Institutional Online Discourse

Abstract

political, partisan discourse or administrative productions. Website studies have been growing in importance in the literature, including critical ones. However, the study of institutional discourse has rather rarely been done with web-based data, and has been rather countryspecific. No such study exists for Belgian institutional-administrative web-based communication. We propose to critically explore the websites of public social providers under municipalities’s authority in Brussels (CPAS-OCMW).We propose a small corpus-based quantitative analysis to prevent over interpretation. We then go into details and provide a close-reading of the 19 websites’ texts (one for each municipality in Brussels). The aim is to provide a critical insight into what the discourse on those websites does in term of social categories, power and inequalities and how organizations act as state-apparatuses. The analysis showed the constructions and re-assertions about the social field as individualized, which were produced by the texts of the organizations studied. It showed the organizations as re-producing the system of institutions and conceptions rather than challenging or changing them in a context of institutional interconnectedness. An omnipresent rhetoric of voluntarism, professional competence and legal entitlement has been shown to obscure the social role of these organizations, and conversely, emphasize their top-down role.