Talking about EU: European identity and the Publication Office of the European Union
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.19245/25.05.pij.5.1.5Keywords:
European identity, topic modelling, content analysis, european union, EU, publication officeAbstract
In this paper we tackle the concept of European identity and the way in which it is communicated by the Publication Office of the European Union. We downloaded the publications of the Publication Office labelled with ‘European Identity’, and we analysed them through Topic Modelling, eliciting six topics that constitute those documents. We analysed these topics against the different dimensions of European Identity, as described by literature: the civic component of the European identity is partly represented by a topic dealing with the rule of law and National and European identities. The cultural dimension of the European identity characterises analysed documents to a wider extent, as three topics deal with common history, heritage, and culture. In particular, a topic connecting European identity with common cultural values and education is the more used in our sample of documents, and the one which is characterising more and more these documents over time. We argue that this trend signals a particular emphasis by the European Union in identifying European Identity with shared cultural values that can be taught.
References
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O’Callaghan, D., Greene, D., Carthy, J., and Cunningham: (2015), “An analysis of the coherence of descriptors in topic modeling”, Expert Systems with Applications, 42 (13): 5645-5657.
Phillips, N., Lawrence, T., and Hardy, C. (2004), “Discourse and institutions”, The Academy of Management Review, 29 (4): 635-652.
Reeskens, T., and Hooghe, M. (2010), “Beyond the civic-ethnic dichotomy: Investigating the structure of citizenship concepts across thirty-three countries”, Nations and Nationalism, 16 (4), 579-597.
Rhodes, C., and Brown, A. (2005), “Narrative, organizations and research”. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7 (3): 167-188.
Risse, T. (2009), “Social constructivism and European integration”. In European integration theory, A. Wiener & T. Diez (Eds), pp. 144-159, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Risse, T. (2010). A community of Europeans: Transnational identities and public spheres, 29-30, Ithaca: NY, Cornell University Press.
Risse, T. (2014), “No Demos? Identities in Public Spheres in the Euro Crisis”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 52 (6): 1207–1215.
Schilde, K. (2014), “Who Are the Europeans? European Identity Outside of European Integration”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 52 (4): 650–667.
Strauss, A., and Corbin, J. (1990), Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Waever, O. (2009), Discursive approaches. In European integration theory, A. Wiener & T. Diez (Eds), pp. 163-180. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wodak, R., and Boukala, S. (2015), “European identities and the revival of nationalism in the European Union: a discourse-historical approach”, Journal of Language and Politics, 14 (1): 87-109.
Zhao, W., Chen, J.J., Perkins, R., Liu, Z., Ge, W., Ding, Y., and Zou, W. (2015), “A heuristic approach to determine an appropriate number of topics in topic modeling”. Proceedings of the 12th Annual MCBIOS Conference, 16 (13). http://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-16-S13-S8.
Antons, D., Kleer, R., and Salge, T.O. (2016), “Mapping the topic landscape of JPIM, 1984–2013: In search of hidden structures and development trajectories”, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 33 (6): 726–749
Barberio, V., Kuric, I., Mollona, E., and Pareschi, L. (2020, forthcoming), “Institutional organizations’ use of social media to communicate EU policy and the emergence of a European Public Sphere”, Investigaciones Regionales / Journal of Regional Research, 46
Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y., and Jordan, M.I. (2003), “Latent dirichlet allocation”, Journal of Machine Learning Research 3: 993–1022
Bourdieu, P. (1985), “The social space and the genesis of groups”, Theory and Society, 14: 723–744.
Bourdieu, P. (1991), Language and symbolic power, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2009), Ragioni Pratiche, Bologna: Il Mulino.
Bruter, M. (2003), “Winning hearts and minds for Europe: The impact of news and symbols on civic and cultural European identity”, Comparative Political Studies, 36 (10): 1148-1179.
Bruter, M. (2005), Citizens of Europe? The emergence of a mass European identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Capello R. (2018), “Cohesion Policies and the Creation of a European Identity: The Role of Territorial Identity”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 56 (3): 489–503
Caporaso, J.A., and Kim, M. (2009), “The Dual Nature of European Identity: Subjective Awareness and Coherence”, Journal of European Public Policy, 16 (1): 19–42.
Chacha, M. (2012), “Regional Attachment and Support for European Integration”, European Union Politics 14 (2): 206–227.
Chang, J., Boyd-Graber, J., Gerrish, S., Wang, C., and Blei, D.M. (2009), “Reading tea leaves: How humans interpret topic models”. In Advances in neutral information processing systems, Y. Bengio, D. Schuurmans, J.D. Lafferty, C.K.I. Williams, & A. Culotta (Eds.), vol. 22. Retrieved from https://papers.nips.cc/paper/3700-reading-tea-leaves-how-humansinterpret-topic-models.pdf
Checkel, J.T., and Katzenstein, P.J. (2009), “The politicization of European identities”. In European identity, J. Checkel: Katzenstein (Eds), pp. 1-28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Christiansen, T., Jorgensen, K., and Wiener, A. (1999), “The social construction of Europe”, Journal of European Public Policy, 6 (4): 528-544.
Contandriopoulos, D., Denis, J., and Langley, A. (2004), “Defining the ‘public’ in a public healthcare system”, Human Relations, 57 (12): 1573-1596.
Delanty, G. (1995), “The limits and possibilities of a European identity: A critique of cultural essentialism”, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 21 (4): 15-36.
DiMaggio, P., Nag, M., and Blei, D. (2013), “Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture: Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding”, Poetics 41 (6): 570–606.
Eisenhardt, K.M., and Graebner, M.E. (2007), “Theory Building from Cases: Opportunities and Challenges”, Academy of Management Journal, 50: 25-32.
Fairclough, N. (1995), Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language, London: Longman.
Ferri, P., Lusiani, M., and Pareschi, L. (2018), “Accounting for Accounting History: A topic modeling approach (1996–2015)”, Accounting History, 23 (1–2): 173–205.
Fligstein, N., Polyakova, A., and Sandholtz, W. (2012), “European Integration, Nationalism and European Identity”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 50 (S1): 106–122.
Fligstein, N., Stuart Brundage, J., and Schultz, M. (2017), “Seeing like the Fed: Culture, cognition, and framing in the failure to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008”, American Sociological Review, 82 (5): 879–909.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience, London: Harper & Row.
Hannigan, T., Haans, R.F.J., Vakili, K., Tchalian, H., Glaser, V., Wang, M., Kaplan, S., and Devereaux Jennings, P. (2019), “Topic Modeling in Management Research: rendering New Theory from textual data”, Academy of Management Annals, in press.
Hardy, C., Palmer, I., and Phillips, N. (2000), “Discourse as a strategic resource”, Human Relations, 53 (9): 1227-1248.
Heibi, I., Peroni, S., Ferri, P., and Pareschi, L., (2019, June 27), catarsi/mitao: MITAO first release (Version v1.1-beta). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3258328
Knights, D., and Morgan, G. (1991), “Corporate strategy, organizations and subjectivity: A critique”, Organization Studies, 12: 251-273.
Koopmans, R., and Statham, P. (eds) (2010), The Making of a European public sphere. Media discourse and political contention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laffan, B. (2004), “The European Union and its institutions as ‘identity builders’“. In Transnational identities: Becoming European in the EU, R. Herrmann, T. Risse, M. Brewer (eds), pp. 75-96. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Levy, K.E.C., and Franklin, M. (2014), “Driving regulation: Using topic models to examine political contention in the U.S. trucking industry”, Social Science Computer Review, 32 (2): 182–194
Marcussen, M., Risse, T., Engelmann-Martin, D., Knopf, H., and Roscher, K. (1999), “Constructing Europe? The evolution of French, British and German nation state identities”, Journal of European Public Policy, 6 (4): 614-633.
McCallum, A.K. (2002), “MALLET: A Machine Learning for Language Toolkit”, http://mallet.cs.umass.edu
Medrano, J., and Gutiérrez: (2001), “Nested identities: National and European identity in Spain”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24 (5): 753-778.
Meyer, R., and Höllerer, M. (2010), “Meaning structures in a contested field: A topographic map of shareholder value in Austria”, Academy of Management Journal, 53 (6): 1241-1262.
Miles, M.B., and Huberman, A.M. (1984), Qualitative data analysis. London: Sage.
Mimno, D., Wallach, H.M., Talley, E., Leenders, M., and McCallum, A. (2011), “Optimizing semantic coherence in topic models”. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 262–272. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Mohr, J.W., and Bogdanov: (2013), “Introduction – Topic models: What they are and why they matter”, Poetics 41 (6): 545–569.
O’Callaghan, D., Greene, D., Carthy, J., and Cunningham: (2015), “An analysis of the coherence of descriptors in topic modeling”, Expert Systems with Applications, 42 (13): 5645-5657.
Phillips, N., Lawrence, T., and Hardy, C. (2004), “Discourse and institutions”, The Academy of Management Review, 29 (4): 635-652.
Reeskens, T., and Hooghe, M. (2010), “Beyond the civic-ethnic dichotomy: Investigating the structure of citizenship concepts across thirty-three countries”, Nations and Nationalism, 16 (4), 579-597.
Rhodes, C., and Brown, A. (2005), “Narrative, organizations and research”. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7 (3): 167-188.
Risse, T. (2009), “Social constructivism and European integration”. In European integration theory, A. Wiener & T. Diez (Eds), pp. 144-159, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Risse, T. (2010). A community of Europeans: Transnational identities and public spheres, 29-30, Ithaca: NY, Cornell University Press.
Risse, T. (2014), “No Demos? Identities in Public Spheres in the Euro Crisis”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 52 (6): 1207–1215.
Schilde, K. (2014), “Who Are the Europeans? European Identity Outside of European Integration”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 52 (4): 650–667.
Strauss, A., and Corbin, J. (1990), Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Waever, O. (2009), Discursive approaches. In European integration theory, A. Wiener & T. Diez (Eds), pp. 163-180. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wodak, R., and Boukala, S. (2015), “European identities and the revival of nationalism in the European Union: a discourse-historical approach”, Journal of Language and Politics, 14 (1): 87-109.
Zhao, W., Chen, J.J., Perkins, R., Liu, Z., Ge, W., Ding, Y., and Zou, W. (2015), “A heuristic approach to determine an appropriate number of topics in topic modeling”. Proceedings of the 12th Annual MCBIOS Conference, 16 (13). http://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-16-S13-S8.
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Published
2020-10-23
How to Cite
Pareschi, L. (2020). Talking about EU: European identity and the Publication Office of the European Union. PuntOorg International Journal, 5(1), 56–72. https://doi.org/10.19245/25.05.pij.5.1.5
