TY - JOUR

T1 - Discursive strategies of blame avoidance in government

T2 - a framework for analysis

AU - Hansson, Sten

PY - 2015/5

Y1 - 2015/5

N2 - Governments’ policies and actions often precipitate public blame firestorms and mediated scandals targeted at individual or collective policy makers. In the face of losing credibility and resources, officeholders are tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations and language use. Linguistic aspects of blame avoidance are yet to be studied by discourse analysts in great detail. In this article, I contribute to filling this gap in knowledge by proposing an improved heuristic for understanding typical macroconversational discursive practices adopted by officeholders in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the goal of positive self-presentation. Based on a multidisciplinary review of scholarly literature, I show how personal and institutional risk aversion involves the application of certain strategies of argumentation, framing, denial, social actor and action representation, legitimation and manipulation. I use concrete textual examples from public statements of UK government officeholders to illustrate how blame avoidance works at the highest level of administration. I argue that to understand blame avoidance as a dominant recurring theme in public communication we should look beyond current linguistic approaches to conflict talk. This could lead to the application of new useful analytic tools within discourse studies and open new avenues of critical research into language use in politics and bureaucratic organisations.

AB - Governments’ policies and actions often precipitate public blame firestorms and mediated scandals targeted at individual or collective policy makers. In the face of losing credibility and resources, officeholders are tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations and language use. Linguistic aspects of blame avoidance are yet to be studied by discourse analysts in great detail. In this article, I contribute to filling this gap in knowledge by proposing an improved heuristic for understanding typical macroconversational discursive practices adopted by officeholders in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the goal of positive self-presentation. Based on a multidisciplinary review of scholarly literature, I show how personal and institutional risk aversion involves the application of certain strategies of argumentation, framing, denial, social actor and action representation, legitimation and manipulation. I use concrete textual examples from public statements of UK government officeholders to illustrate how blame avoidance works at the highest level of administration. I argue that to understand blame avoidance as a dominant recurring theme in public communication we should look beyond current linguistic approaches to conflict talk. This could lead to the application of new useful analytic tools within discourse studies and open new avenues of critical research into language use in politics and bureaucratic organisations.

KW - Argumentation

KW - blame avoidance

KW - crisis

KW - critical discourse analysis

KW - denial

KW - discourse-historical approach

KW - excuses

KW - government communication

KW - justifications

KW - legitimation

KW - manipulation

U2 - 10.1177/0957926514564736

DO - 10.1177/0957926514564736

M3 - Journal article

VL - 26

SP - 297

EP - 322

JO - Discourse and Society

JF - Discourse and Society

SN - 0957-9265

IS - 3

ER -