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>> 189 Appendix Methodology In studying public discourse over economic issues, defining the universe for analysis presents an immediate methodological challenge. In the case of debate over Wal-Mart, numerous actors and institutional spheres are engaged in public dialogue surrounding these issues. For example, not only do the contributions of the national media and national advocacy groups like Wal-Mart Watch or Wake-Up Wal-Mart immediately come to mind, but so do countless other actors ranging from local activists and union chapters to bloggers and local journalists, to name but a few. Because I am interested primarily in the ways actors make public, moral claims in such debates, I chose to focus the analysis first and foremost on the deliberate and public presentations of the actors who were most involved in directing the outcome of this controversy. Although one approach would have been to conduct fieldwork among activists opposing Wal-Mart in a particular town or suburb, or to examine newspaper coverage of anti-Wal-Mart activism in various locales around the country, I chose instead to focus my attention on the claims and arguments made in the public sphere by actors whose legitimacy and institutional connections grant them access to policy makers and other national elites, namely, journalists in leading newspapers with national circulation. In this way, my analysis avoids the methodological pitfall of confounding NIMBY-type activism on smaller, local levels with the larger ideological movement that challenges Wal-Mart and related issues of economic inequality in a nationally prominent way. Selection of Advocacy Groups For this reason I initially chose to limit my analysis of the “major players” in this debate to groups such as Wal-Mart Watch, Working Families for WalMart , and Wal-Mart Inc. itself. Although Wake-Up Wal-Mart had also been 190 > 191 Because the Wal-Mart debate gained traction and arguably reached a fever pitch in the period 2005–2006, I limit the analysis to this two-year time frame, and to the discourse produced by Wal-Mart Watch, Working Families for Wal-Mart, and, as noted above, the press releases disseminated by Wal-Mart Inc. during this same period. After limiting the universe in this way, the data I collected from WMW, WFWM, and Wal-Mart Inc. included almost one thousand organizational documents for analysis (941 total)—a corpus significantly large to conduct rich investigations, but significantly small enough to facilitate complete and exhaustive analysis. These documents included press releases, emails, and website content created by these organizations during the two-year period of 2005–2006. Method of Analysis I approached this body of organizational texts with the analytical techniques of grounded theory and initially moved through them with an “open coding” strategy that did not bring to the analysis a specific goal or theoretical question , but allowed questions for analysis and salient themes to emerge from the data themselves.1 Accordingly, throughout the analysis I supplemented my coding with the discipline of memo-writing about emerging themes, questions, and, above all, theory. Through these deliberations, the three sets of themes that I focus on in chapters 3–5 emerged as the central, orienting concepts for the analysis. Influenced by Gamson’s work on political language, I began to think of the central moral concepts of thrift, freedom, and the rights of the individual not as isolated frames, but as key themes in both this discourse and larger American political culture that are accompanied by “counterthemes” of benevolence, fairness, and community.2 Having identified these three thematic dialectics as emergent in the data, I used these findings to guide my analysis of the remaining data and to revisit earlier documents with these three dialectics in mind. Along the way, the analysis was sharpened, refined, and documented through regular commenting on specific textual excerpts and memo-writing about larger patterns. In chapters 3–5, which emerged from this analysis, I report my findings with a particular concern for how each group of actors invoked these themes, what other concepts they link to these larger moral values, and how the strategies used differ between the two groups. Above all, my predominant concern is for the use of language as a cultural medium that communicates a larger conception of the symbolic and moral order; accordingly, in these chapters I focus less on the frequency of certain strategies and more on the range of discursive strategies used and dimensions of the language each group invokes in doing so. 192 > 193 letters to the editor, and...

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