Constructing Communities of Consumption

Abstract

In this chapter I explain the features of the discourse of commercialization that emerged from the analysis of the brochures. The first section of the chapter identifies the brochures as examples of the discourse of advertising and summarizes how the analysis drew on Halliday’s (1985; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) systemic functional linguistics to investigate evidence of interdiscursive links between the discourse instantiated in the brochures and the experiences reported by teachers in the diaries. As explained in Chapter 2, I anticipated that such evidence would support the notion that the discourse(s) associated with teachers’ practices are being colonized in Fairclough’s (1992) sense by the discourse instantiated in the brochures. The following sections explain the evidence for these interdiscursive relations and their construction of the relations between teachers, students and managers as inherently conflicted ‘communities of consumption’.