Ideology Review on Related Theories
ideology as positions, attitudes, beliefs, perspectives, etc. of social groups without reference to relations of power and domination between such groups. Fairclough
1989 links the ideology and power as follows:
―Ideologies are closely linked, to power, because the nature of the ideological assumptions embedded in particular conventions, and so the nature of those conventions
themselves, depends on the power relations which underlie the conventions; and because they are a means of legitimizing existing social relations and differences of power, simply
through the recurrence of ordinary, familiar ways of behaving which take these relations and power differences for granted
. ‖
Fairclough, 1989: 2
Fairclough emphasizes that the relation between ideology and power lies in the specific conventions which can be seen in the society‘s ordinary ways of
behaving. Therefore, along with the development, human keeps enlarging the idea and the method to survive not only for himself but also for the rest of bound
society he lives in which are the family, the race, and the nation. The relations which are shaped in a long range of time, for example the nationality where the
belief and value shared together will be the new source of power to expand the scope of defense and the supporting aspects.
Ideology is therefore a set of attitude, value, and perception where with it humans can understand and make contact to the world. So, that people are no
longer seeing the worldly reality objectively neutral, instead that the world is determined by a set of attitudes that naturally received and taken for grant
somehow this is the result of ideological hegemony. The social point of view toward the reality is determined by this ideological belief. Ideology is absorbed
and distorted under human consciousness and appearing on the way a society act among the others or to act upon phenomena happen around them. Bourdieu
1991 states that ideology does not only represent the characteristic of group or
class but also serves the specific interest of those who produce them to the specific logic of the field of production. So, an ideological society can value and
decide how to respond phenomena, how to support, or how to reject them. Ideology influences the ideological society attitudes because in an ideology, there
is a principle about what to do or not to do for making the good for the most of an ideological society members.
Ideology is also accepted as overall political view that helps people to make sense of the political world Shalom, 2007. It provides the way to organize
political issues and a framework to make political judgment. It helps people to process political information and formulate their political positions on different
issues. Jones and Peccei 1999 states that politics is matter of power, the power to make decision, to control resources, to control other people‘s behaviors, and often
to control their values. Long before it, Marx 1977: 192 claims that the social and political ideas of those groups with the most power,
status, and wealth ―are nothing
more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships‖ The questions are who decide what is good for all does, how to make all
members agree to this idea and how will the ideological members hold the idea as common interest for all. In an ideological society, there must be a control group
which has the legitimate power to represent a whole members and the duty is to reproduce and sustain the mechanism to achieve the common objectives.
Therefore, the existence of ideology in a group of people cannot be parted from the dominance of the authority, for instance, government, law institution,
churches, etc. Paul Simpson 1993 explains the relation between the ideology and the power as follows:
―An ideology therefore derives from the taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs and value- systems which are shared collectively by social groups. And when an ideology is the
ideology of a particularly powerful social group, it is said to be dominant. Thus, dominant ideologies are mediated through powerful political and social institutions
like the government, the law and the medical profession. Our perception of these institutions, moreover, will be shaped in part by the specific linguistic practices of
the social groups who comprise them.
‖ Simpson, 1993: 5
In other words, Simpson expresses that ideology which is shared among the society comes into a dominant conception which will be followed by the rest
of the society. This dominant belief is then maintained by a group whose power is given by the society for instance, the government who serves the country.
Member of the society gives the legitimating of the ideological practice to the government and the law enforcement to sustain the whole aspects of life in the
society. Now it is clear that the authority comes from the legitimate institutions. This group is usually authorized by mutual agreement among the ideological
society members. Thus, it can be concluded that ideological representations can be identified in texts since text in its wide meaning are form of communication in the
society. The ideology is formulated in the arrangement of language features that lies in words, sentences, and discourse which is embedded in the way member of
society interacting with others. Simpson adds significance remark of language and the ideology as world-
view as follows:
―Special attention was given to the problem of making explicit and direct connections between features of language and aspects of world-view. Textual meaning, it
was argued, is not rigidly fixed and a particular linguistic form may have a number of functions, depending on its
context of use.‖ Simpson, 1993: 108
For Simpson, the functions of chosen linguistic form must be seen on its context of use in order to explicate the connections between features of language and the
aspects of world-view. The world-view is the reality that can happen on anybody. Reality includes event and things that empirically happens outside the body of
human. It means that everybody can have the same reality whether in the same time or in different time of occurrences. However, the way or how a person
internalizes the reality into experience is personal and different from one to another. It is, therefore, the reason behind the differences in how individual
expressing the idea, feeling, or experience in the form of utterance. The process of internalization is different from a person to the other because of many different
factors that belong to each personality. Thus, reality can be shared but an experience is not a common thing. If an experience is articulated it becomes an
expression. The e xpression is the representation of somebody‘s experience which
has been influenced by so many factors such as family background, moral values in the cultural society, and other factor that is influential to the way a person
perceive the reality to be their experience. A person expresses or articulates their experience through language as the benefit of being a human that enable a person
to make meaning of the reality with language. This process can be said as the nature of ideology.