The marketization of discourse about education in UK general election manifestos

Abstract

After 1945, a broad 'post-war consensus' developed in the West. There was general agreement that the state had an important role to play in such areas as macroeconomic management, environmental protection, and social provision for health, education, and welfare. But since the late 1970s, as part of the neo-liberal project to extend the market into every aspect of social life, there has been a backlash against 'inefficient', 'bureaucratic', 'unwieldy', and 'inflexible' state provision. In this article, I examine the discursive dimension of one facet of the 'new capitalism': the marketization of education in the UK. Using frameworks derived from critical discourse analysis, I analyze texts from three election manifestos: the Labour and Conservative manifestos from the 1987 election (a turning point in UK education policy), and the Labour 1997 manifesto. I show how aspects of textual organization, such as patterns of transitivity, the representation of social actors, semantic prosody, and coherence, have a central role to play in the construction of 'comprehensive' and 'market' conceptualizations of the domain.

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