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Draft version of Chapter to appear in ‘International Handbook of Interpretation in
Educational Research’
‘Enabling’ participatory governance in education: a corpus-based
critical policy analysis
Jane Mulderrig
INTRODUCTION
The idea of the ‘enabling state’ has emerged in recent decades as a way of
theoretically conceptualising and politically enacting advanced liberal governance. At
its heart lies the assumption that the primary goal of the state is international
competitiveness and that this is best achieved through economic liberalism and labour
market activation. The result is a growing emphasis on ‘productive social policy’ in
which the enabling state provides ‘workfare’
1
incentives and structural opportunities
for the active citizen to work. Framed in the rhetoric of reciprocity, of ‘rights and
responsibilities’ (Giddens, 1998), this brings about a new contractual relation
between citizen and state. In an era when the state is no longer perceived to be
capable of offering economic guarantees and social protections, the weight of
responsibility shifts to the individual. In 1990 the OECD proposed the ‘Active
Society’ as the future for social policy, in which the primary goal of governments is
no longer guaranteeing full employment but facilitating full employability. The main
policy instruments to achieve this are education and training alongside (limited and
contingent) income support, whereby the state ‘foster[s] economic opportunity and
activity for everyone in order to combat poverty, dependency and social exclusion’
(OECD, 1990:8). In terms of the social relations of governance, this entails new
forms of ‘active, participatory’ citizenship coupled with a more devolved, ‘enabling’
model of political leadership. In other words, advanced capitalist societies have, it is
claimed, undergone a fundamental reconfiguration of the distribution of social power,
roles and relations in the state. This chapter uses critical discourse analysis to explore
the extent to which this was historically brought about in the UK through education
policy discourse.
Alongside these postulated changes in the relations of governance, there has
been an increasing emphasis in advanced capitalist economies on educational
investment as economic investment. This is particularly explicit in the ambitions set
out in the Lisbon Agenda (2000) for the European Union to become ‘the most
dynamic, competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world, with sustainable
growth, more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. At the heart of this
competitive economy is a new commodity: knowledge. With a post-industrial shift in
primacy from physical to intellectual labour growth is now seen to depend
increasingly on the production and application of knowledge (Bell, 1973; Castells,
1998). It follows that in a knowledge economy individual success for the ‘active
citizen’ (and protection from social and economic exclusion) lies in the ability to
acquire and market this commodity better than one’s competitors. In effect,
investment in learning is now seen as a key political mechanism for achieving
economic growth and social cohesion. This has inevitable consequences for the
perceived value, function and content of schooling, fundamentally challenging the
educational status quo and generating structural and ideological pressures to align
education more closely with economic policy goals. Here again this process relies on
reshaping the roles and relations of education so as to foster the lifelong learning
Draft version of Chapter to appear in ‘International Handbook of Interpretation in
Educational Research’
citizen, whose responsibility is to safeguard her future ‘employability’ through the
accumulation of skills (Brine, 2006). The case study outlined therefore focuses on the
historic negotiation of the roles and relations of governance in UK education policy
discourse during the late 20th and early 21
st
centuries. In particular the analysis
examines how their historic reconfiguration helped shape a new policy hegemony in
which an apparent consensus on, and thus legitimacy for, policy goals is construed
through an inclusive governmental identity. At the same time an ‘enabling’ and
distinctly managerial model of governance progressively reconfigures the balance of
power in education towards a more devolved, managerial model. A computer-aided
approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to highlight the systematic
grammatical forms through which these transformations are historically enacted and
naturalised in policy discourse.
The remainder of the chapter is organised as follows. I begin by discussing
CDA as a distinctive approach to interpretive analysis and its potential contribution to
critical social research. A key characteristic of CDA is that it explicitly acknowledges
the (normative) position of the researcher and the interpretive process in the research.
In other words CDA has an explicitly emancipatory agenda in which critical
interpretation of empirical objects is seen as a mechanism both for explaining social
phenomena and for changing them. This explicitly interventionist stance sets CDA
apart from some other approaches to social science, while it is nevertheless committed
to the same levels of scientific rigour. In this chapter I therefore argue that rather than
a discrete stage in the research process, interpretation is integral to the multi-layered,
iterative methodology that typifies CDA. In essence this approach involves a
continual movement between, and critical reflection upon, the different stages and
levels of the research (formulation of the research object or ‘problem’; selection of
appropriate data; identification of relevant conceptual and procedural tools with which
to analyse them; assessment of the significance and normative implications of the
findings).
CDA is inherently interdisciplinary, combing a theory of discourse and a range
of (always variable) text analytical methods with social and political theories relevant
to the object of inquiry in order to contextualise and interpret its findings. Thus the
social context of the data under investigation is always crucial to the interpretive
process. In the next section I therefore present a more detailed account of the
historical context of this case study, framed in a political economic theorisation of
specific transformations in the British welfare state (Jessop, 2002; Hay, 1996; 1999).
This account of the political economic context of the case study is itself a theoretically
informed interpretation of the social practices (of educational governance) under
investigation. Moreover, this theoretical account was used as the lens through which
the research questions were refined, the foci of textual analysis identified and the
significance of the findings interpreted. Thus at every stage of the research process
the object of inquiry was shaped through processes of theoretical and methodological
interpretation. Reflecting this integration I do not treat it here as a separate element of
the research, but rather point to its relevance throughout the research process.
Following a more general account of the historical context of this study I
briefly discuss the rationale for focusing on, and questions formulated in order to do
so, the changing roles and relations of neoliberal governance as constructed in
education policy discourse. I begin with a description of the combined corpus-based
methodology developed for this particular study, outlining the procedures this
involved. I then present the findings from the research, drawing on the political
economic context of the data in order to interpret their potential significance. I
Draft version of Chapter to appear in ‘International Handbook of Interpretation in
Educational Research’
conclude with a brief reflection on the insights afforded by the interpretive analytical
process of CDA into the reality of so-called ‘enabling’, participatory forms of
educational governance and the salient role played by discourse in their enactment. In
particular I suggest that as advanced liberal democracy moves towards greater
emphasis on ‘reflexive, participatory’ governance and ‘active, responsible’
citizenship, critical language awareness is vital for the defence of democratic
freedoms and the promotion of alternative visions for education.
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AS INTERPRETIVE METHOD IN
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
CDA is an approach to social scientific research that brings a detailed account of the
role of language (and other forms of semiosis) in social life. In particular it offers a
dialectical theory of discourse that recognises its socially constitutive potential
without reducing social practices (and their analysis) to ‘mere signification’.
Combining detailed textual analysis with theoretically informed accounts of the
phenomena under investigation, CDA identifies the processes by which particular
ways of using language (re)produce social practices and help privilege certain ways of
doing, thinking and being over others. The approach has its origins in Linguistics,
although unlike some branches of the discipline, it is not a discrete discipline with a
relatively fixed set of methods. Instead it is best seen as a problem-oriented
interdisciplinary research movement that includes a variety of approaches, theoretical
models and research agendas (for recent overviews see Fairclough et al., 2011; in
education Rogers et al., 2005). What unites them is, broadly, a shared interest in the
semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, abuse, and social change. The way I engage
with CDA is mainly influenced by Fairclough’s discourse-dialectical, critical realist
approach (2003; 2006; Fairclough et al., 2002) and shares with it a research interest in
investigating the impact of broad processes of social and political change (here
characterised in relation to advanced liberalism). Other approaches to CDA have
developed in different theoretical and methodological directions depending on the foci
of research. The variability in theory and method in fact stems from some important
theoretical principles and ontological assumptions underpinning CDA. I begin by
outlining these, as well as the analytical concepts this gives rise to, and discuss the
interpretive and methodological implications for educational and other areas of social
scientific research.
The dialectics of discourse
A key theoretical starting point for CDA is the dynamic and mutually constitutive
relationship between discourse and other non-discursive elements that comprises any
object of social research. It is this dialectical approach which leads CDA to engage
explicitly with social scientific theory, since it seeks to correlate its close textual
analyses with a view of social practice as something which people actively produce
on the basis of shared norms of behaviour that are partly constituted in language.
Further, it seeks to interpret these practices in relation to the formation and
transformation of social structures, thus making one of its research objectives the
investigation of social change. In short, CDA seeks to explore the ‘ways in which
discourse ‘(re)constructs’ social life in processes of social change’ (Fairclough,
2005:76). A useful way to conceptualise the relationship between the discursive and
non-discursive is Harvey’s (1996) framework in which he posits six ‘moments’ of
Draft version of Chapter to appear in ‘International Handbook of Interpretation in
Educational Research’
social processes. An ontological distinction between different elements of the social
world, the term ‘moment’ is deliberately chosen to reflect their transient and
contingent nature. Briefly, these moments are 1) beliefs/values/desires (our
epistemology, ontology and sense of self), 2) institutions (ways of formally organising
political and social relations on a more or less durable basis; for example education,
religion, politics, the military etc.), 3) material practices (the physical and built
environment), 4) social relations, 5) power (internalising all other moments since it is
a function of them), and 6) discourse
2
. Each of these moments has distinct properties
therefore researching them gives rise to distinctive academic disciplines. One thing
that marks out CDA from other research traditions in Linguistics is its commitment to
dialogue with other disciplines
3
in order to understand the relationship between
discourse and these other dimensions of social life.
Discourse is a cross-cutting dimension in so far as it internalises all other
moments including values, beliefs, desires, and institutionalised ways of doing and
being. The discourse moment is at its most potent as a mechanism of sociocultural
reproduction when it is the most invisible and naturalised. Critically analysing (here,
policy) discourse therefore means highlighting the inconsistencies, assumptions,
vested interests, values and beliefs that sustain the relations of power it internalises.
CDA offers the analytical apparatus to do this, illuminating how different
(representations and enactments of) moments of the social are textured into discourse.
This ‘porous’, hybridising quality of discourse (in CDA terms its ‘interdiscursivity’)
is the conduit that allows the slippage of values, norms, practices and power relations
between different domains of social practice (for example from business management
to education).
Key concepts in CDA
In the previous section we observed how the discourse moment internalises all other
moments; hence the ideological and material significance of language and why we
should analyse it. Equally, because of its socially constitutive and constituted nature it
is possible and necessary to identify different levels of analytical abstraction. The
analytical categories developed in CDA
4
remind us that texts do not exist in a social
vacuum but instead form part of a process through which discourse structures and
enables social life. The concept of social practices will be familiar to many social
scientists. It refers to the more or less stable, durable, conventionalised forms of social
activity that help (re)produce our institutions and organisations. In Fairclough’s terms
(2003), they mediate the possible (social structures) and the actual (social events). For
example the field of school education comprises a range of different practices like
classroom teaching, assessment, professional training, financial management, policy-
making, curriculum and materials design, and so on. Each has a discursive dimension
and is partly characterised by its distinctive set of discourse practices. Taken
together these form the order of discourse of that social field or institution. These
discourse practices essentially provide the conventionalised (but mutable and
contestable) resources for doing, thinking and being in a manner appropriate to
participation in a particular institution or organisation. For this reason socialisation
and explicit training in a particular social practice (e.g. teaching) involves learning
particular ways of using language. Discourse practices can therefore be analysed
along three main dimensions: genres (ways of acting and interacting), discourses
5
(ways of talking and thinking about the world from a particular perspective), and
styles (ways of being or self-identifying). Different orders of discourse are
