Some have Credit Cards and others have Giro Cheques: `Individuals' and `People' as Lifelong Learners in Late Modernity

Abstract

This article examines and interprets the linguistic behaviour of `individuals' and `people' in the official literature of lifelong learning, in the light of theories of individualization in late modern culture and society, particularly those of Beck and Giddens. Using a 950,000-word corpus of recent government and academic publications on lifelong learning, it presents a concordance-based analysis of `individuals' as members of institutionalized collectivities, as agents, as rational citizens, and as consumers. It compares `individuals' with `people' and, for reference, presents a comparison with both words as they occur in the British National Corpus. The study concludes that close analysis of a corpus can provide valuable evidence for the constituent potential of language in theories of society and culture, and that the differences between `individuals' and `people' demonstrate that the discourse of lifelong learning has close affinities with contemporary sociocultural models of individualization, consumption and production, and with the risk society.

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