Économie et finance durant la crise financière mondiale: représentations sociales, métaphores et figures rhétoriques dans le discours des médias de l’automne 2008 au printemps 2010

Part of a larger transnational and interdisciplinary research program focused on “Mass Psychology and Stock Market: heterogeneous agents, media and investors”, this article highlights some rhetorical devices used in the social discourse elaborated by media and experts about the financial crisis as an explanation based on the split between the good «real» economy and bad «virtual» finance: the former represented as being anchored in the productivity of real people and their work, the latter represented as being anchored in insubstantial financial products produced by speculators so complicated that ordinary people as well as so-called experts do not understand them. In this article we present preliminary results of the first exploratory study based on qualitative analysis of media sources from Autumn 2008 until Spring 2009, integrated by a second study aimed at the analysis of the contents and structure assisted by the Multidimensional Analysis for textual data (ALCESTE, Reinert, 1983) on 345 articles published from September 2008 to April 2010 on the homepage of generalist (La Repubblica) and specialized (Il Sole 24 ore) Italian newspapers websites. Further steps of the ongoing research program foresee qualitative and quantitative analyses of specialized and generalized media from Europe, US and China until 1st June 2010.