The Discourses of Capitalism

Since the global economic crisis of 2007-2008, 'capitalism' has been the topic of widespread general discussion in both mainstream and social media. In this book, Christian Chun examines the discourses of capitalism taken up by people in their responses to a street art installation created by Steve Lambert, entitled Capitalism works for me! In doing so, he considers several key questions including:
How do everyday people view and make sense of capitalism and its role in their work and personal lives?
What are the discourses they use in their common-sense understandings of the economy to defend or reject capitalism as a system?
Chun looks at how dominant discourses in social circulation operate to co-construct and support capitalism, and the accompanying counter-discourses that critique it. This is key reading for advanced students of discourse analysis, language and globalisation/politics, media/communication studies and related areas.

Christian W. Chun is Assistant Professor of Culture, Identity, and Language Learning in the Applied Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. He is the author of Power and Meaning Making in an EAP Classroom: Engaging with the Everyday (2015).