Workers accept hegemonic economic frames while acting oppositionally at local level.

Evidence

The simplest example of a negotiated code is that which governs the response of a worker to the notion of an Industrial Relations Bill limiting the right to strike, or to arguments for a wages freeze. At the level of the national-interest economic debate, he may adopt the hegemonic definition, agreeing that “we must all pay ourselves less in order to combat inflation,” etc. This, however, may have little or no relation to his willingness to go on strike for better pay and conditions, or to oppose the Industrial Relations Bill at the level of his shop floor or union organization. We suspect that the great majority of so-called “misunderstandings” arise from the disjunctures between hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated-corporate decodings. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 811 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This means that the “definitions of reality,” favorable to the dominant class fractions, and institutionalized in the spheres of civil life and the state, come to constitute the primary “lived reality” as such for the subordinate classes. In this way ideology provides the “cement” in a social formation, “preserving the ideological unity of the entire social bloc.” This operates, not because the dominant classes can prescribe and proscribe, in detail, the mental content of the lives of subordinate classes (they too “live” in their own ideologies), but because they strive and to a degree succeed in framing all competing definitions of reality within their range , bringing all alternatives within their horizon of thought. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 905 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Most communication ‘misunderstandings’ stem from negotiated decodings at the local level (similarity 0.85)

Broader Connections

• Workers accept national-interest arguments yet still strike against them locally #corroborates (0.95) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 811
• Ideology works by framing alternatives within a range rather than dictating thought. #expands (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 905