Representations of Workers in Russian Print Media

Abstract

This paper focuses on how industrial workers are represented in popular Russian print media that is aimed at a mass audience. The authors consider the kind of media discourses active in characterizing workers today. To examine this, the critical discourse analysis elaborated by Norman Fairclough was applied, which entails the considering the discourses with the help of a three-dimensional scheme: this includes the levels of social context, discursive practice and text. Based on interviews with journalists, copy editors and contributors to media publications, definite conservative and liberal discursive types emerge that categorize "industrial workers" as a social group. The conservative discourse constitutes corporate and traditional values. It creates a normative image of a worker as part of a larger organism, e. g. a factory, enterprise, corporation or civilization. The conservative discourse represents worker protests as being heavily influenced by external forces and there is a tendency to merge workers into the same group as shop stewards, managers and other socio-professional groups taking higher social positions. The liberal discourse promotes ideas of freedom and economic values and can be divided into neoliberal and liberal-social discursive subtypes. The neoliberal discourse intensifies social inequality and describes workers through the categories of "global capital", "world economy" and quantitative indicators; it characterizes them as a necessary element of Russian society, which should earn profit for the ruling class and be "effective". On the contrary, the liberal-social discourse pays attention to questions of social justice and labour conflicts. This discursive subtype represents workers as active, energetic and decisive people who are able to act independently and collectively, asserting their rights and freedoms. In this context liberal-social discourse conflicts with the conservative one. The authors argue that hybrid discourses circulate in the contemporary medialandscape, which contradict or coexist peacefully with each other in relation to the representations of workers. The authors conclude that the conservative discursive type uses workers to legitimatise the current political order. On the other hand, the neoliberal discourse describes workers as an economic resource, while liberal-social discourse focuses on the social problems of workers but does it for the purposes of attracting the attention of readers and enlarging the size of its readership.