Hybridized, Cross-Professional Relations on the Web

Researchers: Peter Berglez (project leader), Ulrika Olausson, Michal Krzyzanowski

Research funding body: The Swedish Research Council 

About the project

The purpose of the project is to examine how journalists, politicians and PR practitioners interact on the Web, and the role of power. The impact will be deeper knowledge about these professions’ ever more close connections on social media sites such as Twitter. The overall aim is to contribute to a better understanding of hybridized, cross-professional relations in the networked society and its consequences for democracy. In this research project, critical discourse analysis (CDA) will be applied on social media traffic in Sweden but also in other European countries. Guided by media theory and network theory, the project sets out to answer the following questions:

  1. How do professional differences between journalists, politicians and PR practitioners, and their separate value-systems, become articulated, and what characterizes this discourse? (public sphere)
  2. How does cross-professional unity (a "joint language") become articulated, and what characterizes this discourse? (community)

The CDA of cross-professional discourse includes both qualitative studies (textual analyses of particular twitter flows) as well as quantitative studies (content analysis).

Project period: 2014-2017.

Books/monographs

Krzyzanowski, M. Language and Politics: Interdisciplinary Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Work in progress.

Journal Special Issues

Krzyzanowski, M, Tucker, J.A. (Eds.) (2018) Re/Constructing Politics through Social & Online Media: Ideologies, Discourses & Mediated Political Practices. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins (Special Issue of Journal of Language & Politics 17:1)

Journal articles and book chapters

Berglez, P. (2018) "Smileys Without Borders: A Critique of Transboundary Interaction Between Politicians, Journalists and PR practitioners on Social Media", tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 16(1): 18-34.

Berglez, P, Olausson, U., Ots, M. (2017) "What is Sustainable Journalism? An introduction", in Berglez, P. Olausson, Ots. (eds.) What is Sustainable Journalism? Integrating the economic, environmental, and democratic challenges of journalism. New York: Peter Lang. 

Berglez, P. (2016) "Few-to-many communication. Public figures' self-promotion on Twitter through 'joint performances' in small networked constellations", Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia 26(1): 171-184.

Krzyzanowski, M. (2018) "Social Media in/and the Politics of the European Union: Political Communication, Organizational Cultures, and Self-Inflicted Elitism", Journal of Language & Politics 17:1, in press.

Krzyzanowski, M., Tucker, J.A. (2018) "Politics in Social/Online Media: Challenges for an Interdisciplinary Field of Research", Journal of Language & Politics 17:1, in press.

Krzyzanowski, M. (2017) “Discursive Shifts in Ethno-Nationalist Politics: On Politicization and Mediatization of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Poland”, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1317897

Krzyzanowski, M. (2017) ”’We are a Small Country That Has Done Enormously Lot’: The ‘Refugee Crisis’ and the Hybrid Discourse of Politicizing Immigration in Sweden”, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1317895

Olausson, U. (2017) “The Celebrified Journalist: Journalistic self-promotion and branding in celebrity constructions on Twitter”, Journalism Studies: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1349548 External link, opens in new window.

Olausson, U. (2017) "The Reinvented Journalist. The Discoursive Construction of Professional Identity on Twitter", Digital Journalism 5(1): 61-81.