Abstract
Producing Globalisation is an excellent and original comparative study of how globalisation is articulated by leading political parties, social and religious leaders, and the media in Ireland and Greece. Andreas Antoniades successfully transforms discourse theory into a systematic research strategy to demonstrate how the experience of globalisation discourse diverges in different states. The methodology and resulting discourse analysis, allowing Antoniades to make verifiable claims about globalisation discourse, is a particular strong point. The research is explicitly framed as contributing to ideational and institutionalist literature: how globalisation is (ideationally) produced on a ‘social level’ or presented in ‘public discourse’, and (institutionally) how states’ responses to globalisation are far from homogeneous (p. 10). Beyond this, there are two further major substantive aims.
The first is the outline of ‘hegemonic discourse communication’, which entails ‘studying the conditions of production, reproduction and change of social life within the international’ (p. 9). This framework attempts to, first, transcend both material and ideational accounts (p. 17) and also, second, to show how discourse helps order the ‘everyday life’ of the social (p. 18). Whether it is possible to transcend (ontologically) the material-ideational without reproducing that same divide in empirical research potentially masks some of the more interesting contributions of the frameworks. For instance, the focus on globalisation discourse as ‘about social becoming and everyday life, its constraints, its opportunities, its conditions of production and reproduction’ (p. 80) could have been reconfigured to address the problem of ‘the audience’ or of discourse ‘success’ in constructivist approaches.
The second, and perhaps more value-added contribution, is to highlight how the communication of globalisation diverges in different states. Antoniades shows that while Ireland's experience and communication of globalisation can be characterised by consensus, the equivalent in Greece was experienced as contestation. These different apolitical and political communications of the same trend highlight how globalisation discourse should not be considered as a ‘predetermined phenomenon’ (p. 154). Instead, analyses should focus on how different institutional settings and interest-group structure lead to different experiences and discourses of globalisation. Producing Globalisation is an interesting and well-argued contribution to the globalisation discourse and institutionalist literature which may be of particular value to those interested in operationalising discourse theory and/or in studying the relationship between ideas and political outcomes beyond the restrained setting of elite actors.