Measuring Scales of Contention By Using an Actor-Attribution Analysis. the Empirical Case of Global-Local Labour Rights Struggles

The  paper presents a novel approach to the analysis of contentious claim making across different scales in the international discourse on labor rights enforcement. It explores the multi-facetted and multi-scalar nature of political discourse on working conditions using an actor-attribution analysis (AAA) approach. The actor attribution analysis is a novel discourse analytical approach based on content analysis tools from social movement studies, in particular protest event analysis, frame analysis and political claim analysis (note; this method was developed by Jochen Roose and Juergen Gerhards, modified and adapted by Jochen Roose, Maria Kousis, Moritz Sommer). Attributions of responsibility are the backbone of making sense in a political contention on the right way to regulate working conditions in global supply chains and AAA is a way to provide a structure for data without.
In this paper we present AAA as a novel analytical approach which allows to systematically explore the public attribution of responsibilities, which pave the way to future decision-making on who should regulate what, why and how. We argue that this method provides an innovative tool to capture the interplay of actors and institutions located at different locations from the global to the local. Taking the example of the discourse on labour rights violations in Bangladesh after Rana Plaza we reconstruct the interrelations of actors from different scales, their scope of transnational claim and attribution making and the range of their addressees. This allows us to map the multi-scalar contested nature of global-local labour rights debates.