The role of metaphor in the corporate political strategies of health harming industries
Comparing the concept of balance in the gambling and opioid industry discourses
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4599126 |
|---|---|
| Authors | May Ci Van Schalkwyk (0000-0003-2210-2289, Faculty of Public Health, corresponding author), Brian Hawkins (0000-0002-7027-8046, MRC Epidemiology Unit), David E Klein (0000-0002-9451-9668, Public Health Ontario), Adam D Koon (0000-0002-9031-9810, Georgetown University) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 356 |
| Pages | 117158 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Science & Medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117158 |
| PMID | 39094389 |
| OpenAlex | W4400881809 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 30 |
Scholars have identified notable similarities between the political strategies employed by health-harming industries. This includes similarities in the narratives employed by industry actors seeking to oppose public health regulations that threaten their commercial interests. This study seeks to examine the use of a specific concept - the balance metaphor - in the policy discourses of two health-harming industries. Namely, the pharmaceutical industry implicated in the prescription opioid crisis in the US, and the UK gambling industry, whose products and practices are associated with a serious, but largely neglected, series of harms. We first review research on metaphors, demonstrating how this provides additional theoretically-informed concepts with which to understand how industry discourse circumscribes the terrain of policy debates in ways amenable to commercial interests. Building from these insights, we conducted a rhetorical analysis, examining how the concept of balance is employed by different actors in distinct contexts to shape understandings of the social and policy problems associated with gambling and opioid products and to promote industry-favourable regulatory responses to these. This brings a micro-level of analysis to supplement previous meso- and macro-level scholarship in this space. We use our findings to argue that the depoliticization of the policy process and objectivization of the policy space - in ways that obscure its contingent and political nature - through discourses of balance is itself an arch political act. Examining the metaphors used in policy debates and their functions provides important insights that can be used to inform the construction of counter-narratives to industry-favourable discourses, including the creative use of novel metaphors in the service of public health goals
Balance (ability · Economics · Metaphor · Opioid · Opioid epidemic · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Humor Studies and Applications · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
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Seeing the similarities
Purdue's development of abuse-deterrent formulation opioids as a response to market competition
The policy author-function
Corporate Power in a Multistakeholder World
Reputational revival and industry survival
Alcohol industry involvement in policymaking
Judgment under uncertainty
How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning
Defining and conceptualising the commercial determinants of health
Case Study Research
Interpretive Research Design
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Generative metaphor
Frame Reflection
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The opioid industry document archive
Framing and the health policy process
The ‘good governance’ of evidence in health policy
Metaphor, Catachresis and Equivalence
The Economization of Politics
Balance as bias
Epistemic motives moderate the effect of metaphoric framing on attitudes
Rethinking balance and impartiality in journalism? How the BBC attempted and failed to change the paradigm
Metaphors and Foreign Policy Decision Making
The role of metaphor in communication and thought
The Meaning and Measure of Policy Metaphors
| Citations per year | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |