This paper provides a critical social semiotic analysis of the UK Department of Work and Pensions ‘Employ ability’ initiative. Although this initiative can be read as an attempt to reduce the exclusion of people with disabilities from the workplace, it is argued that the ‘Employ ability’ initiative, should be read as part of a discursive strategy to legitimate neo-liberal welfare reforms, where policies relating to the employment and underemployment of people with disabilities remain fixed almost entirely on the supply side (...) rather than the demand side of labour. A number of semiotic resources are identified that attempt to make a neo-liberal ‘problematic’ appear to be a natural and common sense response to questions of welfare. Most notable is the use of an ‘empowerment’ discourse that seeks to legitimate a disciplinary welfare regime and attempts to fabricate an active citizenry so necessary to the demands of neo-liberalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAgainst the background of enduring crisis dynamics, an increasingly popular Gramscian line of interpretation has the merit of shedding light on the ambivalences of the present political scenario as a series of ongoing struggles for hegemony. Yet how to concretely conceive, structure and operationalize empirical investigations interested in these struggles without neglecting their complex interplay of discursive and extra-discursive dynamics? I suggest that cultural political economy, historical materialist policy analysis and critical discourse analysis of practical argumentation can be productively combined (...) into a transdisciplinary research framework to investigate key strategic aspects at play in conflicts over the making and challenging of hegemony. Building on the potential for synergy between CPE and HMPA, I argue that a CDA of practical argumentation can improve their analytical strength in investigating strategies within the broader context of hegemony struggles. Both CPE and HMPA, in fact, imply a process of practical reasoning as a key element in their respective approaches to questions of strategy. This implicit concern, I suggest, should be made explicit and a CDA focusing on practical argumentation can be an ideal candidate to strengthen CPE and HMPA in this respect. (shrink)

The purpose of this analysis was to understand how organizational logics of a fundamentally local institution – the US community college – change with shifts in sociospatial scalar relations. Data included a 3.26-million word, diachronic corpus consisting of 165 issues of the Community College Journal from 1960 to 2011. Textual prominence, collocation analysis, and concordance analysis suggest that the community college shifted from a commitment to local democracy to an emphasis on competitiveness in a global economy. Rank order correlations and (...) log-likelihood statistics identify significant trends. (shrink)

This article deploys a cultural political economy framework to explore New Zealand's "embrace" of globally-sourced knowledge economy discourse. It argues that the diffusion of such knowledge in this locale has been mediated by electoral shifts and rising economic prosperity but in one of the few fields where some level of institutionalization has occurred--higher education--it has been used to increase state control of a highly marketized tertiary sector. The article then discusses the implications of this investigation for researchers in non-metropolitan locales.

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing project of developing a specifically critical realist approach to discourse analysis. This is important not just because critical realist researchers n...

ABSTRACT In this wide-ranging interview, Bob Jessop discusses the development of, and many of the main themes in, his work over the last fifty years. He explains how he became interested in realism and Marxism; and he describes the various influences on his highly influential theory of the state. The discussion explores his strategic-relational approach, his thoughts on regulation theory, variegated capitalism, post-disciplinarity, cultural political economy and his ‘spatial-turn’, as well as neoliberalism, contemporary events and looming problems of climate change (...) and crisis. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the Canadian policy discourse surrounding language and immigrant integration, focusing on the interdiscursive processes through which it recontextualizes discourse elements from a neo-liberal skills discourse, an academic discourse of language as communicative competency, and a research discourse of language as a factor in immigrant incorporation. This dominant discourse on language and integration is based on standard language ideology regarding the functional importance of language skills for economic integration of new immigrants and legitimizes (...) the increased salience of language within the Canadian immigration regime. It also plays a mediating role in changes in discourse practices surrounding language and integration policy associated with a neo-liberal transformation of the Canadian immigration regime. (shrink)

This volume embraces the diversity of combinations between ethnography and critical discourse analysis (CDA) in problem-oriented and context-sensitive research on language, discourse and society. W...

Recent work in the strategic-relational approach to explaining the relationship between structure and agency emphasises the significance of ideas, discourses, and the semiotic realm of symbols. However, this work does not yet offer an explanation of how discourses relate to symbols – how texts take on meaning. This article shows why this is needed. It then provides such an account of language use and learning in explicitly strategic-relational terms. That account both grounds strategic-relational concepts of discourse, and helps define them (...) more clearly. While complementing and strengthening such notions, it also provides an insight into the way particular discourses interrelate. In particular, the model presented here suggests the importance of the constructive and critical potential of reason, in enlarging the scope for critical syntheses across discourses, and guarding against hegemony. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, Bob Jessop discusses the development of, and many of the main themes in, his work over the last fifty years. He explains how he became interested in realism and Marx...