Political Communication, Institutional Cultures, and Linearities of Organisational Practice: A Discourse- Ethnographic Approach to Institutional Change in the European Union

The aim of this article is to present an approach to analysing organisational practices and identities in complex institutional spaces of the European Union (EU). On the example of the 2002–2003 European Convention, the article targets new types of institutional organisms enacted in the EU in recent years. It does so in order to analyse to what extent such new, short-lived institutional bodies have the ability to develop their own, distinct institutional practices and inasmuch their everyday doings are in fact based on patterns adopted from other, more permanent institutional milieus (in the case of the EU – the European Commission, the European Council or the European Parliament). While analysing Convention's institutional reality by means of extensive fieldwork and ethnography, the article looks at the discursive construction of institutional cultures and identities by means of institutional practices as well as through discourses of officials involved in the work of the European institutions.