The ongoing economic crisis that erupted in late 2007 in the US is now in its tenth year, and since then millions of lives have been adversely affected while economists, pundits, and politicians continue to argue about... [ view full abstract ]
The ongoing economic crisis that erupted in late 2007 in the US is now in its tenth year, and since then millions of lives have been adversely affected while economists, pundits, and politicians continue to argue about solutions. However, there has been one unanticipated positive outcome: it has created on an unprecedented scale the opportunity for people around the world to debate why and how this collapse happened. Yet, many economists have dismissed these views as ill-informed due to a lack of economic literacy, and some have implied that this ‘illiteracy’ is a major factor in many people’s own misfortunes. This discourse of economic illiteracy reflects the prevalent view among economists that everyday knowledge of the economy is neither scientific nor grounded in ‘correct’ theory. Because the economy plays a central role in our lives, it is crucial to understand the ways in which everyday people make sense of the economy and the possibilities they see for change. This paper examines how participants co-constructed their knowledge of the economic system known as ‘capitalism’ in interviews on social media.
Building on Ruccio’s (2008) work on economic representations, I first highlight several economic discourses promulgated by economists, journalists, and politicians that produce what is regarded as professional and academic knowledge. I then address the ways in which everyday people mediate these economic discourses. Drawing upon over 300 interviews on if capitalism is working for them or not, I examine how the participants co-construct hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses of capitalism and their own relationships to it. Using a Gramscian framework of hegemony and consent as a basis for my discourse analytic approach (Author, 2017), I explore the following question: how are capitalist discourses taken up by everyday people in co-constructing their understandings of the economy, their roles within it, and its effects on their lives? In examining how their interdiscursive mediations of capitalist discourses challenge notions of so-called economic illiteracies, I address how these spaces of public production of knowledge can contest and intervene in the dominant discourses of capitalism.
References:
Author, 2017.
Ruccio, D. (2008). Economic representations: Academic and everyday. London: Routledge.
