Summary
Contents
Subject index
The definition of ideology continues to occupy scholars across a wide range of disciplines. In this book, Teun A van Dijk sketches a challenging new multidisciplinary framework for theorizing ideology. He defines ideology as the basis of the social representations of a group, its functions in terms of social relations between groups, and its reproduction as enacted by discourse. Contemporary racist discourse is examined to illustrate these ideological relations between cognition, society and discourse.
Consistency
Consistency
Consistency versus Variation
One problem that has often come up in discussions about ideology is whether ideological beliefs form a consistent system. Both traditional work in political psychology as well as in discursive and rhetorical psychology suggests that ideologies are hardly consistent. Both in their actions and in their text and talk, people show many inconsistencies and dilemmas, and these do not seem to presuppose neatly consistent underlying systems.1
The problem with these observations is that while they are undeniably correct, they do not allow firm conclusions about the structures or the contents of ideologies. This is not only true because such studies rarely have an explicit concept of ideological structures in the first place, but rather because they confuse situational, contextually bound expressions or uses ...
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