EcoLogics

By way of a (second) epigraph:

‘…you know, there is no such thing as education. There are individual employers and employees, there are skills and there are businesses. And no government can do anything except through businesses.’ (Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘No such thing as society’ statement, as translated by the New Labour skills policy)

In Lord Leitch’s Levers (Part 1), I focused on the ideological significance of the fact that Gordon Brown commissioned Lord Sandy Leitch to lead what subsequently became known as the Leitch Review of Skills: Prosperity for All in the Global Economy—World Class Skills (1). In this post, I would like to offer a critique of the Review itself.

The Review is a relatively short document by the standards of its genre. However, its 154 pages are full of statistics and policy recommendations. Many of these (the policies, but also the statistics) are so questionable that each could, and indeed perhaps each ought to be the subject of its own extended critique. For example, the Review’s main argument is premised on comparisons with the educational systems of a variety of countries, many of which have not only different systems of qualifications, but crucially, social systems with cultural particularities which the Review ignores.

Unfortunately, a detailed critique of this and many other similarly questionable assumptions would make even longer what is already an overly long post. I have thereby decided to limit the scope of my analysis in two ways. First, I will only engage in a general analysis of the key discursive aspects of the Review. And second, I will focus on the manner in which the mentioned aspects impinge on higher education. In this post I will focus on the critique of the text itself, while in the third and last post, I will examine the practical implications for higher education.

I should perhaps clarify that when I speak of ‘discursive’ aspects of the Review, I refer to the procedures by which the Review sets out at once to construct a convenient problem, and to exclude, overtly and not-so-overtly, alternative ways of interpreting that problem. Put differently, if the definition of the problem already constitutes a form of ‘bias’, its subsequent development serves to compound that ‘bias’, and also to make it difficult for readers to imagine entirely different ways of approaching the issues at stake. The objective of a discourse analysis is thereby to reveal the convenience of the problem; to show how this convenience is both dissimulated, and legitimized by ostensibly ‘objective’ and ‘disinterested’ representations; and to reveal the contradictions that link such representations to broader social dynamics (2). [Update December 12, 2007: I have published a post on the difference between discourse and ideology here. This same post also explains what I mean by neoliberalism.]

* * *

I should perhaps begin by noting that in producing such an analysis, I find myself in a rather paradoxical position. I very much share what seems to be the Review’s main concern: redressing the UK’s—and especially England and Wales’—long history of underinvestment in education.

My own interest and concern with this underinvestment is that it reflects a history of conservative (if not Conservative) efforts to use education, or rather the denial of education, to try to maintain the privileges of the most privileged, as well as the marginality of the most marginalized. By contrast, the Review’s concern is ostensively that today the UK’s educational levels are lagging far behind those of many of its OECD competitors. The Review argues that this is bound to have implications for different social sectors’ abilities to compete in a context of more and more aggressive forms of globalization. While it is clear to me that what I will describe as ‘skillism’ (or ’skillification’) is not the answer to this challenge, it is difficult to find fault with the Review’s apparent goal of providing the means whereby all those of us who live in the UK might be better able to ‘invest’, as the Review puts it, in our own educations.

* * *

The problem—the classically discursive problem—is that the Review does not actually set out to encourage us to invest in our own education. As I explained in the first part of this series, the word ‘education’ is no longer a part of the New Labour’s vocabulary, and instead, the emphasis is now on ‘skills’ and on ‘training’. It might be thought that this is a purely semantic issue. In fact, and as I hope to show in this and in the next post on the subject, the elimination of what I referred to in the first post as the ‘E-word’ (Education) and its replacement by the ‘S-word’ (Skills) marks an important ideological turn in the fate of the UK’s educational provision.

As I also noted in the first post, the Latin root for education is educat, which is in turn related to educere, which means ‘lead out’. This etymology reminds us that, historically, the semantic charge of the word ‘education’ has been associated with leading people out of prejudice, and towards more critical ways of explaining and interpreting the world. This arguably continues to constitute the predominant model of schooling today. It is thus significant that there is no reference whatsoever to this model, this discourse, in the Review. On the contrary, the notion of improving skills is repeatedly justified in the terms of a neoliberal discourse (and ideology) of deregulation, of ensuring gains in productivity, and above all, of developing the ‘flexibility’ and ‘mobility’ of the workforce.

The architects of the Leitch Review might well suggest that there is no contradiction between the two sets of discourses as they might apply to education—they are two sides of the same ‘coin’. In this and the next post, I want to make the case that the ideologies that underpin the two discourses (the Enlightenment and the neoliberal) are actually quite different. I also want to make the case that the turn to the discourse of skillism—a spin-off of neoliberalism in the context of education—is part of a concerted strategy whose advocates—New Labour politicians and their mentors in the private corporate world—have three inter-related objectives. The first of these objectives, which might seem like the least controversial, is apparently to improve the UK’s, or at least the UK’s private corporate economic productivity and competitiveness. The second, which is by no means automatically continuous with the first, is to secure corporate control over key aspects and levels of education in the UK. The third objective, which the Review only acknowledges in passing, is to open up new business opportunities, to take the form of enterprises specializing in training for business. As I will explain in Part 3, the ultimate effect of the Review’s proposals will be (or would be) to fatally undermine the quality of higher education as one of the UK’s last remaining spaces for the production of forms of knowledge that are both independent, and potentially critical of skillism, and its parent, neoliberalism.

* * *

Perhaps the best way to begin to engage in such an analysis is by considering the Review’s representation of the notion of ‘skills’.

In a box titled ‘What do we mean by skills’, the Review begins by acknowledging that ‘there are a large number of different types of skills and they can be split into a number of different categories’(p. 28). However, the Review immediately reduces skills to a single, all-encompassing category: the Review is only concerned with ‘economically valuable’ skills, which its authors define as skills that ‘benefit individuals through higher wages and businesses through improved productivity’(p. 28). This reduction—this economic reductionism—pretty much says it all: the Review is only interested in skills if they result in higher wages, and in improved productivity.

Were it not for the socially dominant nature of this way of thinking, I would not need to say anything more about the Review. But of course, at the beginning of the 21st century, many people in the UK might regard this as a reasonable reduction, or indeed, as no ‘reduction’ at all: surely higher wages and productivity can encompass an extraordinarily wide set of skills, ranging from what the Review itself describes as ‘soft skills’ such as an ability to communicate effectively in teams, to the ‘hard’ skills that, say, an IT engineer might need to develop a new kind of computer, or its software?

To be sure, how could the Treasury be concerned with anything other than economically valuable skills? After all, the Review was commissioned by the Treasury, and one of the Treasury’s main roles is to ensure the economic well-being of the nation, is it not?

I will answer each of these questions in turn. First, the point is not to deny that increased wages and productivity might well constitute criteria that could embrace a wide—a very wide—set of skills. One has only to think of the range of skills, and skilfully made products in the UK to understand that the logic of commodification does indeed encompass an extraordinarily wide set of activities and interests.

This account is nonetheless a typically discursive one (in the sense defined earlier) in that something that seems perfectly objective conceals, by this very objectivity, quite a lot of ideological baggage. The Review is saying, in effect, that henceforth an individual’s education ought to be determined entirely by the, or rather a, market. This means, in principle at least, that any forms of knowledge that are not recognized by the said market would not, or should not be taught or learned as part of a drive to transform the level of education amongst the different social groups that constitute the UK.

Where the argument about the Treasury is concerned (that the Treasury would of course be concerned only with ‘economically valuable’ skills), the reverse point is actually the more pertinent. The issue is not really whether the Treasury should be concerned with economic matters, narrowly or widely defined. That is its function. The real issue—and one that anyone familiar with history of the Blair vs. Brown dynamic will recognise—is that Brown has had ambitions that go far beyond matters concerning the Treasury. This is readily apparent in the Leitch Review. Although the Review is ostensibly only about matters concerning economic productivity, the real agenda, the real interest is one that potentially affects each and every form of education in the land. Indeed we have here too, a typically discursive dynamic, whereby one institution and its allies attempt to define, for all other institutions and their associated sectors, an issue that is, or ought to be, essentially plural.

In making the last point, I deliberately contradict the Enlightenment values regarding education: a social group’s education, a nation’s education, must be at least partly a matter of diversity, difference, and pluralism. While care has to be taken that this self-same diversity is not exploited by the conservatives (or the Conservatives) to generate class-, ‘race’-, or ethnic-based segregation, just as much care must be taken to avoid the opposite risk. When one social group or sector—especially but not only a privileged social group—imposes its educational agenda on everyone else, then we have a recipe for ideological relations. Put more technically, a scenario is more likely to unfold whose agents employ the teaching and learning of certain meanings in an effort to ensure that those selfsame meanings serve to develop and sustain durable relations of domination within, and across, social groups (3).

* * *

I can well imagine that anyone who is sympathetic to Leitch/New Labour would dismiss my arguments as an example of ‘ivory tower’ thinking. So let us, for a moment, keep to the confines of skillism, which I define as the discourse that reduces educational matters to what looks like a purely economical conception of skills (I say ‘looks like’ because no conception is every purely economical; there is always a political, and we might also say a cultural economy, but the political and cultural values of a certain approach to economics tend to be dissimulated by invocations of supposedly neutral ‘market forces’).

In one particularly telling passage, the Review notes that ‘Employers in the survey felt that soft skills were lacking (particularly team working and customer handling skills, each of which were mentioned as lacking in one half of all workers lacking proficiency)’ (p. 41).

It is quite easy to imagine how this ‘skills gap’ might have emerged. Not so long ago, so-called ‘soft skills’ were either not regarded as skills, or were not regarded as being ‘economically valuable’ skills. Henry Ford, for example, would have dismissed ‘soft skills’ out of hand. As automobile manufacturers in the United States were eventually to learn, the cost of this oversight was enormous. To be sure, even today, the idea that the skills in question are somehow ‘soft’ betrays the lingering masculinism of many forms of vocational education.

The lesson that might be gleaned from this example is that what counted yesterday as economically valuable skills might not count as such today, and vice-versa. Insofar as this is the case, a similar point might be made about future skill definitions and valuations. Put simply, there can be no doubt that the valuation of skills is a temporal matter, that is to say, it is subject to change over time.

Now this is a point that the authors of the Review would certainly recognise. As I noted in The UWE Experiment, the Leitch Review declares, rather absolutely, that ‘No one can predict future demand for skills with certainty’ (p. 4). While I will explain below that there is a discursive motivation for this statement, it is valid from the point of view of the issue of the temporality of skill valuations.

What the authors might be less inclined to accept is that by trying to reduce skills to what the current market regards as ‘economically valuable’ skills, they make their policy particularly prone to the danger of obsolescence.

Of course, any and all definitions of everything have this problem (the problem of ‘obsolescence’). One thing, however, seems clear: anyone who favours the principle of ‘all-eggs-in-one-basketism’—reducing a complex, and plural set of practices to the constraints of one narrowly defined set of criteria, in this case the criteria of increased wages and productivity—is likely to be particularly exposed to the mentioned risk.

* * *

In Part 3 of this series I will explain in more detail why educational ‘all-eggs-in-one-basketism’ is risky—indeed, hugely risky. Here I should note that New Labour’s Leitch Review is not content to leave things there. The economicist reduction of skills to the ‘economically valuable’ is corresponded by another remarkable reduction: where education has thus far been provided by a complex network of public, private, and public-private institutions, the architects of the Leitch Review would like to drastically simplify, and revise the balance of educational provision in favour of business. As the Review puts it, ‘…as far as possible, funding should be routed through mechanisms which put effective purchasing power in the hands of customers. This will give training providers a real incentive to deliver the skills that employers and individuals need, flexibly and responsively. If providers do not deliver, they will not receive public funding’ (p. 17-18).

It might be argued that this statement implies a shared responsibility between employers and individuals. In fact, numerous other statements make it clear that those who will really have the power are employers: ‘Over the last decade, the division of responsibilities for improving adult skills between government, employers, and individuals has evolved further. The government has taken steps to build a more flexible, demand-led skills system. A major recent innovation in England has been Train to Gain, which offers employers support in designing and sourcing flexibly delivered training to meet their needs’ (p. 49). Or rather more baldly, ‘To deliver economically valuable skills, employers need a strong voice and must able to scrutinise and shape strategy and delivery’ (p. 77). Of course, it doesn’t take a political wizard to figure out that especially in the context of the New Labour administration, it is not the everyday ‘individuals’ that shape policy, or determine what skills are delivered when and where. It is the organisations—especially the large corporations—that do.

The proposed changes thereby constitute a fundamental change in what we might describe as the political economy of education, and as part of this, the acquisition of skills, i.e. who decides what will be taught and learned by whom, for whom, when, and where. The change is at once justified and dissimulated by way of a false opposition between two simplistic codewords: what the Review describes as a ‘supply driven’ and a ‘demand led’ provision of skills.

According to the Review, a ‘supply driven’ approach (note the choice of words…) is ‘based on the Government asking employers to articulate their needs, and then planning supply to meet this’(p. 49). This approach, the Review would have us believe, is a poor one because it fails to meet employers’ demands. By contrast, a ‘demand led’ approach (note again, the choice of words) responds to demand ‘rather than trying to plan supply’.

The real meaning of the opposition (which is clearly a false one—there must be both planning, and demand for skills and for education more generally) is that the architects of the Review would like to see an end to government control over the provision of skills training, and a shift to the political economy I mentioned earlier: henceforth, and with a couple of significant exceptions, it is the employers who should take control of skills provision.

As part of this shift, the Review also suggests that the current system for acquiring skills is overly complex: there are too many different government agencies, there is too much bureaucracy, there is too much red tape. The tape must be cut, the bureaucracy must be slashed, and the superfluous agencies eliminated; the system must be simplified. ‘The Review has found that the complexity of the current system prevents employers and individuals from effectively investing in skills improvements.’ ‘Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, said that the system “should be substantially simplified”. He argues that this is a vital measure of employer engagements is to move beyond the “bemused indifference” of today’(p. 72).

There may be some truth to this argument. But given the recommendations that are made on the back of this criticism, one can well imagine that there is also an ulterior motivation for branding the current state arrangements as ‘overly complex’. On the one hand, if there is a real pluralism in the provision of education, then we would expect to find a considerable variety of possible institutional sources and procedures for acquiring skills. If, on the other hand, a certain social group wants to exert control over the provision of education, then we would also expect an effort to try to reduce the complexity so as to make it easier for that group to exert that control. As the Review itself puts it, ‘…employers routinely complain that the system is too complex and they are unable to exercise effective influence over it’ (p. 77).

In order to secure this control, the Review proposes to eliminate several of the existing government agencies, but also to make sure that the agencies that are left, or that are created on the back of its recommendations, are ‘demand led’ and indeed, ‘employer led’. I do not have the space to explain in detail just what agencies would be eliminated, and which ones would be created or strengthened. It suffices to note once again that the changes are designed to shift the balance of power over the design and the actual provision of skills to ‘employers’.

* * *

Here too, it might be argued that the proposed changes are surely a good thing. If the employers provide the jobs, and if the largest private and public sector employers provide, as the Review claims, more than 50% of the jobs, why shouldn’t they call the shots, and why shouldn’t the system be biased in their favour?

The most obvious reason involves the short-termism especially of large private corporations, whose managers have been shown again and again to be preoccupied with securing their own extraordinarily high wages against the demands of their shareholders. A somewhat more subtle justification involves the question of corporate accountability. Especially the private corporations that stand to acquire the most control over the educational process tend to be, by their very nature, virtually unaccountable to all but the most powerful of their managers. They tend to be unaccountable to local communities, and more generally, to any entity incapable of matching their enormous economic, political, legal and public relations resources. I might add that New Labour’s record on this matter closely aligns it with that of the Conservatives; as a former editor of the Times recently noted, ‘The word business still mesmerises Brown. To most people the occupation is about making money. To Brown it is a mysterious priesthood of infinite competence. To build a school or hospital, run a prison or plan an urban renewal, you must pledge partnership with a “businessman”. Private money is always good, public bad.’(4).

In this context, suggesting that the proposed changes would benefit individuals (or the broader society) is a bit like saying that the tail would wag the dog, or that the two would wag ‘in partnership’. To be sure, in the chapter on ‘Employer Engagement in Skills’, the Review makes it clear that individuals wanting to ‘invest’ in skills would need to secure the advice and consent of their line managers, and/or of a new careers service that would itself be ‘demand led’.

Given this political economy, it is not difficult to imagine that, on this point alone, the whole Leitch edifice could come tumbling down. The employers who don’t value the acquisition of new skills—and the Review recognises that there is a huge proportion that don’t—could refuse to support any training whatsoever. But also, far-sighted employees who wanted to develop ‘unusual’ skills might well be told that these were not the skills desired by the management, i.e. they might not be regarded as ‘economically valuable’ skills. And of course, people wishing to broaden their horizons (professional, spiritual, artistic, etc.) via so-called ‘non-economically valuable’ skills would presumably have nowhere to turn to unless they had significant funds to pay for them. One has to wonder what would happen to forms of education that would encourage creativity, that key dimension of all aspects of life, but which is all too-often branded as not being ‘economically valuable’.

Whatever the value of creativity, it seems quite clear that the upshot of this system is that at least the acquisition of higher qualifications would continue to be as strongly rooted as ever in social class, or what the Review recognises as a problem of ‘access’. In the educational world conceived by the Leitch Review, social class would now be even more strongly tied to the UK’s corporate hierarchy, which itself remains hardwired to some of the oldest forms of class-making.

* * *

This shift is likely to have many, and very serious implications for most if not all educational practices in the UK, but especially for adult education. History teaches us that there are very good reasons for ensuring that the provision of different forms and levels of education maintains a strong degree of autonomy from any particular government, and from any particular business. The point is not to deny that businesses ought to be able to provide some of their own skills training, or to have a say in the provision of state-run education; many routinely do, and have done, for centuries. The point is to question the need for a decisive shift in the balance of provision in favour of the interests of corporations, and their managers.

This point really comes to a head in the context of higher education. As is the case of so many other aspects of the Review, a casual reader might be forgiven for coming away with the sense that the Review has ‘something for everyone’, not least the academics of Britain’s many investment-starved universities. And indeed, in his foreword, Sandy Leitch speaks of an ‘excellent higher education system’ (p. 1) and the Review proposes to greatly increase the proportion of people who have higher qualifications. If the current proportion of people with skills at level 4 and higher is 29%, the Review proposes to increase this proportion to 40% by 2020 (p. 41). The Review also states repeatedly that increased investment is required in higher education.

A closer reading reveals that there is a sting in the tail of each of these proposals. On the one hand, the Review suggests that the costs of any increased investment in HE should be borne by ‘individuals and employers’ which it suggests stand to benefit most from the investment. This is tantamount to agreeing with New Labour’s strategy to divest the state of its obligations towards university students and higher education more generally.

On the other hand, the reference to employers providing the funding is also tantamount to ensuring that on this level too, businesses will have a far greater control over education. The following quotes more than confirm this suspicion:

‘Growth of this order [from 29 to 40%] is unlikely to be achievable by trying to expand further the current model of HE. There are limits in capacity, and also limits to how far the current model of HE can fully meet the expectations of the greater volume of employers and employees who would need to be attracted. Further improvements in the UK’s high skills base must come from workforce development, and increased employer engagement’.‘…the Review recommends a rebalancing of the priorities of HE institutions to make available relevant, flexible, and responsive provision that meets the high skills needs of employers and their staff’ (p. 68). Elsewhere, the Review echoes the New Labour government’s position that new growth in higher education ’should not be “more of the same“, based on traditional three year honours degrees. Rather, additional provision should be based on new types of programme offering specific, job-related skills such as Foundation degrees. The Review recommends that that this is the right basis for future HE expansion…’(p. 77).

A similar logic is applied to postgraduate education. ‘Postgraduate, or Level 5 Skills, such as MBAs and PhDs, can provide significant returns to organisations, individuals, and the economy as a whole. These higher level skills are key drivers of innovation, entrepreneurship, management, leadership, and research and development.’ ‘Level 5 Skills should also be an important feature of greater employer collaboration with HE, as recommended by Richard Lambert’s Review of Business-University Collaboration…’ (p. 68).

In one of many similar examples of purely rhetorical invocations of a need for ‘fairness’, the Review nonetheless notes that there is a growing social class divide in access to higher education, and urges universities and the Office of Fair Access to ‘improve access’ (p. 68). But such exhortations are in sharp contrast to the Review’s determination, as I mentioned earlier, to continue with New Labour’s strategy to shift the costs of higher education to students (or to businesses). As I will note below, this is one of several ways in which the private corporate sector is only too happy to either continue to ignore, or to let the state (via the universities) pick up the tab for the social costs of the growing class divide. On this level, as in its more general recommendations, the disjunction between the policy proposals with teeth, and the rhetorical calls for ‘fairness’ offer further evidence that the Review is a recipe for increasing class divides as a function of access to education.

It is also interesting to note finally that, unlike other aspects of the Review which are backed up, however flimsily, with research-based evidence, the Review’s criticisms of, and recommendations for higher education are based on no direct evidence whatsoever. The closest the Review comes to backing up its claims is a reference to another review commissioned by the Treasury (the Lambert Review), produced once again by another business executive (Richard Lambert). If Leitch is an insurance man who has, by his own account, devoted his life to work in the financial services industry, Lambert was formerly the editor of the Financial Times, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary council, and now the director general of the Confederation of Business Industries. Is the reader really expected to believe that Lambert and Leitch have the best interests of the nation in mind?

* * *

I will consider the precise educational and social implications of this approach to skills in higher education in the third and last post in this series. I want to conclude the present post by considering two contradictions in the Leitch Review, the first of which reminds us that economic laissez-fairism is never really just that: economic laissez-fairism, or indeed, economic laissez-fairism.

In proposals that remind the reader rather vividly of the current Northern Rock fiasco, the Review suggests that, aside from acting as a guarantor of the deregulation of educational provision, the state should act as a kind of safety net for what the Review describes as ‘market failures’.

‘Market failures’ involve four problems that are arguably an inherent aspect of the Review’s neoliberal approach to education: ‘short termist attitudes to investment in skills’; ‘credit market failure’, or individuals’ and firms’ inability to borrow the costs of training; ‘information failure’, the absence of accurate information about skills requirements, or a skewed distribution of such information; and ‘externalities’, the ‘social costs or benefits of decisions that are felt more broadly than just through returns to individuals or firms’(p. 59).

The admission of such ‘failures’, but also the vocabulary used to describe them, is richly ironic. Even as the architects of the Review reject ’supply driven’ approaches and even as they attempt to secure control over the educational process by way of skillism, they admit that ‘market failures’ might yet scupper their ‘best intentions’. This is almost, but not quite tantamount to admitting by way of a recourse to corporate welfarism that there is, after all, more to education than skills. The Review nonetheless employs a typically discursive turn in an effort to dissimulate the contradiction that emerges with this recognition. The turn involves the transformation of what might best be described as educational ‘internalities’ into skills ‘externalities’. What is an integral aspect of education—its social, cultural and inevitably political nature— is made to appear as some kind of external ‘factor’ that only impinges tangentially, or by mistake, on the acquisition of ’skills’. One of the advantages of this turn is that it allows the managers of corporations to attempt to control the educational process when it suits them, but also to hand back the control (and the concomitant social responsibility) to the state when things don’t quite work out.

The issue of control leads me to the second contradiction. As I noted earlier, the Review states very clearly that ‘No one can predict future demand for skills with certainty’ (p. 4). The discursive motivation for this statement can be found in the false opposition I mentioned earlier: the Review’s architects wish to undermine what they describe as the principle of ‘supply driven’ educational provision. Doing so nonetheless sets up a contradiction which informs every aspect of the Review. If no one can predict skills, then how can the architects of the Review produce a report that contains 154 pages of policy recommendations based on a veritable raft of predictions concerning the UK’s future skills requirements?

The answer is, of course, that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to try to plan and to predict educational needs, at least on some levels. In this sense, the Review constitutes its own best evidence that its fundamental opposition between the ‘supply driven’ and ‘demand led’ provision of skills is an utterly interested, if not a false one.

In Lord Leitch’s Levers Part 3: Skillism and ‘Knowledge Exchange’

Update January 21, 2007: Now even the head of Marks & Spencer is acknowledging a deepening class divide: see ‘Diamonds for rich inside M25; hard times for the rest. After M&S’s boss observed a huge economic divide in the UK comes a survey showing the rift between capital and country‘ in Guardian January 21, 2007.

For a recent critique of the way in which the UK’s funding councils have started to be controlled by the corporate sector, see George Monbiot’s ‘Captive Knowledge’ at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/

References

1) The Review was published in December 2006 by the UK’s Treasury. An online edition is available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/leitch_review/review_leitch_index.cfm. Accessed December 1, 2007.
2) My approach builds on what might be described as a Foucaultian approach to discourse analysis. For an introduction to such an approach, see S. Hall, (1992) ‘The west and the rest: discourse and power’, in S. Hall and B. Gieben (Eds.) Formations of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 275-323.
3) J. B. Thompson (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press.
4) Simon Jenkins, ‘Another fiasco, but Brown is forever a sucker for business’, in Guardian, November 28, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2218210,00.html, accessed December 1, 2007.