Abstract
This chapter focuses on employment and money and their relation to poverty and place in our corpora. We contextualise discussions of (un)employment within their wider social context and consider the linguistic co-text of the query <*employ*>, followed by a wider discussion of employment-related terms. The patterns in the textual data are compared with unemployment and worklessness statistics. We end the chapter by geoparsing terms associated with both money and poverty and compare these to the employment-related terms.
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- 1.
Small capitals denote lemmas: all forms of a word, such as employ, employee, unemployed, employment, etc.
- 2.
Complex queries could reduce some of this noise, but the normalised frequencies are merely a litmus test for each newspapers’ coverage of employment.
- 3.
A random number generator was used to generate samples. No concordances were analysed more than once.
- 4.
Incapacity Benefit was replaced by Employment Support Allowance (ESA) and existing claimants were reassessed from 2010 onwards to determine if they met the criteria for ESA. The reassessment process included a paper-based and/or face-to-face Work Capability Assessment (WCA) with a third-party contractor.
- 5.
Whilst potential PNCs concerned only with benefit fraud were eliminated (as discussed in Chapter 5) there were some remnants of references to benefit fraud where it was mentioned alongside other issues relating to poverty, such as homelessness, loss of employment, and people being unable to pay their household bills.
- 6.
<*afford*>, <*austerity*>, <*cost*>, <earn*>, <*expens*>, <income*>, <*money*>, <*paid*>, <pay*>, <penn*>, <price*>, <*salar*>, <*spend*>, <*wage*>.
- 7.
In the Guardian, pay includes references to retail workers, particularly those employed by Sainsbury’s. Thus, there are parallels between the Guardian and the Daily Mail’s coverage of retail wages.
- 8.
The reference to Middlesbrough in (34) is misleading as it is in the north-east, not the north-west as stated.
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Paterson, L.L., Gregory, I.N. (2019). Locating (Un)Employment in the National Press. In: Representations of Poverty and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93503-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93503-4_6
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