Volume 42 (2021): Issue s3 (April 2021)

This article addresses how class as a category of conflict and struggle is understood and shaped discursively in mainstream media today. We utilise a case study of how Swedish news media represents the long-lasting conflict in the Swedish labour market between the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union and the employer organisation, Sweden's Ports. Using critical discourse analysis, we show two ways in which class relations are recontextualised in three Swedish newspapers. One is through obscuring class and centring the conflict around business and nationalist discourses, which in the end legitimise a corporate perspective. The other, more marginalised, way is through the critique of class relations that appears in subjective discourse types. This handling of class, we argue, serves the reproduction of a post-political condition.

Neoliberal globalisation has expanded transnational corporations’ (TNCs) boundaries of operation and sphere of exploitation, particularly in the Global South where much of the production of traditional TNC manufacturing now occurs. In this article, using a longitudinal approach, I conduct a detailed critical discourse analysis of a large Swedish press corpus reporting on TNC activities in Global South countries. The analysis suggests that the issue of workers’ conditions is made relevant to the Swedish public through a “consumer framework” that not only confers proximity and relevance on the topic, but also effectively recontextualises agency and responsibility towards particular or individual social actors, obscuring the class dimension of labour relations and global production. Moreover, rooted in a highly problematic colonial imagery, exploitation in the Global South is seen as a “cultural problem” of “them” rather than a problem related to the social and spatial relations of global capitalism.

This article focuses on the ways in which the Danish liberal mainstream press covered events related to the so-called Greek crisis. In particular, we examine the coverage of the different Greek national elections that took place during the Greek crisis years (2010–2019) by Jyllands-Posten (JP), a popular Danish daily newspaper. Qualitative content analysis is deployed to study a corpus of 70 news and editorial articles published by JP on the aforementioned topic. Our analysis highlights the existence of three main interrelated themes in JP's constructions of the Greek elections: a moralist, a culturalist, and a technocratic/anti-leftist theme. These themes are theorised through the use of relevant theory on class cultures and politics today.

Recent studies argue that the contemporary working class has largely disappeared from the news media. Another strand of literature demonstrates that the traditional labour beat has lost newsroom prestige due to changes in the established news media and crisis in the labour movement. Analysing how traditional working-class sectors are covered in mainstream newspapers and trade union magazines over time, we conduct a systematic, quantitative content analysis of 18 months of coverage from 1996–2017. We find a steady decline in media coverage throughout the period, indicating that the labour beat as an established specialisation is disappearing. Studying topical emphasis and source practices demonstrates marked differences between the newspapers and the trade union magazines: The mainstream newspapers are elite- and conflict-oriented (although not hostile in their coverage), while the trade union magazines largely reflect power structures and the interests of the labour movement. In the discussion, the main findings from the content analysis are explained by practitioners, to contextualise and provide insider perspectives on the findings.

Class depictions in videogames are prevalent, yet understudied. In this article, we analyse how the working class – particularly working-class men – have been depicted in videogames over the past 30 years. In doing so, we bring together a class- and gender-based analysis to study how narratives, representations, gameplay, and game systems construct the “working-class hero” as a central protagonist. This is done by examining eight paired examples of videogames that feature working-class characters in central roles, including janitor, fire-fighter, taxi driver, and bartender. Our analysis finds that some roles are glorified (such as firefighters), positioning their protagonists in direct conflict with white-collar settings and antagonists. However, many other roles task players with “doing their job” in the face of repetitive (and sometimes outlandish) working conditions. Through these examples, we document the portrayal of working-class videogame heroes, noting how videogames can both reinforce and subvert common media tropes.

In Nordic countries and beyond, there exists a lack of longitudinal, population-level research focused on sociopolitical polarisation and the proliferation of new online activities in the context of changing media usage. In this article, we examine media usage in Finland in 2007 and 2018. We use two nationally representative surveys (N = 1,388 in 2007 and N = 1,425 in 2018) to make comparisons over time and include a wide set of media usage indicators. Applying multiple correspondence analysis, we assess the impact of the proliferation of online activities on the structure of the space of media usage and examine whether the association between media usage and sociopolitical divisions has become more sharply pronounced. The results suggest stability of the structure of media use rather than dramatic change. We discuss these results by reflecting on the relatively strong persistence of “traditional” models of stratification in digital cultural consumption and media practices.

In this article, we consider how contemporary media use is structured by social class, following the theoretical and methodical framework derived from Bourdieu's book Distinction, published in 1984, with a detailed study of everyday use of media platforms, brands, and content among Norwegian citizens (N = 2,064). First, we analyse how such media use varies in the overall social space using multiple correspondence analysis. Second, we independently explore the main differences and groupings of media practices, combining multifactor analysis and cluster analysis. While identifying important gender and generational differences, this study clearly shows how media use inside both younger and older generations are marked by class differences, which we argue demonstrates the fundamental and continuing importance of class for understanding mediated lifestyles.

In this article, I explore how social class shapes the conditions and configurations of digital media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. Drawing on Bourdieusian theory and qualitative interview data from two research projects, I complicate the notion of Sweden as a universally wired media welfare state by showing how economic and cultural forces are structuring Internet access and digital media practice along the lines of preexisting social divisions. Invoking Bourdieu's conceptualisation of social classes as defined both intrinsically and relationally, I identify and exemplify two different but interrelated processes whereby class makes a difference in young people's everyday relationship to digital media: class conditioning and class positioning. I conclude the article by arguing that distinguishing between these processes might offer a better understanding of the relationship between class and everyday media practice. The complexities of advancing a welfare-oriented media policy in the age of digital media are also discussed.