Audrey Laurin-Lamothe’s research while affiliated with York University and other places

Since 2010, grassroots-led socio-ecological movements in Québec, Canada played a key role in overturning carbon extractivist proposals. Building on their successes, these groups now aim to move energy transition debates toward a broader conception of transition that includes radical social justice and post-capitalist alternatives. Meanwhile, corporate actors and the state enlisted major ENGOs and union federations into various technocentric “green growth” projects. These hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles define how transition unfolds in the province, yet few have studied how actual social actors organize to carry out these divergent responses to the climate crisis. We develop a structural analysis of the green growth policy-planning network in Québec. Starting from five organizations at the core of transition debates, we analyze the network of board interlocks they are embedded in. We describe the overall structure of the network and its main corporate, civil society, and individual actors. Analysis outlines the possibility of a new power bloc forming, positioned around the green growth project and the cleantech sector, close to achieving dominance in Quebec, that would threaten deeper decarbonization efforts. Thus, despite the recent ban on petroleum extraction, like elsewhere, energy transition in Quebec still faces deep social and ecological contradictions.

Par le biais d’une analyse thématique d’éditoriaux de La Presse sur près de 35 ans, soit de 1980 à 2015, nous montrons comment s’est graduellement construit, au Québec, un discours qui prône une augmentation constante de la rémunération des médecins, alors même que, parallèlement, les infirmières recevaient un traitement asymétrique. Notre analyse s’inscrit dans la continuité des recherches sur les facteurs ayant influencé l’évolution de la rémunération des travailleurs à partir des années 1980. Notre objectif dans cet article est de cerner si le rapport de force de ces deux catégories de travailleurs s’est détérioré ou a été renforcé sur le plan narratif grâce au portrait qu’en brosse La Presse , l’un des quotidiens les plus lus du Québec. Jusqu’à l’aube des années 2000, les médecins sont décrits et considérés au même titre que les autres travailleurs, notamment les infirmières, c’est-à-dire que leurs revendications salariales ou relatives à leurs conditions de travail sont dépeintes négativement par les éditorialistes. Cependant, au début du présent siècle s’opère un changement discursif qui justifie dorénavant la hausse de la rémunération des membres de cette profession, discours principalement basé sur l’argument de la nécessité d’un rattrapage avec le reste du Canada. Par la suite, dans le cadre d’une analyse thématique, les données relatives à la rémunération des médecins sont comparées à l’augmentation des salaires des infirmières, qui elles n’ont pas bénéficié d’un tel traitement et qui font l’objet d’une dévalorisation associée à la représentation genrée de leur pratique. Au final, cette recherche constitue une contribution à une meilleure connaissance du discours médiatique en tant que reflet et moteur des rapports de force entre catégories sociales qui bénéficient de privilèges inégaux. Notre étude illustre également le traitement différencié réservé à deux groupes de professionnels en santé.

Topoi and the legitimization of austerity policies. A study of La Presse’s editorials from 1980 to 2015 This article focuses on the dissemination of the topoi of a neoliberal vulgate, by means of a longitudinal discursive analysis, from 1980 to 2015, of the editorials of La Presse, one of Quebec’s leading daily newspapers. The thematic, argumentative, pragmatic, and enunciative analysis of this corpus is conducted in dialogue with the economic theories involved in the editorial statements. For, although the popular beliefs (topoi) developed or mobilized by La Presse oversimplify these theories to the extreme, the connections between these two levels of circulation are constitutive of dispersion rules of the discursive austerity event. This study shows how the construction of an anti-deficit topos in the 1980s immediately rejects (without the need for argument) any policy involving public spending. Studying how this topos adapts to different changes in the economic situation by generating and articulating itself with other austerity-related topoi, the analysis shows the conditions of possibility of permanent austerity, legitimizing among other things a criminalization of strikes and a standardization of emergency laws, decreeing the working conditions of employees.

L’article décrit les caractéristiques structurantes du phénomène de la financiarisation des entreprises et cherche à montrer comment ce régime d’accumulation contribue à la transformation des élites économiques. La présente étude des réseaux sociaux d’entreprises et d’organisations québécoises a permis de comparer l’élite économique et l’élite financière, la première se rattachant au processus d’accumulation capitaliste en général et la seconde à la dynamique de financiarisation en particulier. Les résultats ont montré que l’élite financière, sur les plans du profil individuel et professionnel ainsi que du pouvoir qu’elle exerce, était mieux en mesure que l’élite économique de maximiser ses intérêts, de profiter de la crise financière de 2008 et de consolider ses liens dans le réseau.

Network data on connections between corporate actors and entities – for instance through co-ownership ties or elite social networks – are increasingly available to researchers interested in probing the many important questions related to the study of modern capitalism. Given the analytical challenges associated with the nature of the subject matter, variable data quality and other problems associated with currently available data on this scale, we discuss the promise and perils of using big corporate network data (BCND). We propose a standard procedure for helping researchers deal with BCND problems. While acknowledging that different research questions require different approaches to data quality, we offer a schematic platform that researchers can follow to make informed and intelligent decisions about BCND issues and address these through a specific work-flow procedure. For each step in this procedure, we provide a set of best practices for how to identify, resolve and minimize the BCND problems that arise.

This article aims to present some recent developments of the corporation under the financialization of the economy, the transformation of its control’s mechanisms and the reconfiguration of the relationships between managerial and financial factions of the business elite that this process involves. Descriptive statistical analysis about the compensation of the Canadian and Quebec business managers led the authors to assert that financial forms of compensation (stock options and deferred share units) represent a financial rather than an industrial pattern of the integration of managers inside economic circuits. This results challenge the theory of the separation between control and ownership as the managers are, by financial incentives, pushed to redefine the growth objectives based on shareholder value. The financialization of the corporation’s governance has the effect of renewing the precedence of financial conventions in companies, as well as to transform executive managers into industrial managers and financial players.

The first part of this article reports the main events of the 2012 student protest in Quebec leading to the government’s adoption of Bill 12. It highlights the major ideological conflict generated through the liberal managerial mutation of the academic institutions as a key to understand more clearly the student’s claims. Rapidly, the standard strike was transformed into a massive mobilization that produced many protests and other forms of resistance. The response given by the government to these unprecedented acts of resistance was Bill 12, to be understood as a symbolic coup d’état with voluntarily disruptive media effects whose aim was to make people forget the massive rejection of a pseudo tentative agreement in relation to Higher Education reform. The bill was also supported through the abusive and twisted use by the government of a series of buzzwords, like “bullying” and “access to education”, which were relayed by the media. The authors also discuss the issues surrounding the traditional conceptions regarding the analysis of discourses, mobilizing Orwell’s concept of doublethink and the notion of selfdeception inherited form Sartre.