Volume 57, Issue 2 - Wirtschaftskrisen und Krisendiskurse / Economic Crises and the Rhetorics of Economics

This volume examines the evolution of political, economic and media crisis discourses and semantics between the 18 th century and the present. In the battle for opinion leadership, politicians, economists and the media frequently offer differing explanations and interpretations of economic crises. The metaphors used to describe such events can shape or even determine the dramaturgy and development of economic crises. The significance of the rhetorics of economics for the development of collective models or the behaviour of the various players involved in or affected by the crisis is an aspect that has not previously been examined. This volume makes a case for a stronger integration of cultural history and the history of knowledge in the analysis of economic crises in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The focus is on the linguistic representation and construction of economic knowledge and the historical analysis of the complex relationship between economic crises and the rhetorics of economics.

This paper makes a case for a stronger cultural and narrative approach to economic history. It shows that an analysis of the discourse strategies used to construct and present the narratives of crises can be used to reach a better understanding of economic crises. Starting from the observation that economic crises are frequently portrayed as serious illnesses which undergo different courses and progressions, the author argues that crises should also be viewed as phenomena of communication and perception. These should be examined in order to reveal either repeatedly used or changing linguistic patterns, metaphors and abstract concepts. The analysis therefore focuses on the relationship between economic crises and crisis discourses. Whether the crisis is described as an “imbalance” (in an otherwise fundamentally stable system) or a multi-layered disease (that culminates in death) is not only based on different metaphors and interpretation patterns. It also has an effect on the assessment of the causes and the progression of the crises, and it presents different courses of possible action.

The late nineteenth century discourse on stock and commodity exchanges, and especially on the crisis of 1873, made heavy use of metaphors. As a statistical analysis of some key publications in the German language area shows, biological and medical metaphors clearly dominated. They were useful to underscore a number of very different opinions on the frugal or poisonous effects of speculation, capital, etc.; the degree to which exchange reforms (‘medical procedures’) were required or not; and if the exchange needed to be saved at all, or rather to be eradicated for being ‘parasitic’. In contrast to meteorological and mechanistic metaphors, images of health and sickness allowed incorporating a moral dimension in the analysis. The idea of the exchange as a potentially healthy or sick organism became intertwined with notions of speculators themselves, figuratively or literally, developing occasional ‘speculative fever’ (a new variety of the long-established concept of gambling fever) and a constant hysterical condition, as a lifestyle disease of capitalism in the ‘age of nervousness’.

The article investigates the ways in which organic-medical metaphors were used to set the boundary of discourse between the economy and politics. The successful establishment of organic-medical metaphors for the economy is mainly explained by their connectivity to different political views. Concepts such as ‘Wirtschaftsleben’ or perceptions of the economy as an ‘organism’ laid the foundation for diagnosing sick or healthy conditions. From the end of the 19 th to beyond the mid-20 th century typical statements illustrate that the use of such metaphors supported the naturalization and stabilization of the boundary-setting discourse, insofar as it seemed natural that the relation between the two spheres should be formulated in terms of health and disease. Within liberal economic discourse in particular, politics was on the one hand targeted as a potential cause for economic disease, while on the other, it was claimed that politics had the task of keeping economic forces healthy.

Economic language as well as figures of economic thought and bodies of knowledge are to a great extent organized in metaphorical terms. Certainly, the metaphorical content of discourse on economic crises cannot be ignored. In fact metaphors are fundamental elements of these discourses. This contribution addresses two especially prevalent and efficacious groups of metaphors: on the one hand, images of body and disease, on the other those of machinery and mechanics. Drawing on the examples of three economic crises of the 20th century, different manifestations of these verbal images are identified and their discursive features illustrated. Finally, the question is examined which factors influence the specific structure of “metaphor households” in crisis discourses.

The paper examines corporate communication after industrial accidents and the media reception of this communication. It compares the accident at BASF in 1921 with that of 1976 at Meda, better known as the Seveso disaster. The leading thesis is that patriarchal concepts of corporate governance marked the companies’ communications in both cases. They were instrumental, alongside strategic and legal considerations, to the communicative appropriation of actions taken, as well as for public activities of the managements. However, a different configuration of the patriarchal concept of communication on the one hand and changing social conditions on the other, effected a shift in the perception of communicative action in public media. The comparison shows two things. First, successful crisis communication in the sense of social acceptance requires that concepts of order, which define the communicative behavior of companies, match those that characterize societal expectations. And second, the comparison reveals that any kind of corporate activity after industrial accidents, even public restraint, is conceived as an act of communication in a mass media society.

The possibility to fail is inherent to entrepreneurial existence. The risk of a system – a company losing stability increases especially in economic crisis as well as in times of social change. Is it possible for companies to develop their own ‘immunity’ which would make it easier to minimize these risks? This paper examines German breweries during the structural change after ‘the boom’. First, the theory of resilience, here in the sense of crisis robustness, is critically analysed and the value for business research considered. Although the term ‘resilience’ was not used by contemporaries, it was, however, an already established concept of action, based on the interaction between anticipatory preparedness and situational flexibility.

This article analyses the function of illness-metaphors for the construction of economic and social crises in public discourse. Three periods of crises in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany are contemplated: the oil crisis in 1973/74, the public dispute about Schröder’s so-called Agenda 2010 in 2003 and the financial crisis in 2008/09. It will show that illness-metaphors are used in combination with other metaphors involving other source domains. Thus, conceptual metaphors unfold scenarios, which explain the essence of and the coping with a crisis without requiring specific knowledge about economic relations.

The article examines the conceptual metaphor of illness in representations of financial crises. Understanding the economy in terms of the body is one of the dominant concepts in contemporary media coverage on economic events. Accordingly, images of illness proliferate in the discourse on the financial crisis of 2008/2009. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of illness metaphors in 53 articles on the financial crisis published from August 2008 to September 2009 in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel . The journalistic metaphors of illness interpret the financial crisis as a disease and thus naturalize the economic events. The second part of the article analyzes an alternative use of illness metaphors in literary and autobiographical texts on traders. Instead of understanding the economy as a victim of an illness, these texts ascribe an infectious quality to the economic system. In these representations the financial economy is criticized for causing diseases not only of its participants, but of the society in general.

When in 1948 the United Nations ’ Food and Agriculture Organization began to publish internationally comparable and reliable statistics on the global forestry and timber industry, it could rely on infrastructure and methods developed and established during the 1920s and 1930s as well as on personnel with experience of more than a decade. The article focuses on the actors involved and their motivation to develop and establish such international statistics. Given the frequent characterisation of the League of Nations ’ Economic and Financial Organisation (EFO) as “path-breaking” and “pioneering” in statistical matters, this article then examines the EFO’s actual participation in the international standardisation of economic statistics. It is argued that its efforts in this field should be seen in a more differentiated way. EFO certainly became an indispensable player in the international standardisation of economic statistics. However, it neither defined the pace nor the direction of the process in every case. Instead, it rather had an accelerating effect on already existing efforts and served as a coordinating centre for a huge number of international organisations and actors involved in the standardisation process.

After the war, NS-statistics were put to manifold uses. Indeed, the industrial census of 1936 served both as a benchmark for the restrictions on German production imposed by the allied powers and as an indispensable input for the introduction of the planned economy in East Germany. In addition the NS-statisticians involved were also considered indispensable for interpreting and implementing these statistics. In order to assess the economic effects of allied bombing during the war, John Kenneth Galbraith oversaw the Overall Economic Effects Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Wagenführ and other German statisticians were interrogated in order to elucidate the statistical files of Speer’s Planning Office (Planungsamt), the command centre of the German war economy. As the chief statistician in Speer’s Ministry for Armaments, Wagenführ had been in charge of the statistical information system for running the war economy. The article focuses on a recently detected file on the kidnapping of Rolf Wagenführ by US-officers from Berlin to Bad Homburg in the summer of 1945. At that time, Wagenführ was working for the central command of the Soviet military administration of Germany. I found the report on the kidnapping and the ensuing interrogation which Wagenführ wrote for his Soviet command officer. It is part of the archival files of the German Democratic Republic hosted by the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) in Berlin-Lichterfelde. The article here concludes with both a brief presentation of those German production statistics (Statistische Schnellberichte) which had been compiled on a monthly basis for the inner political circle around Hitler during the war, and with some results from the USSBS.