36 research outputs found
Fat-shaming: Change4Life’s anti-obesity ‘nudge’ campaign glosses over social inequalities
No full textThe Change4Life campaign draws on ‘nudge’ theory to encourage families to ‘make better choices’ about their diet and exercise. But, argues Jane Mulderrig, behavioural economics is a poor substitute for radical state intervention that would address the root causes of obesity – such as poverty, the availability of cheap junk food and inadequate public transport. Instead, Change4Life’s advertising subtly evokes northern, working-class families and plays on parental guilt using dubious science
Critical policy discourse analysis
No full text© Nicolina Montesano Montessori, Michael Farrelly and Jane Mulderrig 2019. All rights reserved. This book provides a series of contemporary and international policy case studies analysed through discursive methodological approaches in the traditions of critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and discourse theory. This is the first volume that connects this discursive methodology systematically to the field of critical policy analysis and will therefore be an essential book for researchers who wish to include a discursive analysis in their critical policy research
Critical policy discourse analysis
No full text© Nicolina Montesano Montessori, Michael Farrelly and Jane Mulderrig 2019. All rights reserved. This book provides a series of contemporary and international policy case studies analysed through discursive methodological approaches in the traditions of critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and discourse theory. This is the first volume that connects this discursive methodology systematically to the field of critical policy analysis and will therefore be an essential book for researchers who wish to include a discursive analysis in their critical policy research
Analysing orders of discourse of neoliberal rule: health ‘nudges’ and the rise of psychological governance
No full text
“Enabling” Participatory Governance in Education: A Corpus-Based Critical Analysis of Policy in the United Kingdom
No full textThis 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)
Textual strategies of representation and legitimation in New Labour policy discourse.
No full textThis chapter presents a critical discourse analysis of education policy texts issued under the New Labour government. The analysis focuses on the discourse representation of key educational actors, as well as the discourse strategies by which policy decisions are legitimated. In order to interpret the sociological significance of the findings, the data is interpreted in relation to its wider socio-economic context. It is postulated that a broadly instrumental rationality underlies the representation of educational actors. This is theorised as an indicator of a general shift towards the commodification of education that stems in part from a subordination of social to economic policy. Furthermore, the texts build an inclusive and vague social identity for the government, which is shown to play a significant role in constructing an apparent consensus over neoliberal policy statements
