Abstract
This chapter presents a computer-aided critical discourse analytical method for analysing education policy discourse in historical context. It identifies key procedural steps as well as the central importance of interpretation and contextualisation in assessing the wider socio-political significance of the findings, which are grounded in a political economic account of state education in the UK. The discussion is structured around three distinctive but complementary phases of the methodology. First, corpus linguistic ‘keywords’ analysis is used to track the historical emergence and subsidence of dominant political themes in policy. The chapter then explains how this interdisciplinary method helped identify two significant rhetorical trends in recent policy discourse: ‘personalisation’ and ‘managerialisation’. ‘Personalisation’ involves a more salient role for personal pronouns in constructing an apparently consensual, collectivised representation of policy decisions (Mulderrig, Disc Soc 23:701–728, 2012). ‘Managerialisation’ highlights the operation of ‘soft power’ in contemporary educational governance whereby a particular grammatical transformation constructs an ‘enabling’ leadership role for the government alongside a form of ‘managed autonomy’ for citizens (Mulderrig, Crit Disc Stud 88:45–68, 2011).
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- 1.
Briefly, “workfare” is an alternative to traditional social welfare in which the state provides monetary protection against unemployment. Designed to stimulate some form of social contribution from recipients, workfare schemes have been operationalized in different ways. They also vary in the nature of the activities required (e.g., demonstrable efforts to seek work, interviews to determine “fitness to work” among those with disabilities, mandatory training or education, or compulsory unpaid work) and the levels of coerciveness entailed. Because the workfare principle is inherently vulnerable to exploitation, it is a controversial mechanism for social protection.
- 2.
Here I am extrapolating from Harvey and for the sake of simplicity conflating his two-part label for this moment: “language/discourse.” The “language” aspect refers to the language system as an internally organized resource, whereas “discourse” is given a very wide definition that resembles the notion of semiosis: “the vast panoply of coded ways available to us for talking about, writing about, and representing the world.” I am using “discourse” to cover both concepts of the linguistic system and semiosis in all its forms (since the latter subsumes the former).
- 3.
Following Fairclough, this entails working in a “transdisciplinary” way incorporating where relevant the theories and methodologies of other disciplines (Fairclough 2005).
- 4.
The concepts I outline here are primarily associated with Fairclough’s approach to CDA (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Fairclough 2003, 2005), although other approaches are similarly committed to working at different levels of abstraction and to focussing on the socially constituted and constitutive nature of discourse in its historical context.
- 5.
Thus a distinction is made here between “discourse” as an ontological category in the general sense of language in use (and other forms of semiosis like visual images, symbols, gesture, etc.) and “discourse(s)” as an analytical category to identify the way in which language is used to talk about particular topics from a particular point of view. For example, we might distinguish between Republican and Democrat discourses on health-care provision in terms of how this policy problem is differently constructed depending on competing ideological perspectives.
- 6.
For an illustrative analysis of a political document using these three categories, see Farrelly (2010).
- 7.
Local education authorities (the branch of local government traditionally responsible for overseeing the content and structure of state schooling).
- 8.
See West and Pennell (2002).
- 9.
See Mulderrig (2008) for an empirical study of this change in the “vocabularies of motives” in state education during the Thatcher, Major, and Blair governments (1979–2005).
- 10.
“Ofsted” is the abbreviation for the Office for Standards in Education. It is the government body responsible for carrying out regular inspections of schools in the UK.
- 11.
The use of systemic functional grammar has been strongly associated with Fairclough’s work in the field (especially his earlier work, e.g., 1992b, 2003). However, as he himself points out (2005), there are no necessary ties between SFL and CDA—the decision to use it in this study was because it is particularly useful for the analysis of transitivity and agency, which were the primary focus of interest here. Other approaches draw variously on text linguistics, schema theory, pragma-dialectics, and argumentation theory (Reisigl and Wodak 2009; van Dijk 2008; Fairclough and Fairclough 2012a).
- 12.
Those dealing with the content and organization of schooling in England and Wales; Scotland was not included as it has a separate education system. Some policy documents not fitting the content selection criteria were also omitted (e.g., those dealing with special educational needs in nonmainstream schools or those proposing a program of repairs for school buildings). While the entire corpus contains 17 policy documents, the New Labour section contains five documents: “Excellence in Schools” (1997), “Opportunity for All in a World of Change” (2001), “Schools Achieving Success” (2001), “Twenty-First Century Skills: Realising Our Potential” (2003) and “14–19 Education and Skills” (2005). In addition to these documents the following were also consulted in a follow-up study: “Higher Standards, Better Schools for All: More choice for parents and pupils” (2005) and “Further Education: Raising Skills, Improving Life Chances” (2006).
- 13.
For a very accessible guide to using corpus linguistics in research and teaching, see Hunston (2002).
- 14.
- 15.
The LOB and FLOB corpora, respectively, comprise a cross section of British English texts from the 1960s and the 1990s. Each contains one million words and comprises a range of texts from informative and imaginative fiction (press, general prose, learned writing, and fiction). There exists a range of free-to-access specialist and general corpora in a range of language varieties. A general distinction is made between “stand-alone” and “in-built” corpora. The latter come with their own concordancing facilities (e.g., Mark Davies’ online facility providing access to and facilities for searching and cross-comparing the BNC, COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), and a corpus of Time magazine; available to registered users at http://corpus.byu). Stand-alone corpora, by comparison, must be accessed using a separate concordancer like WordSmith or the slightly simpler but free-to-access “AntConc” http://antconc.com. These are useful when comparing your own corpus with a reference corpus (since the same concordancer can be used to cross-compare the two data sets).
- 16.
These are the only actors that regularly rank within the top 5 keywords (in the case of schools, this is consistent throughout the whole corpus; in the case of government/we, the distribution across the corpus is significantly skewed). For an analysis of how other actors (pupils, teachers, young people) are represented, see Mulderrig (2003).
- 17.
Using Halliday’s functional grammar, we can classify the elements of a clause according to its participants, processes, and circumstances. Generally realized as verbs, processes are subdivided into subtypes, which map onto the three main realms of human activity: doing, being, and sensing. Thus, they can be categorized as material, existential, relational, verbal, mental, or behavioral. The representation of the government’s actions in the data is in fact frequently very complex, abstract, and metaphorical. The analysis process itself therefore fed back into the development of descriptive tools, with additional models of description overlaid onto the analysis as it progressed. Functional grammar by no means offered an unproblematic means of classifying the data; in fact failing to find an adequate grammatical model for parts of the data, I devised a new sociosemantic category I call “managing actions” (see Mulderrig 2011b).
- 18.
Under New Labour, the pronoun moves to a higher ranking (2) among the keywords than even the government had occupied in the preceding data. It should be noted that it is very unusual for a common grammatical item like a pronoun to attain a high keyness rating in a non-spoken corpus. Under New Labour, it is second only to the word skills.
- 19.
- 20.
Preliminary findings from a search of four education policy documents issued subsequently under Brown (Labour government to 2010; three policy documents) and then Cameron (current Coalition government; one document) suggest that this trend, introduced under Blair, continues in this genre.
- 21.
See Mulderrig (2012) for a detailed account of how each instance of we was categorized.
- 22.
Of the remainder, 13 % were ambivalent and just 3 % inclusive.
- 23.
Irrealis statements are those whose tense indicates that they have not yet happened. Hedged statements are those which are modified in such a way as to limit the speaker’s commitment to it (e.g., through modality, “I would like to go” (suggests I might not), or premodifiers, “I”m not sure you’ll like the movie”).
- 24.
Note how the analytical concepts of genre (in this case the actions performed by the government) and style (the identity constructed through stylistic choices in discourse) intersect to create a dynamic picture of the role played by discourse in shaping this particular social practice; its forms of participation, identification, and interrelation.
- 25.
From “Higher Standards, Better Schools for All” (2005).
- 26.
See Fairclough and Fairclough 2012a, b for a detailed analytical model for investigating argumentation in discourse. Relevant concepts here are practical arguments (arguments about what should be done, as opposed to theoretical arguments about what should be the case), which end in some kind of recommended action. Such arguments are structured around a form of practical reasoning wherein action A is seen as the best way of allowing the agent to reach her goals, given the current circumstances and in accordance with her values (or those ascribed to her). In the current analysis, I see the different forms of we and the propositions they are textured with as contributing to the practical arguments that underpin the recommended policy actions proposed in policy documents. This operates in a rhetorically differentiated way, whereby “exclusive” we typically recommends the actions and “inclusive” we provides the values with which the recommended actions are aligned and/or the circumstances of the action.
- 27.
Chief among the principles underlying “workfare” schemes is the desire to combat the fecklessness and structural dependency that state welfare benefits putatively create. Therefore a workfarist discourse will logically highlight the importance of (individual) responsibility and active social/labor market participation.
- 28.
It is important to note that this typology has been derived in order to characterize the findings in the data examined; it is not intended as a universally applicable context-free grammar. Thus, for instance, the specific power relations underlying the social practice examined here were factored into the analysis. It would, however, be interesting to “test” its interpretive capacity in other social contexts. Note also the typology only contains verbal collocates of we and the government. Thus other possible surface forms like nominalizations have been omitted.
- 29.
“Collocates” are words that co-occur. Thus the verb co-occurring with we or the government is a managing action in a fifth of all cases under New Labour.
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Appendix
Appendix
Typology of Managing Actions
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1.
Overseer
Ensure (that) – does, Make sure (that) – does
-
2.
Leader
Require – to, Expect – to, Look to – to, Want – to, Envisage that – should, Urge – to, Encourage – to, Ask – to, Invite – to, Promote [+nominalisation meaning “the doing of X by MA”]
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3.
Facilitator
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(a)
Ability
Support – (to/in doing), Help – to, Facilitate – to, Let – do, Allow – to, Enable – to, (Transform/Enhance) the capacity of – to, Make it easier (for – ) to,
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(b)
Opportunity
Free – to, Give – (greater/more) freedom(s) to, Provide/Increase/widen the) opportunities for – to, Provide for – to
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(a)
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Mulderrig, J. (2015). 2.7 “Enabling” Participatory Governance in Education: A Corpus-Based Critical Analysis of Policy in the United Kingdom. In: Smeyers, P., Bridges, D., Burbules, N., Griffiths, M. (eds) International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_21
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