Intervening in the Inevitable: Contesting Globalization in a Public Sector Organization

Drawing on data from a study of an Australian public broadcaster (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), this paper demonstrates how the marketization of public sector organizations involves a `discourse of globalization' that legitimates marketization initiatives by making them appear inevitable. This discursive dimension also becomes a site of contestation. We examine three oppositional groups that challenge the apparent inevitability of globalization through a range of discursive tactics. They are surfacing implicitly shared values, appropriating dominant themes of globalization, and recovering traditional notions of public service. The paper explores the socio-political effects of such discursive tactics as they relate to understandings of globalization `from below'.