Social Semiotics

ISSN: 1035-0330 (Print) 1470-1219 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20

Introducing elite discourse: the rhetorics of status,

privilege, and power

Crispin Thurlow & Adam Jaworski

To cite this article: Crispin Thurlow & Adam Jaworski (2017) Introducing elite discourse:
the rhetorics of status, privilege, and power, Social Semiotics, 27:3, 243-254, DOI:
10.1080/10350330.2017.1301789

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SOCIAL SEMIOTICS, 2017
VOL. 27, NO. 3, 243–254
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1301789

INTRODUCTION

Introducing elite discourse: the rhetorics of status, privilege,

and power
a b
Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski
a
Department of English, University of Bern, Switzerland; bSchool of English, University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This introductory paper offers a framing of elite discourse as the way Elitism; discourse; class;
elites and/or eliteness are depicted in language and status; privilege;
communication, and the way language and communication are representation; redistribution
deployed for two elitist ends: the production of status and the
maintenance of privilege/power. We sketch three orienting
principles which have structured our special issue – targeting
elitism, centring discourse and critical reflexivity – before
presenting an overview of the individual papers. We end by listing
some of the prominent motifs and questions to have emerged
through this interdisciplinary collaboration, concluding with the
synergetic politics of representational acts and redistributive
actions.

This special issue is deliberately not about elites per se, even though many of the
papers address groups of people who might popularly be regarded as elite in
terms, say, of their relative or absolute wealth. The fact is that elites are notoriously
difficult to determine and the boundaries of elite status – as a label and as a material
phenomenon – are seldom straightforward. Howard and Kenway (2015) point nicely to
some of the multiple ways “elite” is commonly qualified by, for example, time (e.g. new
elite, old elite), space (e.g. global elite, local elite), field (e.g. political elite, cultural
elite), degree (e.g. super elite), power (e.g. ruling elite) and visibility (e.g. hidden
elite). As we have ourselves shown, “elite” is a quintessential floating signifier
which we nowadays find being deployed all over the place and for all sorts of, some-
times quite ludicrous, rhetorical effects (Thurlow and Jaworski forthcoming). Take the
following happened-upon examples as three newer cases in point (Figure 1).
But for the fact that advertising does work – and that advertisers earn a tidy living –
it is certainly hard to imagine anyone really being convinced of the eliteness of a
household fan, a restaurant soap dispenser or an apple. One has to wonder, therefore,
what is really going on here. What is the intent behind these appeals to elite status?
What are the social meanings of “elite” upon which these appeals rely? These are cer-
tainly the kinds of questions about the rhetorical nature of “elite” that underpin and
unite the papers in this special issue with its overarching focus on elite discourse/s.1
We are therefore concerned as much with language and communication about elites

CONTACT Crispin Thurlow crispin.thurlow@ens.unibe.ch

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
244 C. THURLOW AND A. JAWORSKI

Figure 1. The domestic life of elitism.

or elite status as we are with the language and communication of elite people, defined
in terms of their material wealth, power or demographic rarity. Along the same lines,
we are interested in language and communication that is elitist, determined loosely
by its appeal to distinction through excellence, superiority or distinction. Like our
fan, soap dispenser and apple! These claims to/about eliteness we term rhetorics
insofar as they state apparent truths about the nature of privilege and power, as
well as making “plausible, integral, coherent accounts of the world” at large (Kress
et al. 2001, 20). The shared commitment in this special issue is therefore with under-
standing the places, moments and ways people lay claim to eliteness, how they pos-
ition themselves (or are positioned by others) as elite or non-elite and for what
ends. Put simply, we view “elite” is something people do, not something they necess-
arily have or are. Ultimately, of course, we are committed to knowing how these rhe-
torical actions are used by people to shore up their own privilege/power and, thereby,
deepen social inequalities and material injustices. Eliteness, thus conceived, points us to
the semiotic and communicative resources by which people differentiate themselves
and by which they access symbolic-material resources for shoring up status, privilege
and power.

Orienting principles: elitism, discourse, reflexivity

Each of the papers in this issue started life as a presentation for a round-table confer-
ence we hosted in Switzerland in April 2016. It was and is a deliberately interdisciplinary
collective, with some of us coming from different traditions within language and com-
munication studies, others coming from beyond the field: sociology, education, geogra-
phy and fashion studies. Given this diversity of backgrounds and research priorities, we
initially agreed to orient ourselves around three loosely sketched but tightly interrelated
principles. We think it is worth repeating (and elaborating) these principles since they
still hold, although individual papers orient to them slightly differently and to different
extents. Each principle opens here with an allied remark from sociology, a field that has
unquestionably driven class analysis and the resurgence of elite studies. To be sure,
different contributors have taken up these principles in different ways and to different
degrees.
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 245

Principle 1: targeting elitism

Construct[ing] a narrative solely around the characteristics and problems of the most disad-
vantaged people and places … does not address how the power and privileges of the advan-
taged are organized. (Cunningham and Savage 2015, 322)

When it comes to class critique, there continues to be a persistent (usually earnest and
often well-funded) commitment in academia to “studying down,” one that often simply
reinscribes underprivileged people as the problem to be fixed. As Niall Cunningham
and Mike Savage note above, there is also a (greater?) need for research scrutinizing
those with power and privilege, those who stand to benefit most from the status quo (Bea-
verstock, Hubbard, and Short 2004, for an earlier call from geographers). This thinking
aligns with scholarship deconstructing Whiteness and masculinity to better understand
and challenge, respectively, racial and gender discrimination (Thurlow and Jaworski
2012, for more detail). Assuming we are motivated – as editors and contributors – by a
desire to better understand the aggressive re-orderings of social class and the rise of
extreme inequality, then our attention must necessarily turn to elites; they are what
Khan (2012, 373) refers to nicely as the “engines of inequality.” To be sure, eliteness (as
with blackness and femininity) may be performed by “outsiders” – by the non-ostensibly
elite, especially for strategic identificational and other social ends (see Pérez-Milans and
Soto 2016, for a careful analysis of everyday social climbing). The case for studying
elites per se has indeed certainly been made by a growing number of sociologists, anthro-
pologists and others in a number of key reviews and edited collections (e.g. in chronologi-
cal order: Savage and Williams 2008; Daloz 2010; Khan 2012; Salverda and Abbink 2013;
Schijf 2013; Birtchnell and Caletrío 2014; Howard and Kenway 2015). We will not rehearse
this literature any further; suffice it to say we see our special issue working alongside this
literature and doing so in the same intellectual-cum-critical spirit.
Extensive, long-running discussions exist about the nature of social class and social
status/rank, and the connection between them (see below). For our purposes, we orient
to Acker’s (2006, 68) intersectional approach to class as “practices and relations that
provide differential access to and control over the means of provisioning and survival.”
As such, we can regard elite status as a social-class identity (Kraus et al. 2012) that is sim-
ultaneously relational and structural, culturally formed and economically determined. For
this reason, as we indicated above, our interest also lies more accurately in elitism rather
than in elites per se. Although we do not examine eliteness in quite the same way sociol-
ogists often do (i.e. favouring “quantifiable” political or economic elites), we do not want to
treat it as something divorced from distributional disparity and exploitation. Precisely
because ours is not a typological, gradational approach, however, we think we can offer
a perspective on eliteness which still retains its analytic and political force. Elite privilege
and power are quite patently exercised through signification and legitimation as well as
through force and manipulation – through both symbolic or discursive authority (Scott
2008) and material constraint. Our preference is generally for a more Foucauldian
approach to power as something less neatly bounded by demographics, less easily demar-
cated by ownership (cf. Foucault 1978). It is precisely the capillary, slippery nature of elite-
ness and elitism that makes for their corrective, persuasive power. It is also how elite status
comes to be naturalized and normalized, and how class ideologies and inequalities are
entrenched. All of which, brings us to discourse and discursivity.
246 C. THURLOW AND A. JAWORSKI

Principle 2: centring discourse

I argue that to understand class we need to understand the processes of classification: exploi-
tation, domination, dispossession and devaluation, and their legitimation. … Without under-
standing how the symbolic converts value – through representation and classification – we
cannot connect status to class relations. (Skeggs 2015, 205, 213)

While the last decade and a half has seen a renewed, growing concern for class analysis,
scholars in discourse studies (broadly conceived) have been slow to join in. Once a bread-
and-butter concern for sociolinguists, for example, “social class” has continued to feature
as a mandatory topic in handbooks and textbooks (e.g. Ash 2002; Kerswill 2007) but with
relatively little primary research.2 Class and class identity appear to have simply fallen out
of academic favour just as they did across the humanities and social sciences (Savage and
Williams 2008). Until fairly recently, that is. We have begun to see a handful of more sus-
tained, concerted attempts to reinstate structural and/or class analyses. In this regard, we
note Machin and Richardson’s (2008) special issue of Critical Discourse Studies on “Class and
Discourse,” several papers by Rampton (2010), and Block’s (2014) book on Social Class in
Applied Linguistics. There is also our own work focusing specifically on elite status and
the social semiotics of luxury as a classed discourse (e.g. Thurlow and Jaworski 2006,
2012, forthcoming; Jaworski and Thurlow 2009; Thurlow 2016)3. This renewed interest in
class and social status clearly makes sense given the widespread, deepening economic
injustices around us; but it also makes sense because language and communication are
so central to the production and circulation of class ideologies, and to the formation
and maintenance of material inequality.
As Beverly Skeggs notes above, and as Bourdieu (1984, 1991) made quite clear in his
famous works, social class hinges on constant processes of classification, evaluation and
legitimation. These are all quite obviously discursive accomplishments, taking place in,
for example, daily conversations, advertising, movies, political speeches, tourism bro-
chures and academic journals. Importantly, Skeggs also speaks of exploitation, domination
and dispossession; in other words, pointing explicitly to the harder edges and material
consequences of these discursive formations. Herein lies the essence of most theoretical
and political tussles around class: the tension between class as first-and-foremost an econ-
omic formation or as a powerful cultural formation. (It is this that explains variable orien-
tations to the major class theorists like Marx, Weber and Bourdieu, their popularity with
some scholars and their perceived limitations for others; see Daloz 2010 or Block 2014.)
By centring discourse as the object of our analysis or critique, we do not intend to do
so at the expense of more structural perspectives and interventions. Following Skeggs,
though, it is through the study of discourse (“representation and classification”) that we
connect cultural formations (“status”) and economic formations (“class relations”). And
this is both an empirical move and a political one. In Giddens (1979) and Scott’s (2008)
terms, there is no neat line to be drawn between “allocative,” resource-based domination
and “authoritative,” symbol-based domination. Words are not enough, but nor are they
ever “just words.”

Principle 3: critical reflexivity

I would urge researchers studying [elites] to be more critical, and to be … critical we have to
be evaluative … Documenting the lifestyles and behaviour of the rich without questioning the
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 247

sources and legitimacy of their wealth makes me queasy; it is dangerously close to an acade-
mically restrained version of celebrity lifestyle voyeurism. (Sayer 2014, 252, 259)

Everywhere, it seems, we hear stories about the so called “1%,” the “super-rich,” “ultra-high-
net-worth individuals” or just plain “elites.” We also hear a lot about the “squeezed middle
classes” and the so called 99%. In both newspaper reports and in academic papers, we find
privilege being essentialized and reduced through its neat ascription to “the 1%,” and
through fetishizing the excessive consumer lifestyles of this tiny minority (Jaworski and
Thurlow 2017, this issue). Elite is invariably someone else and somewhere else. Andrew
Sayer (quoted above) notes how otherwise well-intentioned scholarship too often gives a
similar impression of celebration or inverted admiration. The naturalization of privilege/
inequality, however, reaches far beyond any specific people or place. To be clear, the extrac-
tion and concentration of wealth by so few is a cause for deep concern (Sayer 2015), but the
tendency to regard eliteness as an “out there” or “over there” phenomenon is also worrying.
None of us gets to stand completely above or beyond inequality. Like it or not, we are com-
plicit in class privilege and, most assuredly, in the production of elitist ideologies. Without
doubt, “99%” is an absurd number, disingenuously collapsing the income and life circum-
stances of, say, professors, postal workers and parking-lot attendants.
One way to retain a properly political critique, without at the same time taking high moral
ground, is to remain self-critical, never losing sight of wider fields of participation and com-
plicit action. Outside of feminist and queer traditions, academics are very quick to analyse
(romanticize or glamorize) the poor and to demonize the rich in ways which leave our own
bourgeois practices/privileges undercover and under-examined (Thurlow 2016). Ours is
often an everyone-but-me politics. We are the invisible, phantom centre of which Ferguson
(1990, 9) speaks when writing about social marginalization. To this end, we advocate the
kind of critical reflexivity (i.e. critique + self-critique) which Lazar (2007) describes in her fem-
inist reframing of discourse studies. This starts with critique in the way Sayer intends it – as
unsqueamish, unapologetic evaluation – but also entails a candid assessment of our own
positionality in the topics of our research and a willingness to change our practice. We
are unavoidably enmeshed in relations of class (cf. Acker 2006), and, as academics, we
are the kinds of educated professional elites whose cultural and economic capitals occupied
Bourdieu. Scholars or not, we are all of us positioned by elitist discourses and targets for the
rhetorics of distinction, exclusivity and prestige that underpin elitist ideologies. Although
this principle is not always explicitly evident in individual papers here, it was the impulse
behind the issue and one we remain committed to ourselves.

Issue overview: the rhetorics of status, privilege and power

Our shared commitment in putting together this special issue has been to retain interdis-
ciplinary breadth which necessarily means restricting the length of individual papers,
although, we believe, without sacrificing intellectual, critical depth.4 Even though papers
will likely be read independently, they are meant to be read as a whole; we have
ordered them accordingly and organized them into three thematic clusters. Any categor-
izing like this is inevitably specious; our papers ultimately cut across elite myth-making,
elitist performance and institutionalized elitism. Such is the nature of the complex discur-
sive formation under investigation here.
248 C. THURLOW AND A. JAWORSKI

Exposing elites
We start with a cluster of three scene-setting papers which tackle head-on the mythologies
and myth-making of elite status. They do this in three quite different ways, although
sharing a commitment to exposing how privilege is organized, enculturated and dissemi-
nated. David Block’s paper opens the issue with its more classical framing of elites (i.e. pol-
itical elites) and a study of Spanish home evictions as a sign-of-the-times class conflict. We
see here clearly how representational politics are inextricably bound up with control over,
and access to, the mechanisms of representation. Grounding his analysis in political
economy, Block’s paper also highlights the brute, oppressive realities of “resource inequal-
ity” (after Therborn 2006) as something both economically and symbolically exploitative.
Turning to sites of explicit instruction, Jane Kenway and Michael Lazarus present insights
from a large, international study of elite schools modelled after British “public schools.”
Their analysis sits nicely, therefore, at the intersection of old-fashioned, colonial forms of
privilege and quite modern expressions of privilege coated in “anti-elitism,” “meritocracy,”
and “diversity.” Central to Kenway and Lazarus’s discussion are the moral discourses by
which these schools avow and inculcate “virtues,” while disavowing structural advantage
and material disparity. In our own paper (Jaworski and Thurlow), the rhetorical maneuver-
ings around privilege and elite status are somewhat less bashful, but still instructional. We
examine news media coverage of “super-rich” lifestyles and the consumption patterns of
the so called 1%. With a mix of bourgeois disdain and judgement, but mostly fascinated
celebration, this relentless, pervasive mediatization normalizes the super-rich in our lives
and, in turn, naturalizes privilege.

(Un)doing eliteness
In the next cluster of papers, we have a series of studies addressing the way eliteness is
accomplished and/or promoted through a range of different semiotic means and, again,
in different settings. Where the first two papers focus on established, but by no means
secure, markers of eliteness (i.e. accents and places), the next two papers look at emerging,
but not unprecedented, markers of elite distinction (i.e. perfumes and designer kitchens).
Centring language, David Britain’s paper takes on the notion of elite speech characterized
in the British accent known as received pronunciation (RP). His starting point is that dialec-
tologists have focused almost exclusively on the accents of working class people, and that
RP is more an artefact of academic practice rather than an empirical fact. It is, as such, a kind
of meta-rhetorical fabrication. While RP continues to be maintained as an aspirational,
sometimes enforced standard, it rests on anachronistic ideas about eliteness, baring little
resemblance to contemporary elite demographics. Speaking of which, Caroline Knowles’
paper takes us deep inside the world of one manifestation of contemporary eliteness: the
human and spatial geographies of a “plutocratic” London neighbourhood. Set against
the raw, often shady, economy of hedge funds, private equity and dynastic wealth,
Knowles’ ethnographic sortie into Mayfair traces the specific, decidedly gendered plea-
sure-zones of private clubs and exclusive hotels. Grounded in her own observations and
through others’ voices, she surfaces the ways privilege is embodied and affectively realized.
Jonathan Faiers likewise attends to the intersection of financial and bodily/sensory pro-
cesses in his study of the elitist mythologies of smell. Focusing on the discourses of
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 249

aspiration and desire promulgated in perfume advertising, and recognizing the cheapness
of the base substance, Faiers tracks intertextual allusions to elite markers such as classical
music, celebrity and fine art, as well as underlying absence narratives (e.g. of love/sex and
wealth) which simultaneously perform distinction and reinscribe privilege. Sticking with
elitist commercial rhetorics, the fourth paper in this cluster is Per Ledin and David
Machin’s social semiotic analysis of IKEA kitchen marketing which they offer as a prime
instance of neoliberal ideals (e.g. self-management and innovation) feeding off, and into,
middle-class aspirational fantasies. Albeit a very different kind of scale and style from
Knowles’ paper, we see space being taken up again as an elite marker or resource, along
with words, music, colour, clothing, lighting and bodies. All these semiotic materials, say
Ledin and Machin, are deployed in the production of four neoliberal-elitist principles: regu-
lated flexibility, tailored choice, affective functionalism and authentic artifice.

Elitist formations
In the third cluster of papers, our attention turns to what we might think of as the “bigger
picture” perspectives of elistist ideology and institutionalized elitism (cf. Kenway and
Lazarus, this issue). One key trope across these four papers is the interdiscursive connec-
tions between eliteness and other “power/knowledge” (Foucault 1978) regimes. We start
with Christopher Hutton’s historically framed discussion of Nordicism, a racial/racist ideol-
ogy rooted in elitist claims to purity and superiority which also blurred or confused the
boundaries between class, race and nationality. As Hutton shows, representational
resources such as photography and cartography were central to the production and dis-
semination of Nordicism, whose aesthetic ideals are with us still. In his paper, Benjamin
Gardner takes up a similarly historical perspective for explaining the elitist formation of
conservationism-cum-tourism around the Serengeti in Tanzania. This is a paper which
squarely addresses transnational class politics and its colonial foundations. Focusing on
US-American agents’ well-resourced social-media campaigning, Gardner demonstrates
how privileged, often self-serving efforts to protect (or “save”) wildlife overlook or,
rather, override the wishes and needs of local Maasai people. In a very different insti-
tutional setting, Maria Rosa Garrido’s paper is ultimately rooted in similar West/Rest trans-
national politics; like Gardner’s, her is also a study highlighting the connection between
physical and social mobilities – travel as both a product and source of privilege. From field-
work interviews with key agents at the International Committee of the Red Cross, Garrido
tracks how material disparities between expat and resident/local staff are structured
through the symbolic capital of elite languages. The special issue is rounded off by – or
culminates in – Alexandra Jaffe’s analysis of so called leadership programmes run for
senior academics in universities. By subjecting our own local, institutional practices to scru-
tiny, Jaffe’s paper is an example of critical reflexivity in action. Her analysis of the inherently
elitist programme materials from two US-American universities (one of which is her own)
shows academics being socialized into “good” institutional and neoliberal subjecthood.

Motifs and questions: betwixt words and deeds

We want now to highlight some of the prominent features of our interdisciplinary
exchange so far, drawing from our round-table discussions and the special issue itself.
250 C. THURLOW AND A. JAWORSKI

Again, we go on record with these comments not because they are uniformly and/or expli-
citly evident in all the papers, but because our intellectual efforts are unfinished and not
fully resolved. This is by no means a comprehensive review or summing up, therefore, and
we decline to make any definitive statements about elite status, elitism and eliteness.
These are, after all, rhetorics and discursive formations which are always locally and rela-
tionally contingent, just as they are historically and institutionally structured. Nonetheless,
we hope that by sharing our uncertainties in the spirit of reflexivity and transparency, the
following motifs and questions might point the way for, and perhaps give shape to, new
research on elite discourse.

What/when is “elite”?
As a group, we remain somewhat undecided – and perhaps rightly so (see above) – about
the extent to which “elite” should be tied to material conditions and/or to symbolic orders
of meaning; in other words, when it is better to treat eliteness as something categorical,
measurable and material (e.g. in terms of money, stuff and land), and when/if we
should be focusing on its ideological, relational and affective dimensions. Regardless,
we ought always to be tracking elite nations and regions just as easily some do elite indi-
viduals and institutions. By the same token, it is important to recognize the recursive
nature of eliteness which exists always as a relative and absolute reality, working across
different layers and domains of privilege, and with varying degrees or scales of inequality.
In other words, there is a need to address both local (i.e. national, regional) class systems
and the transnational class system, and their interdependence.

Is elite status distinctive?

The longstanding struggle to define class persists, as does the relation between elite
status, social-class identity and class formation. By the same token, we remain
unclear whether the expression/maintenance of elite status is distinctive from social
identification more generally. Daloz (2010) thinks not, but it is a question still worth
asking. This points also to the inherently intersectional nature of social status and
the need to consider people’s contingent or “conjunctural” privileges (cf. Brubaker
and Cooper 2000). At the very least, it behoves us always to state our terms, and,
perhaps, to rely more on the way our research participants and insiders define
“elite” and theorize (implicitly or explicitly) class for themselves. Also, how people
sense themselves as enmeshed in class vis-à-vis disability, age, sexuality, sex/gender,
occupation, nationality or race/ethnicity.

What are the tactics for “doing” elite?

Perhaps elite status is distinctive in terms of the specific tactics or communicative acts by
which it is asserted or ascribed (cf. Jaworski and Thurlow 2009). There is certainly value in
documenting these tactics, along the lines of Daloz’s (2010) useful, but empirically loose,
inventory of tactics for doing elite distinction. More to the point, we need to know when,
where and why this happens. From our own discussions, three indicative tactics which sur-
faced were these:
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 251

Disavowal. The precarious cultural politics of elitism (not unlike racism) are such that people
spend a lot of time disavowing their elite status and privilege. (See Kenway and Lazarus,
this issue.) Indeed, the rhetoric of “elite without being elitist” is akin to the denial of racism
(“I’m not a racist, but … ”) or to the persistent tussle between “tourists” and “travelers.”
People seek always to maintain positive self-regard and social standing in the face of disap-
proval or criticism. We also sometimes witness disavowals of disavowals, and other strategic
performances of disavowal (Donald Trump being the most spectacular, oxymoronic manifes-
tation of an elite anti-elitism, cf. Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016). Of course, the possibility
also exists for overt claims to elite status and/or elitism, whether ironic or boastful, including
disavowing others’ claims to elite status.

Co-option. One closely related tactic, is the strategic (but not necessarily conscious) co-option
of progressive or egalitarian discourses in order to claim status or privilege. We see this in, for
example, elite alignments with conservationism (Gardner, this issue), gentrification, diversity/
inclusivity, and language endangerment discourses. Typically, these inter-discursive moves
hinge on the all-too-familiar “trickle down” logic of privilege – a contemporary form of noble-
sse oblige or philanthropy which persuade us that everyone benefits eventually.

Choice/control. Bourdieu (1984) defines luxury (a common marker of elite status; Thurlow and
Jaworski 2012) as limitless choice. Certainly, choice and control function co-dependently as
key rhetorical-material tactics in producing eliteness and privilege (in this issue, see Garrido
on NGO workers, Faiers on perfumes, Jaffe on university leaders, and Ledin and Machin on
IKEA kitchens). This is a tactic closely connected to the social-psychological “independent
model of agency” (see papers in Fiske and Markus 2012) which, importantly, is a culturally
acquired but structurally conditioned/dependent behavior.

There is, without doubt, tremendous value in tracking elitist (interdiscursive) formations his-
torically and geographically, thinking through the ways elite ideologies circulate across
space and over time. We always need to know, for example, how different signs, behaviours
or practices acquire their distinctive, distinguishing significance (or indexicality) as elite.5
One of our most robust discussions at the round table is not necessarily evident in the
papers, but undoubtedly underpins everything; it also returns us to the principle of critical
reflexivity. Through the course of our intellectual exchanges, we felt a responsibility to
reflect on the purpose of our work, and on our personal, professional, political responses
to privilege. The kinds of questions confronting us were these: To what extent is ours – our
special issue – a political project or an intellectual project? To what extent are we willing to
address our own complicit role in the maintenance of class inequality? Speaking of which,
Howard and Kenway (2015, 1021–1022) dismiss “inequality” as too tame a word for getting
at the combination of “domination, exploitation, subjugation, abjectification” at the heart
of class relations. In the final reckoning, we are left with a choice: action and change, or
disapproval and acquiescence. The difference, some of us decided, is between productive
anger and passive tut-tutting.
These are obviously decisions which take us beyond methodology or epistemology into
the terrain of morality, ethics and politics. In some ways, the dilemma is a recapitulation of
the familiar tussle in class theory between culture and economy, between symbolism and
materialism. It is the tension between words and deeds, or, following Fraser (1999), between
representational acts and redistributive actions. In this regard, there are two points worth
making. First, as Fraser makes quite clear: there is no question that structural change
can or should be supplanted or displaced by cultural change; the relationship between
the two ought to be synergistic not antagonistic. Second, and put quite simply, words
252 C. THURLOW AND A. JAWORSKI

matter – in all senses of the word. And in this same vein, we think it fitting to round off our
introduction with a remark by Thomas Piketty, an economist and historian who has done so
much to re-ignite class critique for the twenty-first century both within and beyond acade-
mia. His, of course, is an intervention about privilege/power made compelling precisely
through its deployment of “big data.” Nonetheless, we believe that an engagement with
ostensibly small data – the stuff of everyday language and communication – can be no
less revealing. The point, needless to say, is what we chose to do with this knowledge.
It is illusory, I believe, to think that the scholar and the citizen live in separate moral universes,
the former concerned with means and the latter with ends. (Piketty 2014, 574)

Notes
1. In diverse fields of language study, discourse can point to more micro-level linguistic (or sociolin-
guistic) practices and/or to more macro-level Foucauldian regimes of knowledge. In either sense,
discourse is nowadays usually understood to be multimodal: concerned with the interplay
between, and combination of, words, images, bodies, spaces, things and other semiotic resources.
2. A very cursory review of some leading journals reveals relatively few papers explicitly dedi-
cated to social class since the year 2000: Journal of Linguistic Anthropology: 1; Journal of Socio-
linguistics: 4 or 5; Language in Society: 2 or 3; Discourse Studies and Discourse & Society: 0; Social
Semiotics, leading the pack: 6. Half of which were published since 2010.
3. With their focus on processes of social interaction, discourse-analytic approaches to class are
aligned with certain interactionist (e.g. Sauder 2005) and social psychological (e.g. papers in
Fiske and Markus 2012) studies.
4. We are mindful that eliteness is culturally, regionally and temporally inflected (Daloz 2010;
Howard and Kenway 2015). Although our special issue takes a deliberately (but not exclu-
sively) contemporary perspective, papers do speak of different institutional (e.g. news
media, education and government), commercial (e.g. perfume and design industries), and
international (e.g. Tanzania, Spain, South Africa and China) settings. Our priority has been
to address as wide a range of genres, styles and discourses as possible.
5. In this respect, Silverstein (2016, on the “scaling” of wine talk) and Agha (2003, on the enregis-
terment of RP) are most instructive.

Acknowledgements
We extend our thanks to Crispin’s doctoral student Gwynne Mapes for her meticulous administra-
tive-cum-editorial help, and to our other non-presenter participants at Schloss Hunigen: Kellie Gon-
çalves, Jackie Militello, Aaron Anfinson and Alexandre Dûchene. We are extremely grateful to Miguel
Pérez-Milans for his thorough review of the issue and his meticulous attention to our introduction.
Our biggest thanks go to the paper contributors whose intellectual generosity of spirit and constant
collegial engagement has been nothing short of exemplary.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
We take this chance to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Bern which, together
with key funding from the University of Hong Kong, made possible our round table conference at
Schloss Hünigen in Switzerland, and, therefore, this special issue.
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 253

Notes on contributors
Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication in the Department of English at the
University of Bern, Switzerland.
Adam Jaworski is Chair Professor of Sociolinguistics in the School of English at the University of
Hong Kong.

ORCID
Crispin Thurlow http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3203-9255
Adam Jaworski http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9194-5725

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