The Discourse of Commercialization: A Multi-perspectived Analysis (Palgrave Studies in Professional and Organizational Discource)

Palgrave Studies in Professional and Organizational Discourse Titles include: Christopher N. Candlin and Jonathan Crich...

Author: Jonathan Crichton

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Palgrave Studies in Professional and Organizational Discourse Titles include: Christopher N. Candlin and Jonathan Crichton (editors) DISCOURSES OF DEFICIT Jonathan Crichton THE DISCOURSE OF COMMERCIALIZATION A Multi-Perspectived Analysis Cecilia E. Ford WOMEN SPEAKING UP Getting and Using Turns in Workplace Meetings Sue Garton and Keith Richards (editors) PROFESSIONAL ENCOUNTERS IN TESOL Discourses of Teachers in Teaching Rick Iedema (editor) THE DISCOURSE OF HOSPITAL COMMUNICATION Tracing Complexities in Contemporary Health Care Organizations Louise Mullany GENDERED DISCOURSE IN THE PROFESSIONAL WORKPLACE Keith Richards LANGUAGE AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY Aspects of Collaborative Interaction H. E. Sales PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION IN ENGINEERING

Palgrave Studies in Professional and Organizational Discourse Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–50648–0 (hardback), 978–0–230–58012–1 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Also by Jonathan Crichton DISCOURSES OF DEFICIT (co-edited with Christopher N. Candlin)

The Discourse of Commercialization A Multi-Perspectived Analysis Jonathan Crichton University of South Australia, Australia

© Jonathan Crichton 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–57911–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crichton, Jonathan. The discourse of commercialization : a multi-perspectived analysis / Jonathan Crichton. p. cm. — (Palgrave studies in professional and organizational discourse) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–57911–8 1. Discourse analysis. 2. Commerce. I. Title. P302.C683 2010 401 .41—dc22 2010033958 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Veruschka

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Contents

List of Figures and Table

ix

Acknowledgements

x

1 Introduction Commercializing education The question of tension Discourse analysis and the researcher Cicourel’s challenge and Candlin’s proposal Outline of the book

1 4 10 12 15 17

2 Why a Multi-Perspectived Approach to Discourse? Connecting language, context and social theory Key features of the approach Developing the perspectives Design of the study Selecting and analysing data Summary of the study

20 20 29 33 42 45 48

3 Framing the Discourse of Commercialization Motivational relevancies and multiple memberships Three narratives Motivating themes Theoretical starting points Summary of the analyst’s perspective

49 49 50 58 59 67

4 Professional Practice As a Site of Struggle Analysing the diaries Relations between teachers, managers and students Evaluation and appraisal Implications for other practices Links to the social-theoretical resources Summary of the participants’ perspective

68 68 70 86 98 106 108

5 Constructing Communities of Consumption Analysing the brochures The construction of a community of consumption

109 109 113

vii

viii Contents

Interdiscursive relations: the brochures and the diaries Teaching, learning and other products and attractions The college as producer Students and readers as consumers Summary of the semiotic resource perspective

118 118 128 139 150

6 The Role of Macro-Actors in Professional Practice The discourse of commercialization and contemporary society Bourdieu’s critique Explaining meso- and micro-relations The influence of macro-actors Subordinating the social to the economic Summary of the social/institutional perspective

151

7 Understanding Practice and Informing Change Characterizing communities of consumption Broadening the field: comparable sites Issues of policy, practice and change

181 183 188 193

Appendix 1: Diary Coding System

196

Appendix 2: Brochure Coding System

198

References

202

Index

214

151 153 156 159 162 180

List of Figures and Table

Figures 2.1 2.2 4.1 5.1

Outline of the ontology Outline of the study Relations between teachers, managers and students Community of consumption

34 44 71 115

Table 4.1 The diarists

69

ix

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Chris Candlin for his encouragement and support through the production of the book and during the research on which it draws. Throughout this journey, his scholarship and insight have been crucial. I would also like to express my gratitude to Rob Barrett for his inspiration and friendship, and to Angela Scarino for her understanding and comments on drafts of the manuscript. Particular thanks also to Priyanka Gibbons and Melanie Blair at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience and sound advice, and to Priya Venkat for her meticulous editing. For data collection, I have many people to thank, but foremost among these are the teachers who participated in the study. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my wife, Veruschka, for her uncompromising support at every stage, and our children, Elise and Arthur. I also gratefully acknowledge permission from the ELICOS Association to quote from the newsletter in Chapter 6.

x

1 Introduction

The focus of this book is best introduced by one of the teachers in the study on which it is based. She wrote in her diary, ‘I wondered what course of action I should take and how I should teach – was I a good/bad teacher? What stance should I take? How should I be?’ The comment captures her inability to live up to her expectations of what it is to be a teacher. Her understanding of herself as a professional has been thwarted by competing obligations to meet the educational needs of her students and the commercial interests of her organization. These she cannot reconcile, and her sense of conflicted identity and powerlessness exemplifies within one person’s experience more wide-ranging concerns about the expansion of commercial values and interests over the last 30 years. This expansion has been associated with ‘neo-liberal’ policies pursued by governments around the world. Supported by discourses that have emphasized ‘small government’, ‘freedom’, ‘choice’ and the ‘discipline’ of market forces, these policies have acquired a political and moral authority beyond their origins in economic theory, to the point where neo-liberalism ‘has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world’ (Harvey, 2005, pp. 2–3). While the financial crises of the late 1990s and 2000s have brought sharply into focus critique of such policies, the dominant understanding of the world still has the market as its major premise. On a global scale the conduct of and relations between nations, organizations and individuals have been revised according to market models of promotion and competition. Between nations, economic development has become dominated by free-trade models which have emphasized the opening of markets to international competition and commercial interests as the drivers of social development and the 1

2

The Discourse of Commercialization

primary mechanisms for achieving public good. The privatization of public services in areas as diverse as energy, water, transport, prisons, social services, education, health and child care has been widespread, and commercial models of management have become the norm in such organizations. Language has been crucial to these changes. As du Gay and Salaman (1992, p. 622) observed at the beginning of the 1990s there can hardly be a school, hospital, social services department, university or college . . . that has not in some way become permeated by the language of enterprise . . . from the hospital to the railway station, from the classroom to the museum, the nation finds itself translated. ‘Patients’, ‘parents’, ‘passengers’ and ‘pupils’ are reimaged as ‘customers’. This is not only a matter of redescribing the identities and relationships available to people but of reconstituting them. It is in this sense that the book foregrounds language as ‘discourse’, understood as a means not only of talking and writing about but of ‘acting upon worlds’ (Candlin, 1997, p. iix). The book explores how the language through which people understand themselves and others has been transformed, how their relationships and the purposes of their interactions have thereby been reframed, and the fabric of the social world reworked according to commercial interests. Central to this transformation and a key theme of the book is what Fairclough (1992) has called the ‘colonization’ of social life by discourses associated with marketing and the production of goods and services, a process which has led to the reshaping of roles and relationships to serve these ends. In effect, the expansion of the commercial world has involved the emergence of new, normative ways of ‘being’ for those in and out of the workplace (Bourdieu, 1998, 1999). This book examines what it means for professionals oriented towards service provision to work within organizations that operate in this environment. It explores how commercial pressures permeate and transform professional practice, the tensions posed for practitioners by competing social and commercial interests, the compromises they face and how they struggle to reconcile these in the course of their work. These tensions are illustrated using data drawn from a study of how commercialization affects the professional practices of teachers who teach English to overseas students in privately operated organizations in Australia. This sector is a major player in export education and exemplifies the worldwide trend towards the commercialization of educational

Introduction 3

services. The findings of the study suggest both how and why linguistic and social processes are involved in advancing a ‘discourse of commercialization’ through which sales-oriented constructions of organizations become normative for the identities and relationships of those working within them. Within individuals the resulting tensions can be both ethically and existentially divisive: dilemmas which challenge their understanding of expertise and accountability, the presentation of self and the interpretation and treatment of others. These tensions play out in the interactions between people, in settings that include teaching and learning, assessment and evaluation, performance appraisal and professional development. On larger scales, these same tensions are manifested in competition between organizations, their relations with regulatory authorities, the influence of government policy and the pressures and opportunities presented by economic and cultural globalization. In advancing commercial interests over those of teaching and learning, the discourse of commercialization shapes the interlocking risks facing teachers, students and managers and their competing efforts to reduce them. The result is a ‘community of consumption’ in which, for example, teachers risk redundancy, managers risk failing to maintain the commercial competitiveness of the organizations and students expose themselves to financial risk by purchasing courses in order to realize their aspirations. The efforts by teachers, managers and students to minimize these risks, and thereby secure their own interests, drive the struggles between the three groups, in which managers exert their authority over teachers by holding them accountable for the provision of students’ learning; teachers seek to secure their employment by struggling to reconcile commercial demands with their understanding of professional practice and students exert their authority as consumers over teachers and managers to ensure that they receive the learning owed to them. The central argument of the book is that if we are to understand how such tensions affect people’s lives and the nature of their work, then in the interests of policy and practice we need to understand them as reproduced through the complex social and linguistic interrelationships that constitute organizational life. This involves acknowledging the discursive complexity of the organizational context in a way that is accountable to the people involved. The challenge here is to describe not only how tensions occur in particular cases but why; in other words, not only to describe but to explain, and in a way that reflects people’s experiences as they understand them. This is a matter not only of achieving

4


a shared understanding with participants but as Candlin (2002a, p. 5) has emphasized, it requires the researcher to (re)vitalize ‘what is necessarily an ecology’. The metaphor of ecology is important here because it foregrounds the different ways in which people are interdependent, in interacting both with their environments and, crucially, with each other in the relationships that connect and define them (Candlin, 2000). This book has had a long gestation. It draws largely on data gathered in the late 1990s. This was a time in which Australia was establishing itself as a world leader in the marketing of education internationally, and in which commercial pressures on the service sectors were becoming a de facto instrument of government policy. Internationally and across the political spectrum funding for public service providers was being reduced and emphasis placed on competition for funding along with approaches to management that drew on private sector models of product development, marketing, delivery and quality assurance. Originally motivated by my concern at the way English language teachers struggled to reconcile competing commercial and pedagogic interests, the tensions and themes evident at that time have since intensified across education and professional domains more generally, and the international education sector has come to exemplify globally focused, market-oriented organizations involved in the commercialization of service provision.

Commercializing education Concerns about the commercialization of education have focused on the potential for conflict between commercial and educational priorities, and on the implications of such conflict for educational quality and social justice outcomes (see, for example, Hill and Kumar, 2009; Kenway and Bullen, 2001; Stromquist, 2002). Marginson (2006a, p. 207) has succinctly identified the underlying issue: Competition among schools stymies the potential for system-wide policies designed to equalize opportunities. A world order shaped by competition asserts the fundamentalist interests of one nation against another and valorizes every reduction of the conditions of life in the name of ‘global competitiveness’. Competition in education shapes human nature to fit itself. The central concern here is that while competition is crucial to the operation of the commercial world it is ultimately antithetical to the

Introduction 5

field of education and the interests of students. The basis of this concern has been traced to a political context which Apple (1996, p. 23) has described as ‘conservative restoration’, according to which education is valued for its economic utility – reflected in an emphasis on national standards, measurable skills and training for work. This marks a vocational turn in which internationally an amazingly similar rhetoric has developed, one that first stresses the failures of schools and universities and then proceeds to reform them with more economic and utilitarian goals. (Grubb and Lazerson, 2006, p. 295) This transformation in education has occurred within the context of changes which have been said to characterize the contemporary world. Foremost among these is globalization, seen in growing international flows of trade, capital and people; the reduction of space and time as obstacles to action and the deepening interconnectedness of cultures, economies and communities (Held and McGrew, 2000). The significance of these trends has been the subject of a vast and expanding literature but in essence concerns have focused on globalization as a source of economic inequality and cultural domination. As Fischman (2009, pp. 1–2) has put it, first, globalization implies that political, economic, cultural and social actions are reaching a worldwide scale. Second, it suggests that this worldwide scale is being achieved through increasing homogenization of patterns of production, consumption and cultural understanding . . . among states, international corporations and societies. Further, worldwide homogenization is forcing local communities to compete not only in pure economic terms, but also politically and culturally by accommodating their social and cultural particularities to the demands of corporate-defined and standardized indicators of economic efficiency and success. Associated with globalization has been the emergence since the 1970s of neoliberal economic policies, based on principles of classical nineteenth-century economic theory (Antonio, 2007; Fusfeld, 2001) and characterized by ‘deregulation, privatisation and the withdrawal of the state from areas of social provision’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 3). Emphasizing values of self-reliance and ‘enterprise culture’ (Keat, 1991b), these policies have been particularly associated with the privatization of the

6


public sector, market deregulation and the rejection of policies based on Keynesian economics, a model of systematic intervention in the operations of the market adopted during the 1930s to counter market failures associated with the Great Depression (Quiggin, 1999). Opposed to this, the ‘neoliberal’ – or ‘neoclassical’ – economic model, first associated with the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, draws on a ‘free market’ economic model that originated in the work of Adam Smith in the nineteenth century and was subsequently developed by Hayek and Friedman. Notwithstanding growing critique and a resurgent interest in Keynesian economics since the financial crash of 2008/09 (see, for example, Posner, 2009; Smith, 2010), the neoliberal model still dominates. Underlying this model is the belief that ‘there is no need for government’ because ‘free, unfettered, “liberal” markets work perfectly’ (Stiglitz, 2002, p. 74). While this belief suggests an inevitable, market-driven process in which the role of the state is minimal, in reality the state takes a substantial role in maintaining the efficacy of neoliberal policies (Harvey, 2005; Olssen, 2004; Wrigley, 2009). Moreover, as Bourdieu (1998, p. 95) has observed, while appearing to be an economic theory neoliberalism has become ‘an immense political operation’ which has been used to justify ‘the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships’. A key argument in this process has been the need to maintain international competitiveness. This has provided a generation of politicians with both a convenient alibi, to explain their inaction or indifference to rising inequality and other social consequences of unfettered market forces, and an ideological weapon, to justify major restructuring of domestic political, economic, and social institutions in the guise of urgent and overdue modernization. (Lee and McBride, 2007, p. 1) These policies have created economic and political conditions that pressure public organizations to commercialize their operations and to promote the expansion of the private sector’s role in delivering services (Andrew et al., 2009; Sears, 2003). Internationally, commercial pressures have intensified as markets have become more globalized. In education, providers have increasingly turned to marketing internationally as a way to make up for reductions in government funding in a climate which Kenway et al. (1993, p. 2) have described as ‘dominated by enthusiasm for growth and for budget cuts’, in which ‘the public sector generally,

Introduction 7

and the public sector of education in particular, are negatively compared with the private/market sector’. The increase in the international marketing of education to shore up tuition revenues has coincided with increased demand for educational qualifications offered by the advanced economies. The result has been an ‘explosive growth of the market’ (Marginson, 2006b, p. 24) in which the supply and demand sides have fuelled each other’s expansion. Driving the international demand for education has been the need for individuals and countries to survive in an increasingly competitive world for, in order to compete, people from less-developed countries need to access the knowledge, skills and language used by the advanced economies, leading to an accelerating demand for education marketed by organizations in the dominant economies and languages, and in particular in English (Chew, 2009; Phillipson, 1992; Tollefson, 1991). Through its promotion of the transnational movement of students, fees, and educational products and services on a global scale, education has become both a primary means and a venue of economic globalization (Stromquist, 2002), a role reflected in the unprecedented and growing numbers of people who seek an education in countries with advanced economies and in the economic value of these students to the host countries. Indicative of this is the fact that international student mobility between OECD countries increased fourfold from 0.61 million worldwide in 1975 to 2.73 million in 2005, a trend that continues to accelerate. For example, in the tertiary sector between 2000 and 2007 international student enrolments worldwide increased by 50 per cent, with the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Australia accounting for 58 per cent of students. Of these, Australia had the highest number of international students as a percentage of total enrolments at around 17 per cent (OECD, 2007). At the same time, the global market in education has been consolidated through the development of systems that facilitate competition at all levels, seen, for example, in the prominence of rankings as measures of performance and stimuli to further competition (Torrance, 2006). In the university sector, global university rankings have cemented the notion of a world university competition or market capable of being arranged in a single ‘league table’ for comparative purposes and given a powerful impetus to intranational and international competitive pressures in the sector. (Marginson and van der Wende, 2007, p. 308)

8


Similarly, in the school sector, this trend towards ranking as an accelerant of economic competition has been seen in the use of international comparisons of students’ performance, most influentially through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) process, which McNamara (2010) has argued assesses students’ performance according to constructs that align closely with the goal of global economic competition promoted by PISA’s sponsor, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. At an organizational level, the pressure to privatize has been described by Giroux (1999, p. 141) as ‘the most powerful educational reform movement’ in which teaching has increasingly been reformulated to reflect market imperatives and the legitimate purposes of education have been translated into the language of the market. Reflecting on the profundity of these changes, Fischman (2009, p. 4) has observed that it is undeniable that neoliberalism as an educational discourse had been very influential, not only in changing school practices but also in defining the educational common sense, what can be thought or imagined about schools. The contemporary common sense of the restructured neoliberal global economy is that any society that wants to remain competitive needs to implement educational reforms emphasizing the development of a flexible, entrepreneurial teaching workforce (i.e., broadly educated, specifically trained and without tenure) and a teacher-proof, standards-based, market-oriented curriculum. For those involved in teaching, this foregrounding of market priorities raises the need to teach in a way that meets both pedagogic and commercial interests. That these will coincide cannot be taken for granted. For example, Brookfield (1995, p. 21) has pointed out that significant learning and critical thinking inevitably induce an ambivalent mix of feelings and emotions, in which anger and confusion are as prominent as pleasure and clarity. The most hallowed rule of business – that the customer is always right – is often pedagogically wrong. Equating good teaching with a widespread feeling among students that you have done what they wanted ignores the dynamics of teaching and prevents significant learning. For teachers, such conflicts exemplify what Fairclough (1992) has called ‘contradictory interpellation’. This is a situation in which people are

Introduction 9

pulled in opposing directions by the competing interests that shape the practices in which they are engaged. For example, when a student has purchased a course from an educational organization, the debt of satisfaction owed by the organization is then paid in part by the student’s teacher. This in turn calls for the teacher’s role to incorporate that of service-provider in a marketing chain, rendering the teacher, at least in part, accountable to the client for the product supplied. These obligations create a dual role, a ‘teacher/marketer’ who is required to exercise professional authority while simultaneously being the agent through whom the debt of satisfaction is to be honoured. As the need to exercise authority sits uneasily with the display of deference required to woo clients, the teacher may be left in a precarious position: obliged to address students’ pedagogic needs, but challenged in doing so because of the deference called for by the debt owed by the organization to the student qua client.

The English language teaching sector It is the effects of competing pedagogic and commercial pressures on teaching practices which are the focus of this book, specifically the practices of teachers employed in the private English language teaching sector in Australia. This sector is made up of commercially oriented organizations that provide a range of English language courses to feepaying students primarily from Asia and to a lesser extent from Europe and South America. I chose this setting for the study both because of my personal involvement in the sector and because it exemplified how education operates when it is geared to achieving commercial success in the highly competitive, global market for educational goods and services. My experience included 14 years in a range of organizations and positions: as a teacher, educational manager, member of the editorial board of the sector journal and on the panel of the national regulatory authority. Outside the sector, I had worked with textbook publishers and in international testing. It was these experiences which led to my perception that the sector’s marketing of language education, and its commercial orientation and global operations exemplify how the commercialization of education works more generally in the contemporary world. The history of the sector supports this view. Its emergence has paralleled the growth of international education at all levels, and the entry of Australian educational providers into global educational markets exemplifies and has reinforced the more general trend towards

10


the globalization of markets. Over the last 20 years, the perception of Australia as an attractive study destination for international students has been extensively developed by private and public sector organizations through a wide range of strategies, including marketing initiatives, cooperation with other sectors such as government and tourism, and the cultivation of international agent networks and links with overseas institutions and governments. In 2002 the value of the sector to the Australian economy was estimated to be $5 billion (Nelson, 2003). In the financial year 2008–09 this figure had risen to $17.2 billion, up from $14 billion in the previous financial year, making education Australia’s fourth highest value export after coal ($54.7 billion), iron ore ($34.2 billion) and gold ($17.5 billion) (Australian Education International, 2009). These trends are likely to continue as long as new markets are developed, economies and incomes grow in countries in the region, and as the provision of educational services in the countries from where students come is unable to keep up with increasing domestic demand. Within this environment, the private English language sector has emerged as a significant player in Australia’s export education sector. Since the opening of the first privately owned English language college in Australia in the late 1970s, the number of accredited provider organizations had increased from 86 in 1992 to 175 in 2002 (National ELT Accreditation Scheme, 2003). By 2009, the number of accredited providers had increased to 266 (Australian Education International, 2009). In 2008–09 it contributed around $1 billion (6.2 per cent) to the value of educational exports (Australian Education International, 2009). In contributing to the growth of Australian export education, the sector competes within the global market in English language teaching which is dominated by Britain and the United States and is associated with international markets in teacher training courses, educational publications, English language examinations and other products. In terms of the context and focus of the study, my knowledge of the sector led me to believe that, as a site of international, commercially oriented education, the English language teaching sector would provide ready examples of situations in which commercialization shapes professional practice.

The question of tension While the motivation for the book grew out of concerns I developed in my work, the focus reflects themes that have been identified as characteristic of contemporary society. The first, which I saw exemplified in the

Introduction 11

lives of teachers with whom I worked, reflects the insecurity and risk in social relations, and in social identity itself, which Giddens (1991) has called ‘risk culture’, in which established practices are mediated by the interests of the market and established forms of knowledge are continually monitored and evaluated according to standards that are beyond the control of those appraised. In the workplace, this culture is exemplified by reductions in employment security in the interests of ‘flexibility’ and the need for employees continually to prove themselves in commercial terms (Bourdieu, 1998). The linking of employment security to the exigencies of the market raises particular issues for those whose work involves a high degree of autonomy in interpreting and applying specialized knowledge and the status associated with it, characteristics that are defining of professional work (Gabe et al., 2004; Kemmis, 2005). The challenge arises because these changes can place pressure on those with a responsibility to maintain professional standards to compromise the integrity of their work in order to meet the demands of the market (Keat, 1991a). These pressures in turn raise the prospect of what Sarangi and Roberts (1999a, p. 10) have called ‘a form of growing deprofessionalisation’, in which ‘individualised speciality and expertise is undermined’. The second theme concerns the role of discourse in creating a social order that appears routine and natural. Understood in this way, discourse is both central to the maintenance of social order and hard to resist precisely because it is hidden in plain sight, taken for granted and therefore unnoticed, with the implication that people who stand to lose from social change are complicit in bringing it about (Fairclough, 1992). This theme was instantiated in my experience of relations between teachers, students and managers, in which interactions were shaped by their pedagogic and commercial interests and yet each group appeared unable to acknowledge this in interpreting the position of the other. At the time, this experience resonated strongly with work in critical discourse analysis that emphasized how people are positioned through their use of discourse in ways that serve the interests of dominant groups. In particular, Fairclough’s (1992) notion of ‘contradictory interpellation’ remained salient after I became a manager for, in escaping the pressures of the teacher’s role, the need to reconcile the competing discourses associated with commercial and educational interests reappeared as a tension between attending to commercial priorities and addressing teachers’ educational concerns. The third theme reflects how the transformation of established social practices, including those associated with education, is driven

12


by the emergence of new forms of macro-social order – exemplified by neoliberal economic policies and the globalization of markets (Bourdieu, 1998). My awareness of these micro–macro relationships emerged as I moved through different positions at different levels of the sector and my perspective thereby shifted from the micro-world of interactions within individual organizations towards a larger scale view of the social and economic structures and processes within which contemporary education is situated. Drawing these themes together, the research question was, ‘How does commercialization affect the professional practices of teachers who work in private English language colleges in Australia?’. By narrowing the investigation to the relationship between commercialization and these practices, the question focused the study on the potential for tension between them. From a discourse analytical perspective, this accords with Candlin’s (1987) proposal that discourse analysis concentrate its research focus on ‘interactional cruces’, and with Fairclough’s (1992) emphasis on ‘moments of crisis’. These are moments in which conflict between or within individuals disrupts normally routine interactions, thereby drawing attention to the social structures and processes which shape these interactions in usually unnoticed ways. Candlin (2001, pp. 3–4) has explained that the value of focusing research on these ‘moments where in one way or another people’s ideologies and beliefs are in some way “on the line” ’ is that they offer the potential to ‘tie discursively evidenced conflict to broader social issues . . . to provide an explanatory local context for interpreting the broader big “C” context’. Similarly Fairclough (1992, p. 230) has argued that conflict can reveal ‘the actual ways in which people deal with the problematization of practices’ and, in doing so, shed light on the social context beyond the immediate interaction because an instance of discourse may at the same time be part of a struggle within the particular interaction, within the organization(s) in which it occurs and within society more generally. The focus on how commercialization affects teachers, then, offered the potential to yield insights into links between their experience and the broader contexts of organizational and social change outlined above.

Discourse analysis and the researcher Discourse analysis is being increasingly used to investigate professional interaction in organizational settings (see, for example, BargielaChiappini et al., 2007; Candlin, 2002b; Holmes, 2006; Iedema, 2003,

Introduction 13

2007; Sarangi and Roberts, 1999b). In fact, as Candlin (2006, p. 21) has observed it has become something of a commonplace to assert that workplaces are in some sense held together by the communicative practices to which they give rise, or even, more boldly, that such communicative practices constitute the work of the workplaces themselves. These applications support Jaworski and Coupland’s (1999, p. 3) observation that discourse is ‘an inescapably important concept for understanding society and human responses to it, as well as for understanding language itself’. However, the researcher wanting to use discourse analysis is faced by a diverse range of views on what constitutes discourse and how best to investigate it. Indeed, there are now over 40 distinct approaches to analysing language which their practitioners identify as discourse analysis (Sarangi, 2009). Coupland et al. (2001, p. xiv) have called this profusion the ‘radical heterogeneity’ of discourse analysis; van Dijk (1995, p. 459) has described it as ‘the creative chaos of an exciting new discipline’; and Schiffrin (1994, p. 5) has written that discourse analysis ‘is widely regarded as one of the most vast, but also one of the least defined, areas in linguistics’. This diversity is compounded by the interdisciplinary origins of the term ‘discourse’. As Fairclough (1992, p. 3) noted, ‘discourse is a difficult concept, largely because there are so many conflicting and overlapping definitions formulated from various theoretical and disciplinary standpoints’. Contributing to this range of views is a lack of consensus on the answers to certain fundamental questions. These can be broadly divided into three types. The first might be called ontological questions. These concern how to conceptualize ‘discourse’. They include the question of how to understand the relationship between language and the settings in which it is used and how social theory can inform this understanding (Coupland, 2001; Hammersley, 2007; Sarangi and Candlin, 2001), and the related question of how to acknowledge the relationship between macro- and micro-social phenomena (Sarangi, 2001; Sealey and Carter, 2004). In different ways, these questions turn on the problem of how to account for context, a problem which ‘stands at the cutting edge of much contemporary research into the relationship between language, culture, and social organization, as well as into the study of how language is structured in the way that it is’ (Duranti and Goodwin, 1992a, p. 32). The second questions are methodological. They concern how to investigate discourse and include the question of how to acknowledge

14


the differing perspectives of the analyst and the research participants (Sarangi, 2007; Sarangi and Candlin, 2001), and how to identify features of context relevant to the analysis of language in a way that delimits in an accountable way contextual inclusions in the analysis (Candlin, 2006; Silverstein, 1992). A third type of question arises from a tendency to under-emphasize the relationship between ontology and methodology in what Jaworski and Coupland (1999, p. 37) have called ‘the rush to discourse’. Commenting on this tendency, Sarangi and Candlin (2004, pp. 101–102) have highlighted the need for researchers to bring methodological considerations to the fore: In the field of discourse studies (to include language, communication and interaction), it is not always easy to disentangle methodology from theoretical/conceptual content. This is mainly because discourse and communication analysis . . . is in itself a methodological act. This is turn occasions a shift towards being manifestly reflexive about one’s methodological tropes. This reflexivity has to include a commitment to transparency – a sort of ‘coming out’, metaphorically speaking. Questions to be addressed here include how prior social theory is to guide research into discourse while allowing the generation of new theory (Erickson, 2001; Linell, 2001; Sealey, 2007) and how constructs from social theory are to be used within the study of discourse (Meyer, 2001; Sarangi, 2001). A specific challenge for the researcher wanting to investigate professional discourse, and one that raises all three questions simultaneously, has been identified by Candlin (2006) as one of ‘authentication’. Citing wider concerns in the literature (see, for example, Grant and Iedema, 2005; Iedema, 2003; Putnam and Fairhurst, 2001; Reed, 2000), Candlin has raised the question of how discourse analytical studies can adequately reflect the nature of the organizational sites in which they are conducted, and – crucially – how this adequacy is to be warranted. As Candlin points out, the question leads straight to what Sarangi (2002, 2007) has called ‘the analyst’s paradox’. On the one hand, this is the problem of how the analyst can align her analysis with the perceptions of participants, reflecting the fact they are experts in their worlds, without transforming the analyst’s own perspective into that of a faux participant. On the other hand, if the analyst retains her own analytical assumptions and categories, she risks conducting an analysis that

Introduction 15

transforms the perspectives of participants and is irrelevant to their worlds. Sarangi (2007, p. 568) explains that this raises a set of interesting issues about the positioning of the analyst of professional-client encounters and the limit of their interpretive license. What kind of data sources are required to form the basis of informed interpretive practice? What relationships do obtain between the researcher and the researched? What are the safeguards against over-interpretation? How do analysts go about validating their interpretive practices in such settings? In designing the study, I was reluctant to take for granted the answers to these questions. Moreover, I was concerned to do justice to the experiences of those with whom I had worked and in doing so to acknowledge the complexity of the settings within which these experiences arose. These priorities led me to the ‘multi-perspectived’ approach to discourse analysis proposed by Candlin (1997, 2006) which takes as its starting point Cicourel’s (2007) notion of ‘ecological validity’.

Cicourel’s challenge and Candlin’s proposal Cicourel (1982, 1992, 1996, 2007) has used the term ‘ecological validity’ to call for a recognition of the usually unacknowledged ways in which research processes are shaped by the tacit understandings of researchers and participants. In the case of discourse analysis the need arises because any examples of discourse are inevitably linked to the settings in which they emerge, and this complexity is inseparable from the understandings and emotional lives and relationships of the people who work within these settings. The challenge this poses is to explain examples of discourse not as if they have ‘lives of their own’ (Cicourel, 2007, p. 736) but as part of the understandings and activities of daily life that are set within more complex organizational contexts. This requirement is captured in Cicourel’s (1992, p. 294) observation that language and other practices are interdependent. Knowing something about the ethnographic setting, the perception of and characteristics attributed to others, and broader and local social organisational conditions becomes imperative for an understanding of linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of communicative events.

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To explain how people’s understandings and the activities they inform in one context are connected with others, Cicourel (1992) developed the notion of ‘interpenetrating contexts’. He emphasized that ‘context’ in this sense is multiple, made up of ‘local and more abstract senses of culture or social organization’ involving ‘multiple ethnographic and/or organization settings and informants’ (1992, p. 305). These types and layers of context may be interrelated in numerous ways: they ‘interpenetrate’ each other, because ‘all social interaction and/or speech events presuppose and are informed by analogous prior forms of socially organized experiences’ (1992, p. 308). This includes the practices associated with discourse analysis, which are themselves situated within these interpenetrating contexts. This means that the analyst is accountable for reflecting in methodology the interpenetration of contexts in a way which does not hide his or her sources of information and research choices but makes them into a common resource to be shared with the readers in an attempt to unveil the hidden processes of the selection of information which guides participants and analysts alike in the course of their daily lives. (Duranti and Goodwin, 1992b, p. 292) The implication is that meeting the need for ecological validity in particular organizational contexts requires the researcher to acknowledge: (1) that such contexts are always interrelated with others in mutually consequential ways; (2) that they are subject in vivo to the interpretations and purposes of participants; (3) that researchers are also participants in such contexts and (4) that researchers are therefore accountable for how they themselves are situated within the multiple contexts that may be salient to the research. The force of Cicourel’s challenge and its implications for discourse analysis have been identified by Candlin (1997, 2006). He has argued that it calls for a ‘multi-perspectived approach’ which, focusing on ‘critical moments . . . where discursive (in)competence is at a premium’ (1997, p. xiv) for participants, would draw together analytical perspectives focusing on the description of language and other semiotic resources, the interpretation of these in interaction, accounts of participants’ own understandings of what is going on and social-theoretical studies of institutions and larger scale social structures and processes, to offer ‘explanations of why rather than merely descriptions of how’ (1997, p. xii). This is not only a matter of using different methods of analysis.

Introduction 17

The perspectives employed will inevitably draw on different research traditions, each associated with different methodologies, and different interests in and assumptions about the social world and associated ways of representing it. Each will therefore be associated with distinct discourses that will need to be brought together and kept in play in a process of analysis which involves attending to and exploring the interplay between them. At the same time the analysis will need to take into account the distinct perspectives of the participants, including the researcher, and the researcher’s emergent understanding of the world as it is experienced by participants. In other words, the approach envisaged is reflexive and requires ‘a parallel and complex interdiscursivity of analysis’ (1997, p. xii) which takes as a priority the need to acknowledge the ‘dynamic hybridity’ (2006) of the social world. In framing the approach, Candlin cautions that the issue then immediately arises of how to capture these distinct methodological discourses in a workable program of research, not merely harmonising the different discourses but actively making use of their distinct epistemologies and modes of practice to enrich and expand a grounded analysis. (1997, p. xii) In exploring how discourse is implicated in the commercialization of teaching practice, the following chapters can be seen as a working out of this approach.

Outline of the book Chapter 2 provides an elaboration of the multi-perspectived approach. This involves identifying and addressing the theoretical and methodological requirements of Cicourel’s call for ecological validity, requirements that bring to the fore questions of how language and context are to be understood, how macro- and micro-social theory are to be acknowledged, and how the understandings of participants and researchers are to be mutually referenced. In building on Candlin’s proposal I draw in particular on Fairclough’s (1992) account of interdiscursivity, the multistrategy approach to social research proposed by Layder (1993), Sarangi’s (2007) account of the ‘analyst’s paradox’, Sarangi and Candlin’s (2001) notion of ‘motivational relevancies’, and Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) ‘practical relevance’. The chapter explains how the resulting approach integrates research traditions focusing on

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five ‘perspectives’ – that of the analyst, participants, semiotic resources, interaction and the social/institutional context – and how this approach informed the design of the study on which the book draws. The following chapters each foreground a different perspective and explain how it was realized within the study and contributed to the findings. In this way the account of the discourse of commercialization is progressively developed through the book. Chapter 3 explains my perspective as the researcher with a view to clarifying and warranting the interpretive resources that I brought to the study. In doing so, I provide a preliminary theoretical framing of the central themes of the book, linking these to, among others, Fairclough (1996) on the strategic uses of discourse, Bourdieu (1977, 1986, 1991) and his theory of practice, and Gramsci (1988) on the interplay between consent and coercion in social control. Supporting data are drawn from narratives representing my experience of working in a range of positions in the English language teaching sector. Referenced initially to these experiences, the account of the discourse of commercialization is developed through the remaining chapters of the book in response to the different perspectives they represent. Chapter 4 extends the account through the experiences of teachers who participated in the study, drawing on a thematic analysis of diaries in which they recounted experiences that they believed compromised their ability to carry out their professional role. Exemplified with data illustrating the themes identified in the analysis, the findings show how teachers’ lives are shaped by a three-way struggle between managers, teachers and students over the control and definition of teaching and learning. Central to this struggle are the different ways, formal and informal, tacit and explicit, by which each group evaluates and appraises the others. At stake for teachers is the definition of what it is to be a teacher and what this implies for their professional role. Drawing on and developing the theoretical framing, the chapter charts the personal and professional significance of the patterns that characterize the teachers’ experience. Chapter 5 expands the focus beyond the organization as it is experienced by teachers to consider how these organizations are constructed in their promotional brochures, which are semiotic resources designed to attract people to become students. Drawing in particular on insights into the sociology of advertising provided by Leiss et al. (1997, 2005) and on systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1985; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), the analysis shows how the promotion of education as a product involves the reworking of identities and

Introduction 19

relationships between teachers, managers and students into a ‘community of consumption’. Moreover, a comparison between the world of teaching and learning as it is experienced by teachers and as it is constructed in the brochures reveals the operation of what I have called the ‘discourse of commercialization’. This is seen to advance and regulate an institutional order in which the constructions of teaching and learning in the brochures permeate and compromise, or ‘colonize’ in Fairclough’s (1992) terms, the professional lives of teachers. In Chapter 6 the emphasis shifts to explaining the discourse of commercialization in relation to major themes in contemporary life and the macro-actors who shape the economic and social environment in which such organizations operate. Exemplifying data is drawn from a sector newsletter, industry regulations, relevant legislation, and international teacher training materials. Drawing largely on Bourdieu’s (1984, 1998) critique of contemporary society, I suggest that the discourse of commercialization is a manifestation of much broader trends towards the subordination of social to economic values and interests. Against this backdrop, the links to Bourdieu’s work include an account of neoliberalism, globalization and consumer culture, their consequences for the world of work, and an explanation of how these consequences are produced and reproduced. Chapter 7 draws together the account of the discourse of commercialization and the communities of consumption that it constructs and considers their relevance to education and professional domains more generally. The book concludes with a reflection on the implications of the findings and of the multi-perspectived approach to discourse for understanding practice and informing change.

2 Why a Multi-Perspectived Approach to Discourse?

Connecting language, context and social theory Candlin’s multi-perspectived approach foreshadows the integration of research traditions associated with the study of language, interaction, the perceptions of participants and analysts, and the ‘broader and local organisational conditions’ (Cicourel, 1992, p. 294), which together make up the complex construct that Cicourel’s challenge requires. However, integrating these analytical perspectives raises the more general problem of how to explain the relationship between language and context. The problem is that the context in which language is used is always potentially vast and undifferentiated. The danger is that once context is included in the analysis of language, the analysis will become unaccountable. To explain why context has been a persistent problem in discourse analysis, Duranti and Goodwin (1992a) have used the notions of ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. By ‘figure’ they mean whatever phenomenon is chosen as the focus of attention; the ‘ground’ is what is left over. Their point is that the very act of attending to one phenomenon marginalizes others, making them seem, in Brown and Yule’s (1983, p. 50) phrase, a ‘lumpen mass’. Historically this has been the relationship between language and context in discourse analysis: language has been treated as the ‘figure’ or ‘focal event’ and context has thereby been cast as the background to language, raising the risk that the analyst will have no principled way of acknowledging the non-linguistic features of context. While this problem highlights the need to keep both language and context ‘in play’ during analysis and to ensure that neither is marginalized, it also raises the questions of where to focus the analysis, what is to count as context and what basis the analyst has for addressing these questions. Without 20

Why a Multi-Perspectived Approach to Discourse?

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some answer to these questions, the analyst is left with nowhere to start the analysis, unless this be in the ad hoc way prefigured by Brown and Yule. Following Candlin (2006) and Sarangi (2007), the answer depends at a minimum on acknowledging the macro-micro problem and the reflexivity of the research process, the focus of the next two sections.

The macro-micro problem in discourse analysis In seeking to explain how language is used in particular contexts of interaction we inevitably make assumptions about the relevance of and relationship between the macro-scale of social organization and processes associated with society at large and the micro-scale of interactions that is our focus (Candlin, 2006). In this sense social theory is not optional in research which seeks to make claims about the place of language in the social world. This exacerbates a dilemma identified by Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin (2001). On the one hand, a strength of discourse analysis is its close attention to language use in particular settings. On the other hand, to ignore social theory is likely to weaken the design and explanatory power of discourse analysis. The challenge this presents for the researcher is how to account for the relationship between macro- and micro-phenomena, which has been described by numerous commentators as the central problem in social theory (Alexander et al., 1987; Coulter, 2001; Dawe, 1971; Mouzelis, 1995, 2008). In a classic paper, Dawe (1971) explained that underlying the macromicro problem is the question of how to solve the ‘problem of order’. This is the problem of explaining why society is overwhelmingly orderly. In sociology, there have been broadly two responses to this question. One has emphasized macro-phenomena, maintaining that order arises because individuals are constrained to act in orderly ways by stable, large-scale social structures and systems, such as class. This response has dominated social theory, and given rise to numerous variations – in all of which ‘the actor is still on the receiving end of the system’ (Dawe, 1971, p. 544). These variations have led to social theory that casts the individual as regulated or constituted by the social system. Examples of this tendency to view individuals and their actions as derived from social systems include the work of Marx and Parsons. These macro-oriented views are opposed to the parallel movement in sociology which reverses the explanation of social order, maintaining that stable social structures and systems result from the concerted actions of individuals. Like the macro-response, the micro-social

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response has emerged in numerous forms. These include what Coupland has called ‘rational action and praxis perspectives’ (2001, p. 10). The former assumes that people’s actions result from strategic decision making, and includes symbolic interactionism; the latter views social action as less predictable and more emergent, and includes ethnomethodology. From these micro-social perspectives, ‘social order is not that which holds society together by somehow controlling individual wills, but that which comes about in the mundane but relentless transactions of these wills’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1981, p. 7). Dawe (1971) called the macro-response the ‘social system’ explanation of the macro-micro problem and the micro-response the ‘social action’ explanation, arguing that the two positions are in conflict ‘at every level’ (1971, p. 551), and that sociology itself has developed in response to this conflict, which fails to account for macro- and microsocial phenomena by excluding one or the other. On the other hand, attempts to synthesize these positions will, he maintained, inevitably subordinate or reduce social action to the system or the social system to action. On this view, the underlying problem is that macro- and microresponses, and attempts at synthesizing them, are typically geared to solving the problem of order by locating the source of social control: what Dawe (1971, p. 548) called ‘the problem of control’. He argued that it is this casting of the problem of order in terms of control that has polarized social-theoretical accounts of the macro and micro relationship because one or the other can be the source of social control but not both. He suggested that this problem is embedded in the history and language of social theory, and that the way out of the impasse is to recognize that there may be multiple ways in which social order can arise, not just as the result of a controlling relationship between macroand micro-phenomena. These conflicting orientations, while not necessarily stated, have been evident in discourse analysis as well as social theory. A metaphor to describe the problem this creates might be that of a ‘hierarchic mechanism’. Within this metaphor, analytical perspectives that emphasis language, interaction, participants’ perceptions and the broader social context intermesh rather like driver and slave cogs in a gearbox. Depending on the researcher’s orientation to the macro-micro problem, one perspective may drive the others, and one or more may be partially or fully disengaged from the system. The point is that at least one perspective drives the relationships between them, but not all can. The risk is that some perspectives will be a priori subordinated, underdeveloped


23

or excluded. Two illustrations of this problem are found in critical discourse analysis (CDA) and conversational analysis (CA). Fairclough’s (1989, 1992) framework for CDA is arguably still the most comprehensive and influential attempt to integrate macro- and microphenomena in discourse analysis. The ‘critical’ agenda implies an emancipatory interest in discourse analysis as a way of ‘showing connections and causes which are hidden; it also implies intervention, for example providing resources for those who may be disadvantaged through change’ (Fairclough, 1992, p. 9). In terms of the relationship between language and context, Fairclough’s framework links macro- and microphenomena through the operations of power and ideology. In doing so it emphasizes how the use of language in social interaction constructs participants’ identities and relationships. The framework focuses particularly on how the power and ideologies of dominant social groups create and perpetuate social inequalities by constructing identities and relationships that advance the interests of these dominant groups and marginalize those of others. A number of commentators (see, for example, Hammersley, 1997; Widdowson, 2000) have argued that the framework leaves little or no room for the perspectives of individual social actors by casting their actions as determined by macro-relations of power and ideology. For example, macro-level power and ideology remain dominant in determining what ‘members’ resources’ (Fairclough, 1989) are available to people and, consequently, how they produce and interpret discourse. This is an instance of the macro-micro problem in which the influence of macro-features of context on micro is explained, but at the cost of leaving the micro without space to influence the macro. In this case, the problem results from the Marxist legacy of CDA (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997). The problem surfaces in the ontological aspect of the framework in the way individual action is a priori subordinated to macro-social structures and processes, and consequently, in relation to methodology, the social-theoretical assumptions which underpin constructs such as ‘power’ and ‘ideology’ drive the analysis of data representing micro-social phenomena. It is concerns such as these which have been the focus of moves to review and clarify the ontological and methodological bases of CDA (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Meyer, 2001; Wodak and Chilton, 2005). These moves are part of a ‘general debate about the whole enterprise of CDA’, central to which are the questions of ‘to which theories . . . the different methods refer’ and of how to ‘operationalise

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theoretical concepts’ in order to ‘translate . . . theoretical claims into instruments and methods of analysis’ (Meyer, 2001, pp. 17–18). The use of prior theory to guide analysis has placed CDA in opposition to approaches to discourse, such as CA (Sacks, 1992; Sacks et al., 1974), that seek to separate data analysis from the analyst’s beliefs about the nature of the social world as a whole. CA explores how participants display to each other in language their ongoing understanding of what is going on at the same time as they interpret the relevant understandings of others. In doing so, participants attend to the context in which talk occurs. ‘Context’ here includes the sequential organization of talk, which is the focus of analysis in CA. In explaining the significance of context to CA, Schegloff (1992, p. 197) has observed that the search for context properly begins with the talk or other conduct being analyzed. That talk or conduct, or what immediately surrounds it, may be understood as displaying which out of that potential infinity of contexts and identities should be treated as relevant and consequential (both by co-participants and by professional analysts). Schegloff is emphasizing here that for CA the organization of talk provides the only reliable reference point for decisions on what other aspects of context may be relevant to the analysis of talk. However, again reflecting the macro-micro issue, CA’s orientation to language and context has been noted to focus on language to the exclusion of potentially relevant features of context. For example, Cicourel (1981, p. 55) has observed that while researchers interested in ‘complex group or organisational structures . . . would not deny the relevance of many of the patterns found in conversational analysis . . . there are questions about the limits of such findings when larger socio-cultural contexts are included’. In a similar vein, Lynch and Sharrock (2003, p. xxxix) have observed that although the sequential organization of talk is important for understanding social practice, ‘it is not enough to say that, for example, a jury deliberation or a medical diagnosis is an “organisation of talk” ’. And Fairclough (1992, p. 20) has argued that CA displays ‘an underdeveloped social orientation’, providing an account of context which is too narrow to allow an explanation of how language use is linked to wider social and institutional contexts. The important point for the development of the multi-perspectived approach is that these critiques of CDA and CA that focus on the language–context relationship underscore the broader challenge of accounting for the nature of and relationship between social-theoretical


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assumptions and methodology in discourse analysis and in social research more generally. The issue here is whether it is ‘possible to perform any research free of a priori judgements and . . . to gain insight from purely empirical data without using any preframed categories of experience’ (Meyer, 2001, p. 17). From a social research perspective, Layder (1993) has identified this concern as a tension between the need to draw on prior theory in guiding research and to develop new theory that may conflict with prior theory. Two dangers are posed by this tension. On the one hand, if prior theory dominates the research, there is the danger that ‘knowledge cannot progress since the data of research is always interpreted as reinforcing or verifying the existing perspective of the researcher’ (Layder, 1993, p. 53). On the other hand, without this perspective, there is no starting point for research because, as Cicourel (1992) has shown, any such point of departure is inevitably informed by the explicit or tacit assumptions and decisions of the researcher. These considerations highlight the problem of how to integrate the different analytical perspectives within an account of the macro–micro relationship that does not subordinate or exclude any of the perspectives. As Cicourel (1981, p. 56) observes, ‘the challenge is to sustain one level while demonstrating that the other is an integral part of the discussion of the findings and the theoretical propositions advanced’. This implies an approach which does not assume in advance particular relationships between analytical perspectives, but which can be guided by and linked to social theory in accordance with the analyst’s prior knowledge and emergent understanding of the social setting under scrutiny. Rather than a ‘hierarchic mechanism’, this suggests a more fluid relationship in which the different perspectives have the potential to combine, draw on and contribute to each other in ways which can be informed by the emergent understanding of the researcher, and which leaves open to discovery how the perspectives interrelate in particular settings by keeping them continuously ‘in play’. To summarize, then, the chief ontological requirement for the multi-perspectived approach is that it explains how the perspectives are potentially interconnected within an account of the macro–micro relationship which does not, a priori, subordinate or exclude any of the perspectives.

Acknowledging the reflexivity of the research process This section focuses on methodology, which refers to what Silverman (1993, p. 2) has described as ‘a general approach to studying a research topic’, which ‘establishes how one will go about studying any

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phenomena’, is informed by ‘theories’ regarding the nature of the social world, and has implications for the ‘specific research techniques’ – or “methods” – appropriate to investigating it’. Methodology in this sense is closely related to the open-ended ontology envisaged for the multiperspectived approach; a relationship which draws into focus the question of how to reconcile the influence on the research process of the analyst’s ontological assumptions with the need for this process to allow the discovery of phenomena which may dispute these assumptions. Accounting for the relationship between ontology and methodology is a key requirement of Cicourel’s (1992) call for accountability, which, as explained above, implies that the analyst both acknowledges that discourse analysis and its data are situated within ‘interpenetrating contexts’ and has an explicit warrant to support the quality of such situated research. To meet this requirement, three related questions need to be addressed: • What are the perspectives and how are they related to each other? • How can the analyst go about investigating them in particular cases? • What is the analyst’s relationship to the perspectives and to their investigation? The first question raises the problem of explaining the features and relationships involved in the language/context nexus. The second raises what, paraphrasing Brown and Yule (1983), might be called the problem of relevance. This concerns how to establish which of the potentially infinite relations between the features of language, interaction, the broader social/institutional context and participants’ perceptions are salient to the investigation of discourse in particular settings. The answers to the first and second questions are related. On the one hand, ontological assumptions will influence which data count as relevant to the analysis of discourse, and therefore which methodologies are used to investigate it. For example, the linguistic investigation of texts will be methodologically different from the investigation of interaction and participants’ perspectives. On the other hand, the use of different methodologies raises the question of how to ground the analysis of discourse in data representing each of the perspectives, and how to combine these analyses in a coherent account of the discourse under scrutiny. These methodological decisions will in turn affect how the data analysis impacts on the ontology – whether, for example, this is a matter of developing, confirming or qualifying the ontological assumptions of the researcher.


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Recently these questions have been underscored in the context of professional discourse studies by Sarangi (2007) in his discussion of the ‘analyst’s paradox’. Here he argues that the problem of warranting the analyst’s interpretations of data is particularly pressing when the analysis involves the work of professionals, whose ‘conduct, by definition, is complex, which defies disciplinary pigeon-holing, let alone different analytical frameworks within a given discipline claiming a privileged interpretive status’ (p. 570). The need to warrant the analyst’s interpretation in a way that is mutually relevant to participants and in doing so to establish the limits of the analyst’s ‘interpretive license’ requires, he argues, a reciprocal, collaborative approach to the research at all points. Similarly, Hak (1999) has shifted the focus to the resources available to researchers. He has argued that the methodological resources available to researchers create a ‘methodological imperative’ that prestructures the problems they can identify and the questions they can ask, which has led in discourse analysis to a bias towards the investigation of recordable language, isolating this kind of language from other forms of meaningful social action and defining it in opposition to the non-linguistic context. Further highlighting the interdependence of ontology and methodology, Scollon (2001; Scollon and Scollon, 2007) has argued that assumptions about the pre-eminence of text have led discourse analytical studies to underemphasize the importance of social action. Rather than taking text as the methodological starting point, he has proposed a focus on ‘mediated action’. By this he means the actions through which people participate in and contribute to the social world, which may or may not involve text but will always be accomplished through some culturally salient means. What these means are in particular cases cannot, Scollon argues, be assumed in advance but should be open to discovery. These interdependencies of ontology and methodology make clear that the challenge of developing an ontology of discourse is mirrored in the challenge of developing a methodology with which to investigate it. Moreover, by drawing attention to the influence of the analyst’s decisions and assumptions on methodology, Cicourel, Hak and Sarangi raise the third question: that of how the analyst is situated in relation to the context studied. On this point, Sarangi and Candlin (2001, p. 351) have observed that ‘theory and method are intricately intertwined’ because decisions taken by the analyst are as much situated within the social context as those of the social participants being studied. In order to meet Cicourel’s challenge, they have argued, discourse analysts should make explicit their ‘motivational relevancies’. These are

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the ways in which the analyst’s interests, values and knowledge shape their ontological assumptions and methodological decisions. This information is important because it reveals the relationship between the analyst’s perspective and that of the participants, a relationship which, they argue, determines whose perspective on data the analysis reveals: namely, that of the participants aligned with, or transformed by, the analyst’s perspective or some combination of the two. The challenge of reconciling this distinction between participants’ and analysts’ perspectives is, they (2001, p. 379) have observed, ‘the main methodological problematic that pervades both social theoretical and sociolinguistic studies of social life’. Through the notion of motivational relevancies, Sarangi and Candlin draw both ontological and methodological questions into the relationship between the analyst and participants. At the most general level, motivational relevancies include assumptions about the nature of social reality itself. As noted above, these ontological decisions in turn affect and are affected by methodological decisions on the appropriate focus of research and methods for investigating it. On the methodological side, motivational relevancies include questions which influence how the ‘quality’ of research is to be understood, as foreshadowed by Cicourel’s (1992) call for accountability. These questions, Sarangi and Candlin argue, include the analyst’s stance on what to investigate in doing discourse analysis; whether this involves searching for particular phenomena or leaving the research design open to discovery; the role of description and explanation in researching discourse; and how the analyst values specific research methods. They (2001, p. 383) conclude that in order to make explicit these decisions, ‘there is the need for . . . a reflexive alignment of our accounting practices’ which would require that ‘one critically reflect on one’s own practices’. This need for a reflexive understanding of the relationship between the analyst, research practices and participants is also taken up by Sarangi and Roberts (1999a), who have argued that the analyst is inevitably situated within the broader social context and therefore has a responsibility to pursue research ‘integrated’ both with theory development and with advancing participants’ needs. They call the latter ‘practical relevance’, and recommend that, as the kind of social change analysts pursue will reflect their orientations to social theory, ‘practical relevance and theoretical illuminations should resonate together’. This requires that the process of research and the relationship between the participants and the researcher become a ‘topic of reflexive scrutiny’ (1999a, p. 39) for the researcher.


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With their emphases on how the analyst is reflexively situated within the research process and in relation to the participants, motivational relevancies and practical relevance provide a starting point for developing a multi-perspectived approach that meets Cicourel’s requirement that researchers acknowledge that they, along with their research practices, are themselves socially situated. Requirements for the approach To summarize, then, the challenge is to integrate the ontology and methodology in an approach that addresses 1. how the perspectives are potentially interconnected in an account of the macro–micro relationship that does not, a priori, subordinate or exclude any of the perspectives; 2. how motivational relevancies and practical relevance inform the analyst’s perspective, and thereby position the analyst in relation to the participants; and 3. what theoretical and methodological orientations to draw on in operationalizing the different perspectives.

Key features of the approach Discursive practices, interdiscursivity and the archive In addressing the first requirement, my starting point was Fairclough’s (1992) explanation of ‘discursive practice’ and ‘interdiscursivity’, a focus that reflects Candlin’s (1997, 2006) point that meeting Cicourel’s challenge would require the acknowledgment of interdiscursive relations as constitutive both of the world of participants and of the research process. Interdiscursivity is a part of Fairclough’s (1989, 1992, 2003, 2010) broader explanation of discourse as central to the order of the social world and at the same time a window on that world which can yield insights into how macro-social change operates in peoples’ everyday lives. According to Fairclough (1992) any instance of language use is a ‘discursive event’, which is simultaneously an instance of text, discursive practice and social practice. The ‘text’ is the sample of written or spoken language; ‘discursive practice’ describes the text as it enters into social interaction, and ‘social practice’ focuses on the social origins and consequences of the discursive event and on how it shapes and

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is shaped by larger scale processes such as those associated with particular organizations and institutions. These three dimensions are not discrete – as if texts lead three separate but concurrent lives. Rather, the three-dimensional account of discourse points to the fact that discursive events are instances of socially situated text, embedded in and constitutive of social practice. A key part of this account of discourse is the complex interrelationships between discursive practices that Fairclough (1992, 1999) has described in his account of ‘intertextuality’, which, drawing on the work of Bakhtin (1986) and Kristeva (1986), emphasized the ways that texts draw on earlier texts and are in turn drawn upon in later texts. Fairclough has argued that the value of these transformations is that they reflect and thereby reveal the particular social conditions in which they arise and can therefore provide a sensitive measure of social change. In one sense, intertextuality refers to the relations that arise between discursive events at the level of text, such as where one text is quoted or in some other way included or mixed within another. However, the form of intertextuality which Fairclough (1992) has called ‘interdiscursivity’ refers to the ways in which discursive practices draw on and enter into larger scale ‘orders of discourse’, a phrase he has adapted from Foucault (1981) to describe the ‘totality of discursive practices within an institution or society, and the relationships between them’ (1992, p. 43). It is this notion of interdiscursivity which he uses to explain how orders of discourse can be ‘colonized’ by other orders of discourse, a process which is central to his account of social change. In this process, types of discourse that advance the interests of dominant groups in society permeate those associated with less powerful groups, positioning their members in ways which advantage the dominant groups. This form of social control is particularly effective because the constructions it advances through discursive practices are usually unnoticed, being naturalized or coming to be viewed as common sense, and are therefore hard to resist. While interdiscursivity and colonization model the relationships between discursive practices, Fairclough (1992, p. 227) has adapted the term ‘archive’ from Foucault (1989) to refer to ‘the totality of discursive practices . . . that falls within the domain of the research project’, a usage which emphasizes that all data are discursive, and therefore – in Fairclough’s terms – potentially interdiscursively related. In combination, these three notions – discursive practice, interdiscursivity and the archive – offer a response to Cicourel’s call for ecological validity. Like Cicourel’s notion, interdiscursivity refers


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to how communicative contexts – in Fairclough’s case, discursive practices – draw on and enter into each other, and how these interrelations shape and are shaped by other contexts. Combined with the archive, interdiscursivity emphasizes, as Cicourel has done, that all data are socially situated and therefore potentially interpenetrating. Both Cicourel and Fairclough have emphasized that these relations are central to understanding discourse and that in investigating discourse the analyst is implicated in multiple contexts along with the participants. For Fairclough (1997) this implication is an unavoidable consequence of his account of intertextuality because the intertextuality of a text is open-ended – we cannot claim to exhaust all possible links between a text and other texts, or genres and discourses, and making these links is manifestly interpretive because it depends on our sociocultural positioning and knowledge. (1997, p. 10) Although the multi-perspectived approach developed here draws on these features of Fairclough’s framework, it does not include the framework as a whole. This is because, as discussed above, his orientation to the macro-micro problem tends to marginalize the perceptions of participants. For the ontology developed here, then, the question arises as to how to situate discursive practices, interdiscursivity and the archive within an account of the macro–micro relationship which does not, a priori, subordinate or exclude other perspectives. A research map In responding to this question, I drew on Layder’s (1993) ‘multistrategy’ approach to social research. In this and other writings (1997, 1998, 2005), he has argued for the inclusion of both macro- and microorientations in social research without subordinating either. In developing this position he (1993, p. 72) has provided a ‘research map’ which divides macro- and micro-phenomena into four elements: context, setting, situated activity and self. ‘Context’ refers to large-scale social phenomena; and ‘situated activity’ and ‘self’ refer to the micro-level. To these he adds the ‘setting’ which comprises the institutions in which situated activities occur. The map also includes the history and power relations associated with each of the elements. They are all stretched over time, but the timescale for each is different. For example, daily routines, a person’s lifespan and the duration of institutions typically involve different lengths of time and different degrees of continuity.

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Similarly, he has stressed that power and control will operate in each of the four elements but may operate differently in each one. The map does not presuppose particular relationships between the elements, their histories and the operations of social phenomena such as power. In other words, it does not reflect a particular social orientation but is open to potential relationships between social phenomena. It leaves open for discovery the question of how macro- and micro-phenomena, and history and power, are interrelated in particular settings. Summarizing his position, Layder (1993, pp. 102–103) has explained that although I have presented the resource map as a set of separable elements with their own properties, I have also continually stressed their interconnected nature in relation to the analysis of specific research problems. In this regard, macro phenomena make no sense unless they are related to the social activities of individuals who reproduce them over time. Conversely, micro phenomena cannot be fully understood by exclusive reference to their internal dynamics so to speak; they have to be seen to be conditioned by circumstances inherited from the past. In other words, micro phenomena have to be understood in relation to the influence of the institutions that provide their wider social context. In this respect, macro and micro phenomena are inextricably bound together through the medium of social activity and thus to assert the priority of the one over the other amounts to a ‘phoney war’ (Giddens, 1984). This emphasis on the potential relationships between macro- and micro-phenomena directly addresses the need for an account of the macro–micro relationship that does not, a priori, subordinate or exclude any of the perspectives. As Layder (1993, p. 8) has written, ‘such an approach directly opposes those which assume either that one level can be reduced to, and explained by, the other more “favoured” level, or can simply be tacked on to the more “important” focus of analysis’. His treatment of the macro–micro relationship as a matter for discovery leads to the second feature of the multistrategy approach: how he links the map to social theory. He does this by casting social theory as part of the interpretive resources that guide the researcher’s decisions. Moreover, and again consistent with the requirements for the multi-perspectived approach, he has emphasized that the researcher’s approach to investigating the relationship between macro- and microphenomena should be open to discovery, loosely held, subject to


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revision in the light of incoming data and analysis, and open to alternative orientations. The value of this account of social theory for the multi-perspectived approach is that it situates social theory within the motivational relevancies (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001) of the analyst. Furthermore, Layder’s emphasis on a practical orientation to social theory provides a link between social theory as an interpretive resource and Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) call, in their account of practical relevance, to harmonize theory and research in affecting social change. In terms of the multi-perspectived approach, then, the elements of Layder’s research map and its links to methodology provide a rationale both for including the macro–micro relationship in research and for situating social theory as a resource within the analyst’s perspective.

Developing the perspectives Combining these aspects of Fairclough’s and Layder’s work and drawing on Candlin’s (1997, 2006) recommendations, the ontology (Figure 2.1) is explained below. Each of the four overlapping circles represents a different perspective on discursive practices. The diagram reflects Fairclough’s (1992) account of discursive practice as a complex interaction of the textual, the discursive, and semiotic resources and processes – displayed by the overlaps between the four perspectives. At the same time, ‘perspective’ evokes different ways of perceiving and representing. Accordingly, as foreshadowed by Candlin (1997), the overlapping circles represent different ways of understanding and investigating the discursive practice(s) under scrutiny. Within this ontology, discursive practices may be investigated from one or more of the perspectives: a single discursive practice can be viewed from one perspective, or at the overlaps between two, three or all four circles. All four circles overlap at the centre. This is where a discursive practice would be scrutinized from all four perspectives. It is also possible to investigate the relationships between discursive practices. The overlaps between the circles then emphasize that a discursive practice under scrutiny from one perspective may be interdiscursively related to discursive practices viewed from other perspectives. It is important, as with Layder’s (1993) research map, to reiterate that there is no primacy among the perspectives. However, how the perspectives are displayed is also important. Layder’s representation of ‘levels’ of context perhaps has less to commend it iconographically, and perhaps materially, than the Venn diagram in addressing the first requirement

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Semiotic resource perspective: describes the resources drawn on in discursive practices

Analyst’s perspective: explains ‘motivational relevancies’ and ‘practical relevance’ in relation to participants’ perspectives

(Inter) discursive relations Social practice perspective: interprets interaction as socially situated practice

(Inter) discursive relations Participants’ perspective: recounts participants’ interpretations of discursive practices

Discursive practice

(Inter) discursive relations

(Inter) discursive relations

Social/institutional perspective: explains the contextual conditions in which discursive practices arise

Figure 2.1

Outline of the ontology.

identified above. What is required is that all the perspectives are – potentially at least – active and interactive. The Venn diagram displays readily the potentially discursive and interdiscursive relations between the perspectives and emphasizes that no perspective is a priori subordinate to any others. Also, the ordering of the perspectives in the Venn diagram does not imply a particular chronological sequence in which to investigate discursive practices but rather the topography of a study, which is open to being iterative and exploratory, not linear. The Venn diagram thus emphasizes that the perspectives are contingently engaged and ‘in play’. This means that, following Layder’s (1993) recommendations for social research, the resources drawn on to operationalize the perspectives are held lightly, are responsive to incoming data and analysis, and are open to findings that emerge from the ongoing interplay between the perspectives.


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In this sense, the approach does not exclude particular perspectives but is designed to enable these to operate in an inherently dynamic combination (Candlin, 2006) in which the inclusion or weighting of particular perspectives/research traditions will depend on the analyst’s understanding of the relevance of the investigation to the lives of the participants, and this understanding will in turn depend on how the analyst’s perspective aligns with that of the participants (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001). The priority in selecting and operationalizing the approach, then, is to achieve this relevance with reference to the world of the participants as they understand it. This point provides an answer to the third requirement: the need to address what theoretical and methodological resources a particular analyst will draw on in operationalizing the different perspectives. These selections will depend on the analyst’s own motivational relevancies, and the practical relevance of the study, referenced to her emergent understanding of the salience of the different perspectives to the world of the participants. These are explained in the following sections.

The analyst’s perspective: the analyst as topic and resource The inclusion of the analyst’s perspective within the ontology, at the left of Figure 2.1, provides a way of addressing the second requirement because it acknowledges that different analysts with particular interests, research purposes, understandings of the research context, orientations to social theory and distinctive research backgrounds may operationalize the ontology in different ways and give different weightings to the perspectives. The analyst’s accountability for the ecological validity (Cicourel, 2007) of the study is reflected in the need to explain the analyst’s motivational relevancies (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001) and the practical relevance (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999a) of the study. Both notions draw attention to the analyst as simultaneously a focus and a shaper of research. This dual role creates a version of what Sarangi and Coulthard (2000) have called the ‘topic/resource dilemma’, a paradox which results from the fact that in studying social life the analyst is as situated within the social world as the participants. The paradox arises because the interpretive resources on which the analyst draws in studying the social world as a topic are themselves drawn from this world, which is shaped by the interpretive resources deployed by those who are studied. The question this raises is how to explain the analyst’s perspective from within the study it simultaneously shapes, and in relation to the participants’ perspective. To achieve this,

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Sarangi and Candlin (2001, p. 383) recommend that researchers view themselves as standing in a relationship to the social context of their research, their research practices, and their social-theoretical assumptions that enables ‘a reflexive alignment of our accounting practices’. In this relationship, the interpretive resources of analyst and participants are mutually shaping: the analyst’s decisions on how to balance the analyst’s and participants’ perspectives both shape and are shaped by the analyst’s mode of engagement with the world of the participants. This is the focus of Chapter 3. The participants’ perspective: the self and narrative At the right-hand side of Figure 2.1, the participants’ perspective meets the need to acknowledge the subjective experience of participants, to develop a shared understanding of the world of the people being studied. This emphasis reflects the ‘verstehen’ approach associated with the work of Blumer according to which the social world is understood to be ‘forged by the actor out of what he perceives, interprets, and judges’ (1966, p. 542), and which foregrounds the participants’ perspective – in which the task of the researcher is to see the operating situation as the actor sees it, perceive objects as the actor perceives them, ascertain their meaning in terms of the meaning they have for the actor, and follow the actor’s line of conduct as the actor organizes it. (1966, p. 542) Blumer argued that this emphasis on recovering the actor’s perspective reduces the danger, inherent in viewing the actor ‘from the perspective of an outside, detached observer’, of ‘the observer substituting his view of the field of action for the view held by the actor’ (1966, p. 542). The researcher’s task, then, involves discovering how ‘the actor acts toward his world on the basis of how he sees it and not on the basis of how that world appears to the outside observer’ (1966, p. 542). The focus of the participants’ perspective acknowledges that each participant has a ‘subjective career’ (Layder, 1993, p. 76) that informs the interpretive resources they bring to the social world, and therefore the meanings they attach to social interaction and their responses to it. This is what Layder (1993, p. 77) has termed the ‘biographical elements of social experience’. The aim of drawing on the participants’ perspective is to recover participant narrations of their perceptions of what is going on, specifically


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in relation to their interpretations of discursive practices. This focus on narratives to operationalize the participants’ perspective reflects the fact that narrative has come to be seen as a ‘mode par excellence for the construction of self’ (Georgakopoulou and Goutsos, 2000, p. 75) and as a key source of insight into how people interpret and represent their lives (Clandinin, 2006). In this literature, narrative is viewed as the primary resource by which individuals make meaningful their own and others’ experiences through time (Ricoeur, 1991). Moreover, in recounting narratives people perform ‘preferred selves’ (Riessman, 2008) that are co-constructed in the telling. A narrative thus involves the teller in simultaneously interpreting and recounting her experience and enacting an identity that is ‘situated and accomplished with audience in mind’ (Riessman, 2003, p. 7). Understood in this sense, narrative is a condition of meaningful experience (Mattingly, 1998) and ‘unfinalizable’ (Bakhtin, 1981) because ‘life always opens up more options . . . , includes more meanings, more identities, evokes more interpretations than even the number of all possible stories could express’ (Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001, p. 8). Reflecting these emphases, achieving and making accountable a ‘mutuality of perspective’ (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001, p. 382) between analyst and participants will involve narrative on both sides. The recovery of participants’ perspectives will reflect their narratives of experience, and the explanation of the analyst’s motivational relevancies will involve an interpretation of her experience, an act of narrating and an enactment of self vis-à-vis her engagement with the world of the participants. The value of this interplay of perspectives has been captured by Riessman (2008) who advocates an approach to the documentation of narrative research that foregrounds both the analyst’s and participants’ perspectives as continuously ‘in dialogue’ in very much the way required by the multi-perspectived approach. She writes that the research relationship is an unfolding dialogue that includes the voice of the investigator who speculates openly about the meaning of a participant’s utterance. Readers see her subjectivity . . . the investigator adopts an active voice (although she is never the only voice) . . . the investigator joins a chorus of contrapuntal voices, which the reader can also join. To put it differently intersubjectivity and reflexivity come to the fore as there is a dialogue between researcher and researched, text and reader, knower and known. The research

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report becomes ‘a story’ with readers the audience, shaping meaning by their interpretations. (2008, p. 137) Chapters 3 and 4 draw on this approach by juxtaposing and keeping my own voice and those of the participating teachers active and in play, with the aim of making visible and therefore accountable how my perspective has on the one hand come to align with and on the other to transform and go beyond that of the participants. While it is true that unless the participants’ perspective is foregrounded there is a danger that the analysis will under-emphasize their contribution to the interpretation of discursive practice, if the analysis is restricted to the perceptions of participants there is the risk that it will be limited to these perceptions, thereby becoming a ‘ “subjectivist” sociology which loses sight of social phenomena’ (Silverman, 1993, p. 54). The problem is that much of the social world goes unrecognized by participants who are unaware of the ‘strangeness of an obstinately familiar world’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 38), with the consequence that the perceptions of participants do not determine the limits of the world that they experience. Understanding the social phenomena which constitute this world therefore requires resources beyond those provided by the participants’ perspective. These resources are the focus of the following sections. The semiotic resource perspective: instrumental approaches to language At the top of Figure 2.1, the semiotic resource perspective describes the resources drawn upon by participants to create meaning in interaction. The notion of ‘resources’ is drawn from Fairclough (1989) who uses the term ‘members’ resources’ to refer to the shared knowledge that enables people competently to participate in interaction. The perspective potentially includes the non-linguistic resources highlighted by Hak (1999) and Scollon (2001; Scollon and Scollon, 2007) and draws on ‘instrumental’ (Duranti and Goodwin, 1992a) views of language which emphasize how it is meaningful within the contexts in which it is used, exemplified by Halliday’s (1985; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Although SFL is not required within the perspective, of the available models it perhaps best illustrates how an instrumental approach to language can be accommodated within the multi-perspectived approach and it is the approach I have taken to the analysis of promotional brochures in Chapter 5.


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In developing SFL, Halliday elaborated the idea that language can be experienced as meaningful only when functioning in a particular context, into a comprehensive account of language as a ‘social semiotic’ (1978). This envisages language not so much as a set of rules, but as a system of meaningful options in which multiple functions are discharged simultaneously by any instance of language use. In this system, even the most delicate selection entails functional relationships between the language selected, the surrounding text and relevant aspects of the context. Viewed in this way, language is seen as a system of potentially meaningful social actions, ‘a set of socially constructed resources of behaviour, a “meaning potential” ’ (1978, p. 34). By attending to how language discharges these functions, SFL provides a framework for language analysis which is ‘open at the sociological end’ (Young, 1991, p. 68), enabling the investigation of relationships both within and between texts and to the local and larger scale social contexts. While Halliday’s work has informed broader semiotic perspectives (see, for example, Jewitt, 2009; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006; Van Leeuwen, 2008), it has also been pointed out that SFL tends to prioritize linguistic features of text over the context as a whole (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). The problem illustrates a more general issue which applies to SFL and to CA, discussed earlier. The issue involves a tension between what Linell (2001, p. 21) has called a ‘structure-in-focus view’, which he has identified with attempts to explain language as ‘one system’, and a ‘dynamics-in-focus view’, which emphasizes language as part of a ‘dynamic, only partially shared and fragmentarily known, dialogically constituted world’. The point is that, notwithstanding its instrumental orientation, SFL illustrates the ‘structure-in-focus view’ in under-theorizing these dynamic relations between the local and broader context and the linguistic system. It is the need to capture these relations which warrants the inclusion of resources to operationalize the other perspectives of the ontology.

The social practice perspective: strategic and emergent views Moving to the left of Figure 2.1, the social practice perspective meets the need to investigate those features of discursive practices which are typically unnoticed by participants because they are routine and taken for granted. The focus here is on interpreting how people contribute to social practices through their participation in interaction. The two research traditions which have exemplified this focus are symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. The most influential

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exponent of the former has been Goffman (1959, 1967, 1981), in whose ‘dramaturgic’ account of social life each person is understood as simultaneously two ‘selves’: the ‘situated self’ or self as a ‘performed character’ as opposed to the more private self as ‘performer’ (Goffman, 1959), whose interests are vested in the positive social attributes ascribed by others to the performed character. These attributes constitute each person’s ‘face’ (Goffman, 1967) and each person’s involvement in interaction is understood as an ongoing performance strategically crafted to enhance face. Goffman’s dual account of the self provides a way of investigating how participants deploy semiotic resources – including language – to (mis)manage their interests through the risks encountered in routine interaction. Because each person’s face depends on and is vulnerable to the perceptions of others, interaction involves the management of these perceptions in a constant process of ‘mutual monitoring’ (Goffman, 1964, p. 134) in which each person operates simultaneously as a performer and an audience, attending to and seeking to adjust to their best advantage the way they align themselves to others and frame what is going on (Goffman, 1981). In contrast to this strategic focus, ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) views interaction as less predictable and emphasizes the meaning of social action as contingent on the interaction at hand. In doing so, it addresses the problem of ‘intersubjectivity’: that is, the problem of explaining how members of a society contribute to the creation and maintenance of a mutually understood social world (Heritage, 1984). Ethnomethodology’s answer effectively constructs social participants as the continuous creators and arbiters of social reality. In accomplishing this, their actions are not determined by rules – macro, strategic or otherwise. Indeed they could not be, Garfinkel (1967, p. 3) maintained, because rules cannot specify the conditions of their own use – they always conclude with a form of ‘et cetera’. According to Garfinkel, rather than following rules it is through their actions that participants implement and simultaneously display their expectations about how to go on in every social situation. To do this they employ ‘methods’. These account for, in that they shape, what is going on and simultaneously act as accounts of what is going on, since they communicate participants’ understandings of the nature of the situation to other participants. These two senses of accounting are reflexively related to each other because participants’ knowledge of how to go on is itself shaped by what they observe others’ methods to be (Garfinkel, 1974). This point leads to what Giddens (1993, p. 46) has identified as ‘the central postulate of ethnomethodology . . . that the activities that produce the settings


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of everyday life are identical with actors’ procedures for making these settings intelligible’. Although I draw in Chapter 3 on symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology to explain my experience of working with teachers, they do not provide a way of investigating interaction within the broader contexts in which it arises. On this point, Mouzelis (2008) has observed that because Goffman’s account of interaction is not connected to larger scale social structures and processes, it lacks resources with which to account for the influence of macro-social phenomena on interaction. In a similar vein Layder (2005) has argued that ethnomethodology, in explaining social order as created and recreated on a moment-by-moment basis through the actions of individuals, underplays the ways in which people’s actions are socially constrained. These points raise the need for additional resources with which to investigate the broader social context within which social practices are situated. The social/institutional perspective: social theory and contemporary society In moving from the social practice perspective to focus on the institutional and broader social context, at the bottom of Figure 2.1, there is a change in how the analyst’s resources are relevant to the analysis of data because, as Layder (1993, p. 66) explains, In the analysis of face-to-face encounters it is important to think of the ‘relevance’ of theory as related to the social skills and knowledge of the people involved. However, the more one moves towards an analysis of institutional phenomena, the ‘relevance’ of theory has more to do with its general empirical anchoring. In this context ‘relevance’ applies to the way in which the theory identifies social conditions and resources (and inequalities which stem from them), which inform and empower activity. For the social/institutional perspective, the point is that the ‘already established character’ (Layder, 1993, p. 90) of social practices within institutions and broader social conditions cannot be deduced only from how participants experience and engage in these practices. Rather, any such enquiry also needs to draw on social-theoretical resources that address how institutions and societies are themselves reproduced over time; in other words, how they have ‘an ongoing life that is identifiable apart from specific instances of situated activity’ (Layder, 1993,

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p. 90). As well as providing a theoretical basis for this stability and continuity, the resources need to explain how institutions and societies are produced; in other words, how social change is possible. While making clear that the question of how stability and change interact in particular cases will only be decided through research, Layder (1993) emphasizes that the answer will depend on what power relations have been laid down through the history of the institutions and society more generally. This implies the need for social-theoretical resources which account for how power relations are themselves produced and reproduced over time. The most influential of these include the work of Giddens (1984, 1991), Bourdieu (1977, 1991), Foucault (1979, 1980, 1989) and Habermas (1984, 1987). Each acknowledges the centrality of language in social life, foregrounding in their work that ‘the meaningful character of human action is given above all by its saturation with language’ (Giddens, 1994, p. 3). In doing so, they provide alternative ways of employing language as a construct in explaining contemporary society. Moreover, from different standpoints, their work points to themes that are central to understanding the contemporary world and therefore to operationalizing the social/institutional perspective. The social-theoretical resources that I drew on in the study are introduced in Chapter 3 and developed through the remaining chapters of the book.

Design of the study The study took as its perspectival entry point the analysis of the promotional brochures produced by a sample of privately run English language colleges. This focus on textual analysis led to the initial foregrounding of the semiotic resource perspective. However, the fact that this perspective was taken as the starting point in this study does not reflect a need to sequence the perspectives in a particular way; as explained above, the presentation of the perspectives in Figure 2.1 does not represent a chronology but rather a flexible topography which can be adapted to the needs of particular investigations. The value of the brochures to the study was that they constitute the first point of contact between the colleges and their prospective clients and, as such, are central to the recruitment of members of the public into the college. The brochures therefore enter into, and are inseparable from, the social practice of recruitment, an activity characteristic


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of commercially oriented educational organizations (Askehave, 2007; Meadmore and Meadmore, 2004). Designed to persuade members of particular target groups to convert to the role of clients of the colleges, the discourse instantiated by promotional brochures is highly strategic, exemplifying what Cook (2001) has called the ‘discourse of advertising’. Brochures contribute to this recruitment function by representing education in ways likely to attract new clients. In designing the study, then, it was reasonable to imagine that these representations reflect and advance a commercialized view of education that renders in a saleable way the colleges, their courses, teachers and students, and how they participate in processes of teaching and learning. The analysis of the brochures, then, sought to discover evidence for, and to generate an account of, these commercially motivated constructions of participants and the relationships between them. My aim in generating the account of these constructions was to compare them with how teachers themselves perceive their own professional practices, the point being to discover whether the comparison provided evidence that the discourse implicated in the construction of the colleges in their promotional brochures was also implicated in teachers’ accounts of their practices. This interest in investigating the predictive value of the analysis of the promotional brochures was prompted by Fairclough’s (1992, p. 207) account of ‘commodification’ as a process involving ‘the colonization of institutional orders of discourse, and more broadly of the societal order of discourse, by discourse types associated with commodity production’. As explained above, colonization is central to Fairclough’s explanation of social change and provides a focus for the investigation of such change. More specifically, the decision to focus on promotional brochures was prompted by Fairclough’s (1992, p. 99) suggestion that ‘the extension of market models to new spheres can, for example, be investigated through the recent extensive colonization of orders of discourse by advertising and other discourse types’. In taking this focus I anticipated that colonization would be evidenced by interdiscursive relations between the discourse(s) instantiated in the brochures and teachers’ perceptions of their practices. The reason for suspecting the presence of these relations was that both the brochures and teachers’ professional practices are subject to the same commercial pressure to package, promote and sell English language teaching and learning, a process which does not stop at the brochures but represents the overarching commercial imperative of the

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organizations. It was reasonable to assume that any tensions between pedagogical and commercial interests would, from the teachers’ perspective, be experienced at points of inter- and intra-personal conflict when the teacher is faced with a choice between competing commercial and pedagogic needs. From the teachers’ perspective, this would be experienced as ‘moments of crisis’ (Fairclough, 1992). Whether such moments are experienced by teachers, what they identify as such moments, and the relationship between these and the construction of participants and relationships advanced through the promotional brochures were, then, key questions in to be addressed in designing and implementing the study. The remaining sections of this chapter explain how this was done and how the multi-perspectived approach was drawn on in the design of the study, outlined in Figure 2.2, below.

Semiotic resource perspective data: Promotional brochures from colleges

Analyst’s perspective: explains ‘motivational relevancies’ and ‘practical relevance’ in relation to participants’ perspectives

Predicted interdiscursive relations Social practice perspective data: No specific data gathered

Predicted interdiscursive relations Participants' perspective data: Diaries kept by teachers

Teachers’ practices

Predicted interdiscursive relations

Predicted interdiscursive relations

Social / institutional perspective data: newsletter, regulatory documents, training materials

Figure 2.2

Outline of the study.


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Selecting and analysing data The participants’ perspective The participants’ perspective focused on recovering teachers’ perceptions of their professional practices at of ‘moments of crisis’ (Fairclough, 1992): specifically, moments when teachers are faced with a conflict in meeting competing commercial and pedagogic interests. Data was gathered using diaries which were kept by a sample of teachers engaged in what would be considered in the private English language sector to be normal teaching duties. Participating teachers were asked to describe and explain any incidents which they felt adversely affected their ability to carry out their professional role, whatever they understood this to be. The only conditions on participation were that the teachers should be involved in full-time teaching and that they should have been teaching in the sector for at least a year. This was to ensure that the diary entries reflected routine teaching practices, whatever these might be, and that the diarists themselves would recognize these practices as routine. Eight teachers from seven organizations participated. Their teaching experience ranged from 1 to 17 years. The diaries were then subject to a thematic analysis using the coding procedures recommended by Miles and Huberman (1994). The analysis, which is explained further in Chapter 4, focused on identifying which participants and relationships the diarists’ perceived to compromise their ability conduct their professional practices. The semiotic resource perspective The semiotic resource perspective focused on describing the discourse instantiated in promotional brochures produced by organizations in the sector, including those in which the diarists worked. The aim here was to develop an account of the discourse instantiated in the brochures through an analysis of how participants and the relationships between them are constructed. A corpus of 10 brochures was gathered. As in the analysis of the diaries, the coding procedures used were those recommended by Miles and Huberman (1994). As the purpose of the analysis was to generate an account of how the brochures represent teachers’ practices, the coding focused on discovering patterns in the grammatical categories associated with Halliday’s (1985; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) notion of ‘transitivity’, the aspect of grammar which serves ‘as a means of representing patterns of experience’, and thereby enables ‘humans beings to build a mental picture of reality’ (1985, p. 101). This is explained in more detail in Chapter 5.

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Combining the participants’ and semiotic resource perspectives The findings of the two analyses were then compared to discover to what extent the construction of participants and relationships identified in the brochure analysis correlated with any identified by teachers as compromising their professional practices. Social practice perspective As explained above, there is no requirement within the multiperspectived approach for data to be gathered reflecting each perspective, nor that each perspective should be drawn upon in the analysis. However, it is also possible for more than one perspective to be brought to bear, as if with alternative lens, on the analysis of particular data sets. Consistent with this, no data was gathered specifically for the social practice perspective. However, analytical resources associated with this perspective, drawn from the work of Goffman and Garfinkel, informed the interpretation of interactions recounted in the narratives gathered to represent the analyst’s and participants’ perspectives, explained in Chapters 3 and 4. The social/institutional perspective To operationalize the social/institutional perspective, data were selected which, I anticipated, would provide insights into how the larger social context influences the identities and relationships between participants identified through the analyses of the brochures and diaries. These ‘lines of influence’ are explained in Chapter 6. Three types of data were selected. • A sector newsletter. This was produced bi-monthly by one of the sector’s peak bodies to inform managers of colleges about local, national and international developments that may affect their decision making. • The industry regulations. These documents determine accreditation of colleges within the sector and inform the development, monitoring and maintenance of minimum standards of service provision. • Teacher training materials used in the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA). These were included because the CELTA is the most influential qualification of its kind in Australia and internationally, shaping expectations of teaching, including what language is, how students learn, and what teaching methodology to


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use. All the teachers who participated in this study were graduates of this course.

The process of analysis The analysis of the brochures and diaries followed the ‘interactive’ approach to data analysis recommended by Miles and Huberman (1994), which emphasizes analysis as a ‘continuous, iterative enterprise’ that mobilizes all aspects of the research design. This broad notion of data analysis draws on principles of ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), which emphasizes analysis as an inductive, iterative process in which the analyst’s understanding of the data develops through repeated cycles of coining, comparing, validating and refining the codes used to interpret the data. Within the interactive model, this approach to coding is included within ‘data reduction’, which refers to the whole process of selecting, simplifying and transforming data to the point where conclusions are drawn and data displays made. The processes of drawing conclusions and displaying analysed data inform each other, and feed back into how the analyst conducts ongoing data reduction and collection. Miles and Huberman recommend that analysis proceeds until the codes have become ‘saturated’, the term used by Glaser and Strauss (1967, p. 62) to describe the stage in the analysis when incoming data cease to yield new codes. The resulting coding system is a ‘conceptual web’ (Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 62) in which emergent codes shape and are shaped by the development of a coherent explanation of their interrelations and significance as a whole. As explained above, particular methods of analysis are not required by or precluded from the multi-perspectived approach but are referenced to the analyst’s perspective. The value of Miles and Huberman’s recommendations was that they offered a principled way of investigating interdiscursive relationships between the perspectives. The findings generated by the coding of data sets representing different perspectives can be compared to seek correlations between the data sets that could evidence interdiscursive relationships between them. The advantage of seeking evidence of interdiscursive relations based on correlations between emergent findings in differently coded data sets is that it offers a way of grounding the investigation of interdiscursivity in systematic, transparent procedures for data analysis, an aim that is very much in line with Cicourel’s (1992) call for accountability in discourse analysis. The analysis of each data set reflected the perspective from which it was viewed. The units in the analysis of the brochures drew on the

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transitivity descriptors in systemic functional grammar. The codes were in this sense ‘ready-made’ because the units of analysis were imported into the study. Within the design of the study only the brochures were analysed in this way. The analysis of the diaries required the development of the codes themselves. These codes are therefore more ‘inductive’ than those developed in the brochure analysis in that they emerged through the process of analysis. The analysis of the sector newsletter, regulations and training materials did not employ these iterative, grounded coding procedures, but was more selective, focusing not on the generation of emergent findings through the development of coding systems but guided by the findings of the diary and brochure analyses in a search for explanation for how the identities and relationships of participants were constructed. In this sense, then, the analysis of the final three data sets did not abandon the analytical process but was guided by the findings that emerged from the analysis of the first two data sets.

Summary of the study Taken as a whole, the multi-perspectived approach aims to provide an integrated, interdiscursively oriented ontology that meets the key elements of Cicourel’s (2007) challenge to acknowledge ‘ecological validity’. In doing so, the approach aims to acknowledge the reflexivity of the research process to enable a ‘critical, but open, methodological stance’ in order to ‘understand social life from the inside, while striving to make sociolinguistic description and explanation socially relevant’ (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001, p. 383). The next chapter explains the analyst’s perspective in relation to my motivational relevancies (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001) and the practical relevance (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999a) of the study.

3 Framing the Discourse of Commercialization

In this chapter I explain the theoretical bases of the study and how these were sourced from my involvement in the world of the participants. The next chapter explores the extent to which my perspective was consonant with that of the participating teachers. As explained in Chapter 2, no particular position on social theory is assumed within the multi-perspectived approach, and the resources selected to operationalize the perspectives are to be held lightly, subject to revision in the light of incoming data and analysis: though the social/institutional perspective provides the link between the study and the broader themes of contemporary society, the resources on which it draws are intended to evolve in response to the analyst’s emergent understanding of the discursive practices that form the focus of the study. The approach thus aims to allow the integration of ‘theoretical development and practical relevance’ (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999a, p. 43).

Motivational relevancies and multiple memberships The challenge posed for the analyst by the need for practical relevance is how to develop a perspective that is shared with participants but informed by social-theoretical resources that go beyond their experience. Crucial to this relationship is the extent to which the analyst can be a member of the group being studied (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001). For this chapter, the task is to explain how my memberships shaped my understanding of the participants’ world. To explain these motivational relevancies (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001), I shift from non-narrative to narrative mode to present myself as both participant and analyst. Based on these narratives I identify the themes that motivated my interest in the study and the social-theoretical orientation I brought to it. 49

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Narrative lends itself to the expression of this double voice because narratives can simultaneously communicate two versions of the narrator: as a participant inside the constructed reality of the story and as the teller who constructs the story at the time of the telling (Riessman, 2008). At the same time the narratives below are also forms of ‘accounting practices’ (Garfinkel, 1967) in that they are used to refer ‘to instances where actors reflexively stand back from everyday activity as they explain and justify to others what is/has been going on’ (Hall et al., 1999, p. 542). In making explicit within the narratives the experiences that motivated the study, I draw on Goffman’s (1959) distinction between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ regions. The value of the distinction here is that the struggles between groups in organizations can be revealed by how they negotiate their roles at the boundaries between these regions (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999a). ‘Frontstage’ refers to areas of social life where a person’s ‘face’ (Goffman, 1967) is at risk because the person’s performance ‘may be seen as an effort to give the appearance that his activity . . . maintains and embodies certain standards’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 110). ‘Backstage’ regions are where the audience does not intrude, and where the person is therefore free to prepare for higher stakes performances and ‘where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 114). This freedom to prepare for a frontstage audience and in doing so to violate the standards they expect does not mean that backstage regions are places where people can abandon frontstage behaviour altogether – only the frontstage behaviour for which preparation is currently underway. Moreover, front- and backstage regions are not rigidly segregated but interrelated and may be shifting, subject to renegotiation and contestation and, therefore, potentially revealing of tension between members of different groups. By drawing on the work of Garfinkel and Goffman, analytical resources that are associated with the social practice perspective, this perspective is in effect turned back on the analyst – the aim being to make visible, and therefore accountable, those memberships that shaped the study and its relationship with the world of the participants.

Three narratives The teacher I worked as a full- and part-time English language teacher in private sector organizations in Australia throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.

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Like other teachers, my primary responsibility was to teach classes of students from around 20 countries in Asia, South America and Europe. The standard full-time teaching load was 20 hours’ classroom teaching and 5 hours’ supervision of other student activities. In planning lessons, assessing students and carrying out other teaching responsibilities, teachers followed curriculum documents developed by an educational manager. My teaching duties were typical for the sector. I was responsible for teaching classes in 4- or 5-weekly blocks, often called ‘modules’; two or three modules comprised a course. Each course represented a level of proficiency in English. The organizations where I worked ran five or six levels of courses, from ‘beginners’ to ‘advanced’. Within these levels, both generalist and specialist courses were run. The generalist courses were called ‘General English’; other courses focused on specializations such as ‘Business English’, ‘Academic English’ and preparation for various international language tests. In addition to classroom teaching, I was usually required to accompany students on excursions and to attend organized social events. The typical teaching day was divided between the staffroom and the classroom, as well as movements between the two, and meetings with non-teachers for a range of purposes. Teachers treated the staffroom as their backstage region. Here they prepared for lessons and engaged in banter about students and non-teaching members of the organization. These activities were backstage in relation to the classrooms and other areas where teachers’ professional practices might come under scrutiny from non-teachers. Teachers, then, maintained the staffroom as a backstage region by engaging in a range of practices that they would have deemed inappropriate for scrutiny from non-teachers. However, the backstage status of staffrooms was not assured. Some kinds of practice transformed part or all of the staffroom to frontstage. This happened when, for example, backstage regions developed around huddled conversations dealing in topics which members were careful to keep within the bounds of trusted relationships, such as problems at home, crises of confidence and criticisms of other teachers. The staffroom would also be transformed into a frontstage region if a nonteacher entered. This might be a student, a member of management or some other person to whom teachers would present a frontstage performance. At these moments, it was common for teachers to adjust their behaviour comprehensively to accommodate the entrance of the non-teacher. These adjustments reflected divisions between teachers and the other groups within the organization. The major non-teaching groups were

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identified by teachers as students, management and administration. These groups were subdivided in various ways: for example, into students who were easier and more difficult to teach, into the different levels of management, and according to how the members of the different groups treated teachers. It was not unusual for talk in these backstage regions to be focused on situations that had challenged the speakers’ ability to carry out what they saw as their professional role. These situations occurred in frontstage regions, and involved interaction with members of the three main non-teaching groups. Teachers experienced in contributing to staffroom talk were skilled at raising and developing these topics – sometimes for the attention of the staffroom as a whole. The topics were usually of general interest and prone to draw attention away from other kinds of activity. The two dominant concerns were that students had excessive authority in interactions with teachers, and that teachers lacked support from management in this and other areas. These concerns were raised about situations in which, for example, students challenged teachers about how they taught; teaching was made difficult by either large classes or students with different proficiency levels; students started in classes after courses had begun; or when students complained about a teacher to management. In my own teaching experience, I also perceived these problems, and with more experience also contributed to staffroom discussions about them. In general, I noticed pressure from management on teachers to be accommodating to students. This included pressure to recommend that students move into classes of a higher level than was warranted by their language proficiency; to socialize with students in the evenings and at weekends, thereby posing for teachers the problem of how to maintain a frontstage demeanour while in effect feigning the use of backstage resources; to accept new students into classes outside course start dates; and to be generous in explaining students’ failure to progress – not blaming their ability or attitude to study but to look for solutions in changes to teaching methodology or classroom management. Other teachers reported being similarly frustrated in trying to teach according to what they understood to be professional standards. Noticeably different were the solutions they proposed and their explanations for why the situations kept recurring. In each organization, a range of views circulated, though the tendency was to argue that the management cared more about keeping students content than with ensuring that their ‘learning needs’ were met. The explanation for this apparent bias varied. Some teachers claimed that management knew little about


teaching and that they should be replaced with people who were better informed. Another line was that management’s lack of support was evidence of a policy of minimizing the time and money put into teaching and learning. Others said that members of management were not promoting the organization effectively – the argument being that if they were, there would be more students and therefore more funds available to provide more support for teaching. The view common to these different explanations was that management was ‘on the students’ side’. The effect was to reduce the confidence teachers felt in carrying out their teaching responsibilities. When meetings were arranged with management to discuss these concerns, the outcomes were usually perceived by teachers to be disappointing. Managers appeared not to address teachers’ pedagogic concerns, but to emphasize teaching as a means of enhancing students’ levels of satisfaction with the organization and thereby attracting new students. After these meetings, we left with the impression that our concerns had not been addressed but redescribed in a way that recast the problem in terms of its potential to reduce students’ satisfaction or enrolments. We often left these meetings with a feeling that our concerns had been ignored or misunderstood. This impression tended to confirm my and other teachers’ doubts about management’s support for teaching standards, and for our view of ourselves as lacking professional authority. I continued to hold only these perceptions until two new memberships changed my relationship with teachers: I became an educational manager and later a member of the authority which regulates the sector.

The manager After several years of teaching, I began to work as the senior teacher and later as the educational manager of an organization in which I had previously worked as a teacher. The educational manager bears responsibility for the management of the quality of teaching and educational administration, usually meets regularly with members of these groups as well as with other managers, and liaises with members of relevant organizations. Among these are overseas agents, who, for a percentage of students’ fees, recruit students. For the teacher who becomes a manager, these responsibilities redraw the frontstage and backstage boundaries. The staffroom is transformed into a frontstage region both for the manager, for whom it is a place where teachers’ preparation and attitudes can be monitored, and

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for teachers in the presence of the manager. At the same time, for the educational manager, the management and administrative areas of the organization take on a backstage status, whereas for teachers they remain frontstage. Contributing to these changing boundaries is the knowledge among teachers that the manager is not only familiar with their practices but, unlike teachers, has backstage access to the non-teaching groups within the organization: the managers, students and administrators. Combined with the authority the manager has over teachers, this access to sources of organizational knowledge and influence creates a need to treat encounters with the manager as frontstage. These changes in the interactional geography opened a different perspective on teachers’ interpretations of their experience. This change arose gradually as I became involved in management practices in which the organization was understood as a business, with education as its primary product, and profitability its driving motivation. According to this perspective, ‘workplace problems’ were those events that threatened the organization’s capacity to attract new clients or in some other way might compromise their impression of the organization as an attractive place to study. The interpretive resources deployed here were not merely different from those of teachers, but potentially in conflict – the stakes being the professional credibility of managers and teachers. These differences were most noticeable in the ways managers and teachers cast the processes of learning and teaching. For example, managers would typically understate the demands and unpredictabilities of language leaning, thereby minimizing the onus on the learner for the success of learning outcomes. On the other hand, teachers were more likely to emphasize these aspects of language learning, indeed to argue that learners needed to understand the nature of language learning and their role within it as a prerequisite for successful language learning. Frontstage, managers and owners continually reinterpreted the significance of problems reported by teachers, who would in turn reinterpret according to their own perspective the managers’ constructions of these problems. Backstage, each group tended to characterize the other as failing to meet their own professional standards. As noted above, teachers contended that their problems arose because management prioritized maintaining student contentment over meeting their learning needs; managers, on the other hand, tended to characterize teachers as out of touch with commercial realities and ‘inflexible’ or ‘unprofessional’ in their approach to teaching.


As both an ex-teacher and a manager, I found these competing ways of construing the ‘same’ workplace problems hard to reconcile and began to see them as examples of more general patterns of difference between how management and teachers perceived teaching. As a manager, I maintained and implemented policies which exemplified these differences. These policies were difficult to justify to teachers but their merits were clear to management. The five examples below illustrate these policies and the tensions they created. The first concerns the way students’ complaints about teachers were handled by management. These complaints often focused on the particular teaching methodology, which was usually described as ‘communicative’, meaning that it emphasized learning through the contextualized use of language. For students unfamiliar with this methodology, it may not look like ‘language teaching’, and the language teacher may in turn not be recognized as a teacher. Management’s decisions on students’ complaints were often hard to communicate to teachers when these decisions appeared to focus on reducing the dissatisfaction expressed by the student rather than addressing the methodological and orientation issues raised. The complaints procedures typically encouraged this perception by suggesting that students approach their class teacher first and, if this did not resolve their concern, or if the teacher advised them to do so, that they take their complaint to a designated manager. Students wanting to complain about their teacher tended – understandably – to take the latter option, leaving the teacher out of the complaint loop until s/he was informed of it by the management. Teachers saw this route as a way of excluding them from the complaints process, a perception which was reinforced by the lack of support the management appeared to give teachers who had complaints made against them. Second, initiatives were taken by management to standardize teaching practices. These moves came against a background of concern about student satisfaction levels, and a perception that unless managers had more control over classroom teaching, they could not ensure that students were receiving the instruction students expected. This concern about meeting students’ expectations was linked to dealing with students’ complaints and the need to be consistent with the descriptions of courses and teaching methodology contained in marketing materials. A phrase used to describe the aim of these standardization policies was ‘house style’, a type of teaching for which an organization might become known and valued in the marketplace. Examples of moves to establish a house style included requiring teachers’ lesson plans to be

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submitted to the educational manager for filing in a ‘bank’ of reusable lessons; creating checklists to record what each teacher had taught during a week; matching the checklists to a detailed syllabus and collating and monitoring these documents as part of ongoing performance reviews. These initiatives were generally unpopular with teachers, who felt that the ‘reusable’ lessons and proliferation of checklists were an imposition on their professionalism and did not reflect the realities of teaching practice. Teachers argued that lessons should be tailored to the needs of each class, and suspected that the reusable lessons were an attempt to make teachers more easily replaceable. They objected to the checklists on the grounds that they reduced the complexities of language learning to inventories of discrete activities and items, such as skills, vocabulary and grammatical structures and functions. Managers, on the other hand, argued that the teachers’ objections were an example of their avoidance of ‘accountability’. From a management perspective, then, this interpretation of the teachers’ objections further justified the standardization of teaching. Third, and again in line with policies in the sector more generally, I was required to introduce regular observations of teachers in classrooms, involving observation schedules and checklists, and to explain the purpose of the observations with teachers. These observations were part of a ‘staff development’ programme, the idea being that I would observe teachers in order to discuss with them areas in which they would like to increase their knowledge and skills. Teachers found this implausible, arguing that observations were inevitably part of the attempt to standardize teaching, and would function as a performance appraisal with implications for their employment prospects. Fourth, a regular cause of tension was the number of students in each class, when they joined the class, and differences in their proficiency levels. As a teacher, I and other teachers had felt that there should be no more than around 12 students per class. This number, we thought, ensured that the learning needs of each student could be addressed. I knew also that students perceived these benefits and so also preferred having this number or less in their classes. Both teachers and students also preferred all students to start at the beginning of a course, because of the disruption late arrivals caused and the extra attention they required from teachers. For similar reasons, teachers and students preferred classes to include students of comparable proficiency levels. As a manager, I was aware of these preferences. However, I was also aware that there were tight financial margins dependent on the number


of students in each class, and on the total number in the organization, which could not afford to lose potential students. In overriding teachers’ concerns, I had more authority than with students because students’ satisfaction was commercially critical; any complaint they made to other students or to the overseas agents who had recruited them could lose students to other organizations. In comparison, teachers had less authority because they depended on the organization for their employment: the focus of the final example of policy. This dependence was compounded by a policy of hiring teachers on a casual basis whenever possible, as opposed to other less ‘flexible’ categories of employment. Teachers who had taught for some time on a casual basis often questioned me on why they were not moved to a more secure arrangement. This situation created an understandable fear among teachers that their contracts might not be renewed, and for reasons not directly related to their teaching competence – for example, if they were unpopular with students. It was difficult to explain these employment practices to teachers, who typically argued that, apart from their personal concerns, insecure employment and a high staff turnover would reduce the quality of teaching. Management did not usually see this as a serious risk, but rather emphasized that all teachers should be ‘professional’ and ‘flexible’ irrespective of their terms of employment. The difficulty of simultaneously deploying the competing discourses of teachers and managers raised my awareness of the tensions between their different interests and motivated my own interest in how these tensions might be addressed. My perspective on this problem, and my relationship to teachers and managers, then evolved again when I became a member of the authority that regulates the sector.

The regulator The industry regulatory authority, the National ELT Accreditation Scheme (NEAS), implements national standards of English language education provision. It employs a small management and administrative staff and, on a consultancy basis, ‘panelists’, who regularly inspect and report on how organizations comply with the relevant legislation and regulations. The reports are used as the basis of decisions on whether to accredit organizations which provide English courses to students from overseas. In the late 1990s I became a member of the inspection panel. During an inspection the panelist gathers information on the operations of the organization in areas which affect the quality of teaching and

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educational management. This includes interviewing members of management and staff, checking documents and procedures and inspecting premises and facilities. Educational managers in particular are subject to scrutiny during the inspection, which focuses on their professional expertise. Other employees may be told by management when an inspection is scheduled and advised of its purpose. There is often, then, preparation in anticipation of an inspection. During the inspection, this preparation is converted into a performance, which transforms hitherto backstage regions into frontstage as the panelist passes through. For the panelist, too, an inspection is a frontstage performance using prepared questions, and standardized inspection and reporting practices. Through preparing for and conducting inspections, it became apparent that the tensions I had previously perceived between teachers’ and managers’ perspectives were not restricted to the organizations in which I had worked. Whereas the explanation might have appeared from the teachers’ or managers’ perspective to lie with individuals or the circumstances of their particular organization, as a panelist I came to see these organizations as situated within a sector that was itself shaped by diverse and changing political, regulatory, market and other national and international conditions – including teacher education and training, exchange rates, transport and technology, government policies and tourism. These insights gave me the impression that I understood better the struggles I had experienced and observed as a teacher and manager. However, this awareness did not reduce the difficulty I had as a manager in reconciling the competing discourses I had come to associate with teachers and managers. My perception that tensions were unlikely to result from particular employees or organizational circumstances was usually not taken as relevant by teachers to the problems they faced in their daily lives, nor by managers as relevant to the ‘inflexibility’ they perceived teachers to exhibit.

Motivating themes The three themes highlighted in these narratives were introduced in Chapter 1. To recap, the first reflects concerns about the human cost of insecurity and risk that people experience in trying to maintain established practices while their autonomy is undermined in ways that are beyond their knowledge and control. This theme is instantiated by the demoralization experienced by teachers who perceived their professional autonomy and authority to be compromised within the practices


that define their professional identities. The second focuses on how discourse contributes to social order and change and is difficult to resist, precisely because it is familiar and therefore unnoticed. This theme emerged, for example, in my experience of struggles between teachers, students and managers as shaped – usually in unnoticed ways – by their different interests, and that each group appeared unable to recognize this, seeming not so much unwilling to understand each other’s positions as to find them incomprehensible. The third foregrounds how the transformation of professional practices, illustrated by policies of monitoring and standardizing teachers’ practices while casualizing their employment, is driven by the emergence and increasing domination of new forms of large-scale social order – exemplified by the globalization of markets in education. The remainder of this chapter explains how these themes and the experiences that instantiate them informed the selection of socialtheoretical resources used in the study.

Theoretical starting points The professional workplace as a site of struggle The first theme recalls Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) argument that the professional workplace in contemporary society is increasingly a ‘site of social struggle’. This struggle arises from a fundamental difference between the work of professionals and those who implement and maintain organizational systems. The difference lies in the fact that professionals, typically understood, are those who provide advice to lay people, freely drawing on their professional knowledge and applying this in accordance with their professional standards, whereas those – such as administrators – whose work interest lies in running the organization will have an orientation that emphasizes institutional rules and procedures. Though this is not a hard and fast distinction, the differences are reflected in the ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977) of the two groups. In order to become a member of a profession, an individual must acquire the disposition to articulate the discourses that characterize the profession. Such discourses involve ways of saying and doing that are durable, legitimate and authoritative for members of the profession and the people to whom they provide services, whereas institutional discourses are associated not with individual members but with practices whose authority derives from rules and regulations that govern the organization.

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Because of these different orientations and sources of authority, institutional discourses have the potential to conflict with and dominate professional discourses. Sarangi and Roberts argue that this potential for conflict is increasingly evident in changes in roles, skills and knowledge across the professions, describing these changes as constituting a trend towards deprofessionalization in which the value of individual expertise and specialization is undermined. This is brought about through both bottom-up and top-down ways of acting on professional discourse. The former includes reworking professional concerns into terms that are allowable within the organization, a process that recalls teachers’ perceptions that their concerns were recast by managers to reflect the organization’s commercial interests. The latter involves attempts to change professional knowledge and practices to bring them into line with institutional requirements, a realignment that has profound implications for how professional knowledge is ‘packaged and delivered’, and redefines ‘the professional identity of educators in relation to the job market and the consumers of education’ (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999a, p. 18), changes to professional knowledge, practices and identities that resonate with the trends described in my own narratives.

The technologization of discourse The second theme finds close expression in the notion of ‘technologization’; one of a cluster of terms that Fairclough (1992, 1996) has developed to explain how people’s lives have been transformed through changes in discourse and how these changes are related to larger-scale social transformations. Technologization here refers not to ‘technology’ as usually understood but to the processes by which discursive practices are increasingly (re)designed to serve institutional interests. It thereby exemplifies Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) notion of institutional discourse. The value of technologization for the study was that it provided a potential link between commercially driven changes in discursive practices, tensions between professional and institutional discourses of the kind identified by Sarangi and Roberts (1999a), and larger scale processes of social change. Moreover, the struggles they describe between institutional and professional discourses are exemplified by those which result from the changes engendered by technologization. According to Fairclough (1992), the pressures on organizations to compete for market share drive these changes, creating an incentive to subsume all other interests to commercial imperatives. It is


these imperatives which he explains in terms of ‘commodification’ and ‘marketization’. The former refers to the pressure to create and promote new products out of areas of life previously not viewed as saleable, and the latter to the spread of market models to new areas of social life. These shifts towards marketization and commodification are related to the growth of ‘consumer culture’, a term that highlights the centrality of products and their consumption to contemporary society. Featherstone (2007, p. 82) explains that this involves a dual focus: first, on the cultural dimension of the economy, the symbolization and use of material goods as ‘communicators’ not just utilities; and the second, on the economy of cultural goods, the market principles of supply, demand, capital accumulation, competition and monopolization which operate within the sphere of lifestyles, cultural goods and commodities. Foreshadowed here, the interplay between the symbolic and economic value of products is explored in Chapter 5. For the moment, the focus is on elaborating the economic side of consumer culture, which has led to shifts in power from producers of goods and services to consumers faced with increasing choices from producers competing for their attention, thus increasing competition among producers for the attention of consumers. Abercrombie (1990) has argued that in this process the authority to influence the nature of goods and services has shifted from producers to consumers. As well as being consistent with the way teachers perceived students to be treated by managers, this account also predicts the growing authority of those involved in marketing education over those who teach. This trend exemplifies Abercrombie’s point that, with the decline in producer culture, and their authority over consumers, organizations focus their resources on efforts to attract customers, raising the importance of those employed in areas such as marketing, and reducing the authority of professionals. This is a process that Fairclough (1993) has argued is exemplified in higher education and is characterized by the widespread colonization of discourses associated with the professions and public services and is exemplified by what Fairclough (1996) has called technologization. This has five characteristics • the emergence of expert ‘discourse technologists’; • a shift in the ‘policing’ of discourse practices; • the design and projection of context-free discourse techniques;

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• strategically motivated simulation in discourse and • pressure towards the standardization of discourse practices. Though these characteristics are not equally represented in the narratives above, there are sufficient affinities to infer that technologization describes the direction of the institutional changes I experienced. The discourse technologist as an expert in the manipulation of discourse has not emerged clearly in my experience. However, the policies described above signal an increasing awareness in these organizations of how documentation can be designed to monitor and evaluate compliance with institutionally standardized practices, reflecting the second and fifth characteristics. In the narratives, these include the transformation of syllabus documentation into checklists, requirements on teachers to create and record the use of reusable lessons, and the moves to develop a house style, including the ambivalent combination of staff development and appraisal in practices associated with observations of teachers. Reflecting the third characteristic, the discourse technologies employed in the examples are to a large extent ‘context-free’, applicable across a wide range of both teaching and non-teaching practices. In addition to this push towards context-free, standardized practices, there is, as reported in the first narrative, a pressure to be accommodating to students. This pressure resembles closely the fourth characteristic, ‘strategically motivated simulation’, which, Fairclough (1996) argues, commonly appears as fabricated ‘friendliness’ that constructs closer and more familiar relationships than would otherwise be warranted and involves the use of language associated with interaction in private life rather than institutional settings. As reported in my narratives, teachers felt under pressure to simulate this lack of social distance in numerous practices. Some, such as assessing students’ work, were part of their professional practices. Other practices were introduced to promote this simulation, including socializing with students. The conflict teachers experienced in trying to maintain their professional frontstage identities in these situations exemplifies the deprofessionalizing effects of technologization and the potential to create ‘moments of crisis’ (Fairclough, 1992) involving intra- or interpersonal conflict in which teachers struggle to reconcile the commercial and pedagogic interests that compete to shape their professional practices. In summary the affinities between Fairclough’s account of technologization and my experience of tensions in the workplace suggested that technologization contributed to the explanation of the tensions


I had perceived. Moreover, technologization provides links between these tensions and Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) account of the professional workplace.

Processes of social production and reproduction The question remains as to why these tensions are occurring in contemporary society – the focus of the third theme. This question draws general social theory into the study and hence into the account of my motivational relevancies. As a starting point for explaining these tensions, I drew on Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ and Gramsci’s distinction between ‘coercion’ and ‘consent’. Some explanation of these and their connections to the narratives will be needed before we explore their relevance to the other perspectives. Central to the theory of practice is the notion of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). This refers to the dispositions people develop and act upon throughout their social lives. These dispositions include the knowledge, values and skills which are prerequisites for engagement in social life and which each person acquires through their own particular experience. Each person’s habitus reflects and tends to reproduce particular social conditions or ‘fields’ through being enacted in social practices. In linking the actions of individuals to the social conditions in which they are situated, the habitus operates as the ‘pivot around which the production and reproduction of society is accomplished’ (Layder, 1994, p. 157). The habitus does not, Bourdieu emphasizes, subordinate people’s actions to large-scale social structures; nor does it cast individuals as free to act irrespective of their own dispositions. Rather, a habitus is synchronized with the social conditions in which it evolves, so that when a habitus meets social conditions to which it is adapted it is like a ‘fish in water’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 127). When the habitus is adapted to a field the person is not constrained to act but naturally acts in concert with the prevailing social conditions, recognizing and taking appropriate action in virtue of her or his particular habitus. To explain how dispositions come to be deployed in different fields, Bourdieu (1986) develops the economic metaphor of the ‘market’, central to which are four notions of ‘capital’. The term refers to those properties of habitus and field which affect the power relations between social actors. ‘Economic capital’ refers to those properties which can be immediately realized in monetary terms. Both ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ capital refer to properties that may in certain circumstances be converted

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into economic capital. Cultural capital refers to properties, such as educational qualifications, which both distinguish carriers as advantaged in their access to capital and enable them to be so; and social capital refers to the social obligations and connections the carrier gains access to and is inducted into though membership of social groups such as a family, union, profession or other source of ‘collectively-owned capital’ (1986, p. 249). The fourth type, ‘symbolic capital’, is typically manifested as prestige, fame or other forms of public esteem. This is the form taken by the other three types of capital ‘when they are perceived and recognised as legitimate’ (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 112): that is, when they become established in society as valuable in virtue of their perceived capacity to improve people’s life chances. Because people’s life chances depend on the amount and kinds of capital they have, they tend to try to maximize the capital they can get. However, the value of the capital that people seek and hold varies according to its distribution and scarcity, so it is the interplay between the forms of capital a person brings to a field in the form of habitus – their ‘assets’ – and the distribution of capital within the field and how it is valued by others which determines a person’s capacity to accumulate further capital and therefore increase their power in relation to other social actors in the field. The different forms of capital, then, are ‘like trumps in a game of cards, are powers which define the chances of profit in a given field’ (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 112). In the competition to acquire capital, power is exerted in struggles between individuals who, collectively, form ‘classes’. These are not necessarily organized groups but comprise individuals who share a similar habitus, strive to maximize their capital within similar fields, and who therefore ‘have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing similar practices and adopting similar stances’ (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 112). This coincidence of interests within classes creates struggle between them, as each class competes to acquire the available capital. A key stake in these struggles is ‘common sense’ perception of the social world, which includes people’s sense of what it is possible for them to aspire to. Control of this sense of people’s place in the world brings the power to manipulate how social classes understand the outcomes they can legitimately seek within the market and the power to manipulate the existence of classes themselves. As a consequence, ‘classes and other antagonistic social collectives are continually engaged in a struggle to impose the definition of the world that is most congruent with their particular interests’ (Wacquant, 1992, p. 14). Bourdieu (1991) describes the form of power used in these struggles over definitions as ‘symbolic power’ and the resulting manipulation


of classes as ‘symbolic violence’. Symbolic power involves the use of language by different classes within the ‘linguistic market’, in which linguistic competence is conceived as ‘linguistic capital’. As with the other forms of capital, linguistic capital is an unevenly distributed asset, with more valuable forms accruing to those who already have greater assets. As with other forms of capital, those people who start out with advantages tend to accrue them, and the reverse is true for those who start from a position of disadvantage. Symbolic power is particularly effective when it operates through the dominant – and therefore most valuable – language in the field. As the most desirable linguistic capital, the dominant language is accepted as the ‘legitimate’ language by those in the field, including the people who stand to lose most by not having it: its dominance is ‘invisible to social actors precisely because it presupposes the complicity of those who suffer most from its effects’ (Thompson, 1984, p. 58). According to Bourdieu (1998), contemporary society is being shaped by those classes whose interests are served by the current dominant ‘neoliberal discourse’. He argues that central to this discourse is the construction of social action as driven by ‘individual rationality’, a view of the individual which, in ‘bracketing off the economic and social conditions of rational dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 94–95), ignores the intimate relations between people and their social experience highlighted by the theory of practice. These views have been legitimized through what he (1991) has called the ‘unification of the market’, a process by which the social, cultural and economic capital associated with neoliberalism become the most highly valued in fields beyond its origins in economic theory, thereby resetting the values for existing forms of capital in these fields and expanding the dominance of neoliberalism in the market as a whole. Bourdieu (1998, 1999) identifies the human cost of these changes as rising levels of risk, arguing that the distorted account of social life presented by neoliberalism is proceeding on a global scale to legitimize a culture of insecurity and fear among those who stand to lose from neoliberal economic policies. These are the people who lack the habitus to access the forms of capital which are valuable within it and are thereby caught in a cycle of disadvantage in which the value of their habitus is reduced as other classes come to dominate the market. Interpreted in the light of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the resources deployed by teachers and managers in their professional practices can be seen as different forms of habitus, the former synchronized with the pedagogic field, the latter with the economic field. The capital each class holds is valued within its own field, and, within their respective

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fields, teachers and managers represent influential classes. On this interpretation, the economic field is incorporating the capital associated with English language teaching, thereby devaluing it because, within the economic field, teaching is construed not as social capital, in the form of professional competence, but as a product with a value determined by its capacity to generate economic capital by competing in the global market for education. This revaluation is seen in the use of new workplace conditions and practices, such as casual contracts and new methods of monitoring/evaluation to control and standardize teachers’ professional practices, and fits well with Fairclough’s (1996) focus on technologization, whereby discursive practices are reworked to maximize their potential to further commercial interests. As well as suggesting how the habitus of teachers and managers is linked to the production and reproduction of contemporary society, Bourdieu’s theory of practice suggests a way of explaining the influence of other groups. Students, for example, could be understood to form another class, that of ‘enterprising consumers’ (Abercrombie, 1990). With their economic capital invested in English as a way to enhance their life chances, they are valued and competed for within the economic field, and have increasing authority over teachers’ practices as these become incorporated into the marketing chain. Other groups include regulatory authorities and the dominant teacher training organizations. According to the theory of practice, these groups would represent further classes of interest that influence the different habitus and fields associated with those who work in English language teaching. There remains the question of how the actions of teachers, managers, students and others actually shape teachers’ practices. To explain this I have drawn on Gramsci’s (1988) theory of ‘hegemony’, according to which lasting social control is only possible if it involves an equilibrium between ‘coercion’, which is the use of force through, for example, military or judicial means, and ‘consensus’, which involves the incorporation of the dominant class’s values into those of other classes through their socialization in institutions such as schools. The equilibrium between these forms of control is unstable and shifting, in response to changing social conditions and class interests. There is a wide range of ways in which people may be induced to consent to their own subordination. Among these, Gramsci (1988, p. 307) identifies as particularly significant the ‘prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant class enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production’.


Consent may be brought about by the acquiescence engendered by its prestige, but its effectiveness ultimately depends on coercive power ‘which “legally” enforces discipline on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively’ (Gramsci, 1988, p. 307). Notwithstanding this dependence on coercion, consent is required by the dominant classes because it ensures that people’s acquiescence to authority becomes habitual and naturalized, and therefore harder to notice and resist. For a dominant class, then, a combination of coercion and consent provides the most effective means of social control, in which a population subordinates itself through consent, and coercion can be reserved for ‘moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed’ (Gramsci, 1988, p. 307). As an explanation of how groups exert control over one another, consent in this sense fits well with Bourdieu’s account of how classes with influence in the market can consolidate their dominance by raising the value of their capital, inducing other classes to devalue their own by seeking that of the dominant class, and thus subordinating themselves in an effort to improve their life chances.

Summary of the analyst’s perspective My motivational relevancies were sourced in experiences I have shared with teachers, managers and regulators. These experiences raised my awareness of the tensions between teachers, managers and other groups implicated in shaping teachers’ practices. This chapter has explained the social-theoretical resources that I selected for the study based on their fit with and capacity to elaborate themes raised by these experiences, and in doing so to provide a starting point for explaining the role of discourse in shaping these tensions. In keeping with the multi-perspectived approach, the aim is to hold these resources lightly, keep them open to revision in response to emergent findings and to justify them in terms of my motivational relevancies and the practical relevance of the study. Against this background, the next chapter explains the participants’ perspective, as revealed in the analysis of the diaries kept by participating teachers.

4 Professional Practice As a Site of Struggle

In this chapter I explain the themes that emerged in the analysis of the diaries. In doing so I make explicit links to the social-theoretical resources introduced in Chapter 3 and show how these connections extend the account of the discourse of commercialization. The chapter concludes by drawing together the argument developed through the previous two chapters. However, there remains the need to trace interdiscursive relations between the diarists’ accounts of their practices and how these are constructed in the brochures and to elaborate these relationships from the social/institutional perspective. These questions are addressed in Chapters 5 and 6.

Analysing the diaries The participants Eight teachers participated in the study. They worked in seven organizations, varying in size but typical for the sector in terms of management structures, conditions of employment, location in major tourist centres and recruitment of students from regions favoured by the sector as a whole: primarily Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan and Switzerland. The participating teachers had experience and qualifications that also typify the sector. All had taught in organizations internationally, mainly in the United Kingdom, Europe and Japan, and had at least the minimum qualifications required by the regulatory authority (an undergraduate degree and one month certificate in teaching English to adults). All had the CELTA certificate, the most common for teachers internationally and in Australia. Their qualifications and English language teaching (ELT) experience are summarized in Table 4.1. 68

Professional Practice As a Site of Struggle Table 4.1

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The diarists

Diarist

Qualifications

Years’ ELT experience

Collette

BA CELTA Grad Dip Ed BA CELTA BSc CELTA BA CELTA MA (App Ling) BA CELTA RSA Dip TEFLA BA CELTA BA CELTA BA CELTA

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Simon Terry Karen

Joanna

Michael Andrew Sandra

3 2 9

8

2 1 1

Each teacher kept a diary for a month. The diary guidelines asked the diarists to describe any incidents that caused them difficulty in maintaining their professional role as a teacher, whatever they understood ‘professional’ to mean. In identifying these incidents, diarists were asked to record only those that were recurrent – and not merely maverick events that may or may not recur – because these were more likely to evidence features characteristic of practices within the sector. The guidelines also suggested which aspects of these incidents to record. These included present and absent participants whom the diarist felt were relevant to the incident; a description of what happened; how it affected the diarist and other participants (present or absent); the causes of the incident as perceived by the diarist and reflections on any similarities between this and other incidents familiar to the diarist. Coding the narratives Following the coding procedures recommended by Miles and Huberman (1994), the analysis of the narratives aimed to develop a thematic coding system, grounded in the data and guided by my resources as analyst.

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The coding system was developed by first generating a provisional ‘start list’ (1994, p. 28) of codes based on the analysis of a single diary that served as the basis for subsequent analysis. This provided a tentative but coherent coding system which could be extended and refined through its application to further diaries. The analysis of these involved the same recursive, exploratory approach described in Chapter 2, in which the evolving system of codes was loosely held and open to revision and refinement as the analysis progressed. Glaser and Strauss (1967, p. 105) summarize this process as follows: each stage after a time is transformed into the next – earlier stages do remain in operation simultaneously throughout the analysis and each provides continuous development to its successive stage until the analysis is terminated. After coding the sixth diary, no further amendments were made to the existing codes and only one new code emerged through the coding of the seventh and eighth diaries. The final coding system was then deemed, in Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) terms, to have reached ‘saturation’. The key findings to emerge as the coding progressed concerned the relationships between teaching practices, evaluative/appraisal practices, and the characteristics diarists assigned to the different participants. The following sections explain these relationships and in doing so address the question of how the teachers perceived their practices to be affected by commercialization.

Relations between teachers, managers and students The diaries suggest that teachers’ practices shape and are shaped by a three-way struggle between managers, teachers and students over their commercial and pedagogic values and interests, the dominant influence being the commercial relationship between managers and students. In these struggles, the diarists believed that their authority as teachers was being overridden by both management and students, thereby compromising their ability to teach according to their understanding of professional standards. This three-way pattern of tension emerged in the data in practices associated with evaluation and appraisal in which managers, teachers and students struggle over how teaching is to be practised and understood. Figure 4.1 illustrates the relations between the three groups.

Professional Practice As a Site of Struggle

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Teachers

Struggle in/over evaluation/ appraisal


Teachers’ practices Managers

Figure 4.1


Students

Relations between teachers, managers and students.

Before discussing the data in detail, it is important to explain that while Figure 4.1 shows each group enclosed within a circle, this is not meant to imply that they are homogenous, that they do not collaborate, or that they are not influenced differently by absent participants. Complicating the picture of struggles between the groups are distinctions that the diarists drew between and within the three groups. In relation to students, several diarists contrasted students who made little effort in learning and expected this to be provided by the teacher, with those whom teachers reported to want to study ‘hard’. Further complicating the identification of students as a homogeneous group were the cultural differences teachers perceived among them. These differences affected teachers’ ability to distinguish between culturally determined and commercially motivated behaviour, adding to the uncertainty they had about how to teach students. There is also evidence for a distinction between current and prospective students,

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based on the commercial significance managers accorded prospective students. In distinguishing between teachers, one diarist drew attention to the different expectations and levels of competence teachers themselves bring to teaching. These differences are shaped by the training teachers receive and shape how they respond to commercial pressures. Two further distinctions complicate the relationships between the groups but were less clearly made in the diaries. First, there are differences between managers. For example, there are those involved in finance and marketing, who are usually more senior, and those in educational management who are normally recruited from the teaching staff and often retain a part-time teaching role. However, the diarists’ perception of managers as a collective, or at least as closely allied, is reflected throughout the diaries. Where distinctions were made, these focused on educational managers as concerned about ‘status’, rather than ‘profit’, and as feared by teachers because of their role in evaluating/appraising teachers on senior management’s behalf. Just as the characteristics of the groups have to be qualified by distinctions within them, so, in evaluation/appraisal practices, was the three-way relationship between the groups complicated by collaborations. These occurred when interests which were shared by two groups conflicted with those of the third. Thus, the diarists perceived teachers to support students against managers’ interests, and managers to support students against teachers’ interests. They reported teachers and students to collaborate over complaints about the quality of teaching conditions, facilities and the ratio of students to teachers in classes, and managers and students to collaborate in the evaluation/appraisal of teachers. Further complicating the diarists’ accounts was the influence of absent participants within the broader national and international contexts, which included international recruitment agents, teacher training organizations, unions, the education sector as whole, the regulatory authority and the federal government. The remaining sections of the chapter bring together the analysis of the diaries and the social-theoretical account of commercialization to explain the components of Figure 4.1. The explanation reflects the organization of Figure 4.1. The first section focuses on the characteristics the diarists ascribed to each participant, and the subsequent sections on how the diarists perceived these characteristics to shape and be shaped by evaluation/appraisal practices, and the final section on how these practices affected other teaching-related practices.


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The role of the teacher The major theme in the diarists’ characterizations of themselves was their role as teachers. This theme emerged from a combination of three sub-themes, reflecting the diarists’ perceptions that the teacher’s role involved contradictory pressures between commercial and teaching interests; that teachers brought different expectations and competence to teaching and that they complied with commercial pressures because they feared redundancy if they did not. Of these, the most frequently occurring themes were the contradictory pressures of the teacher’s role, which was referred to 13 times, by six diarists, and fear of redundancy, referred to 14 times, by seven diarists. An example from Karen’s diary draws together the points made in the other diaries under the theme of ‘contradictory pressures’, and establishes the broader themes of three-way struggle and professional insecurity which run through the diaries. Ultimately I feel that I want/need to leave the industry altogether – it has grown too fast. Well-qualified, professional teachers teaching [General English courses] have an almost impossible task – differing student expectations and study objectives conflict with what the college wants to give them (which isn’t itself always clear) – all of these then collide with what teachers want to do in the classroom and their version of the best way to go about it. Students want to leave feeling they have made huge progress in their English and that it is the teachers’ responsibility to fulfil this aim, the college and management want students to leave as a satisfied client who will spread the good word and encourage them to attend the school so that the Marketing Manager doesn’t have to go on so many o.s. trips to create new markets. Teachers want to do a lot of different things – the main one is to feel they are doing something rewarding and fulfilling – I don’t. Here Karen identifies the intra-personal struggle of being subject to the pull of competing commercial and pedagogic interests. Recalling Fairclough’s (1992) notion of ‘contradictory interpellation’ and underscoring the theme of workplace struggle introduced in Chapter 3, she explains the struggle in terms of tensions between the teacher’s interest in maintaining professional standards and managers’ and students’ interests in concluding a commercial exchange for which students expect to gain English language proficiency as their due from the teacher.

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Karen’s reference to ‘the Marketing Manager’ to represent commercial interests is used by other diarists to explain the intra-personal struggle itself. For example, Terry foregrounds this notion in explaining the tensions he experiences. I suppose this brings me to the problem of economics versus education within our industry. Classes closed, put together, students at inappropriate levels to facilitate numbers. I could write forever about this but I’m sure you get the gist. Marketing issues are always difficult – what does a teacher do when a student is in the wrong level due to classes being full? What does a teacher do when it’s freezing in the class and the students are more interested in the internal climate and complaining about the studying? Where is the teacher and where is the marketing manager within each teacher? And Michael explains that his ‘dilemma’ in telling a student recruitment agent how his students were progressing involved a similar conflict, observing that, in reporting to the agent on the students’ progress, ‘I slipped into Company Marketing Rep mode but I couldn’t help feeling that this really wasn’t my job’. And a further example from Michael illustrates how the contradictory role required of teachers extends into the minutiae of frontstage interaction, in which the teacher is uncertain of the standards against which he will be judged and whether, therefore, to present himself as a ‘teacher’ or ‘customer service rep’. While passing through the library a senior teacher entered with a group of people in tow. I remember stopping and wondering what my role in their passage should entail. Initially I was unsure who they were – visitors, prospective students, enrolled students or study tour participants or agents. When I decided they were new to [name of organization] the next question was whether to assume a helpful smiling demeanour, carry on with my business or wait for the teacher to introduce me. I settled for a hesitant smile and excused myself. The senior teacher gave little indication as to whether this was what was expected. This is not the first time I’ve been undecided as to what role I should adopt – teacher or customer service rep. These references to an obligation to include a marketing function within the teaching role recall Abercrombie’s (1990) point that it is the groups who attract new clients which have increasing authority in institutions that supply the needs of ‘enterprising’ consumers. By aligning one side


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of their internal struggle with the interests of marketing the diarists draw attention not only to the priority of marketing within these organizations but also to the authority this implies for students. This reflects the fact that the increasing authority of consumers and those involved in attracting them is matched by a corresponding reduction in the authority of those involved in production. Within Abercrombie’s account, this would include teachers – and their relative lack of authority is indeed referred to throughout the diaries as a feature of their contradictory roles. The perception that the teacher’s role is compromised by pressure to serve consumer and marketing interests can, however, itself be problematized. Collette, the most experienced teacher among the diarists, observes that some people mistake their role entirely, and see themselves as something else . . . so we have teaching as social work and teaching as therapy for the teacher . . . certainly, language rarely seems to come to the foreground. By focusing on differences between teachers’ expectations and competence, Collette draws attention to the resources which teachers bring to teaching, how these shape their understanding of what teaching is, and consequently how they respond to commercial pressures. These resources are therefore significant in explaining how teachers construe their role, and Collette’s perception of their variability suggests that, among teachers, the notion of the ‘professional’ teacher itself may be problematic. The question of how teachers themselves understand teaching points to the importance of teaching qualifications in shaping teachers’ perceptions of what teaching involves and of what a teacher is. The question of how this influence occurs is taken up below, in relation to teacher training, and in Chapter 6 in relation to the international market in education. From the teachers’ perspective, the diaries suggest that the other major influence on the tension teachers experience is fear of being made redundant. Terry indicates that this fear arises within a job market increasingly characterized by short-term, casual employment contracts, observing that ‘the casualisation of the industry continues to encourage disempowerment’. This fear is typically associated with practices that involve evaluation/appraisal of teachers by management or students. For example, Michael illustrates how fear of redundancy arises in the process of staff development, a practice which he suspects is used as a form of performance appraisal.

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A head teacher was in my group and it felt quite difficult to talk about bad lessons (recent ones) while Management is constantly cutting back staff and trimming hours of sessional teachers. Whether or not disclosure in a workshop is used as a basis of making decisions about teaching competency is hard to determine. I find it hard to believe it could be fully erased from a Management Agent’s memory. Because of this suspicion he does not contribute to the session, fearing that to participate would jeopardize his job. Further entries suggest that fear of redundancy is greater for less experienced teachers, who are usually given the shortest-term contracts, and whom the diarists report to be most likely to succumb to commercial pressure. For example, Andrew describes how another inexperienced teacher, Constance, succumbed to this combination of fear and compliance. Another teacher, Constance, asked me today if I thought it was a good idea if we tried to get back the $40 we’d spent on a school competition from the school’s petty cash supply. I was dumb-founded that she would even ask me!! She’s one of those teachers who works so bloody hard, and is seen to be one of the beasts of burden around the place; a characteristic that certain other teachers and even [education manager] heartily takes advantage of. If there’s ever a new idea to experiment on, some professional development to be involved in or something to be created or organized, Constance is always around to be foisted into the lime-light by someone else. As relatively new teachers, we accept this as a form of ‘initiation’ which just may assist us in improving the longevity of our positions at [name of organization]. When Constance asked Andrew ‘if I thought it was a good idea if we tried to get back the $40’, the implication is not that she was unsure about the legitimacy of her claim, but rather whether it would be imprudent to ask. Terry provides a clue as to the nature of this imprudence. He describes how some teachers do not take sick leave for fear of management’s reaction. I also know some teachers who work on through a cold or flu because they don’t want to be a ‘bother’ to their [education manager]. I think it’s important that trainee teachers are carefully made aware of their rights – not necessarily from the union – but from the


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trainers. I suppose it comes back to a point I made earlier about people being/feeling rather insecure about their jobs and not wanting to rock the boat – although the denial of sick leave through what [amounts to] emotional blackmail is completely unacceptable. This is a dilemma that resembles Constance’s in its subordination of what Terry calls ‘rights’ to what he identifies here as a desire not to be a ‘bother’ to management for fear of being negatively appraised. The vulnerability of inexperienced teachers to these pressures is compounded by a tendency to recruit teachers on the basis of low cost. As Collette explains, this school employs a big majority of relatively inexperienced teachers, and they do not teach, as I did when I was inexperienced, a limited number of hours. I remember that I started by teaching two days a week and feeling swamped even by that. Now those teachers teach more than any of the experienced teachers (except me, and I am regarded as being eccentric because I still prefer to teach). They tend to teach the full . . . week, with perhaps half a day off for some other responsibility they have been given. This time is also often taken up with relief teaching. Being on the bottom of the heap, these teachers have no power to fob this duty off onto anyone else. These teachers are often confused and exhausted. With a very few exceptions they take their work very seriously, spend hours in preparation, and feel devastated if something ‘didn’t go well’. For some reason, the experienced teachers’ unwillingness to teach is taken as a given, and does not get questioned by the academic management, who, I guess, suffer from the same malaise themselves. Commercial considerations would seem to demand that the clients be served by the most able teachers, but instead they are served by the cheapest. Collette goes on to suggest that this vulnerability is compounded by teachers being employed for their physical attractiveness to students. In identifying attractive teachers as a ‘selling point’, she notes that when you look at the less-experienced and therefore cheaper teachers that are hired, there are certain characteristics that emerge. These teachers tend, for example, to be younger and better-looking than the run of the population. I would guess at a mean age of approximately 26. None of them have any visible physical defect, or are overweight. Very few of them even wear glasses . . . . This reminds me

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of the ads I used to see in the Japan Times for ‘young, blond female English teacher, attractive and under 28’. Schools associated with universities seem to have a more representative mix but it may be that being associated with a university is a strong enough selling point in itself without the need to focus on other points, including this, the ‘school as sexual shop window’ factor. In our school, the few teachers who are older invariably teach on migrant classes – I am the only exception – and in those classes the salesmanship element is not present. Management would be quick to condemn the Japan Times type of advertising, but I think that they must be selecting with similar characteristics themselves. They would be loathe to admit it, but they know that, for example, Japanese girl students often swoon over handsome young male teachers, and that this factor would affect their assessments of the school. In their intra-personal struggles to reconcile the pressures of teaching and commerce, the fear of redundancy, then, generated within evaluation/appraisal practices to which inexperienced teachers are particularly vulnerable, provides the chief incentive for teachers to align themselves with commercial interests at the expense of teaching. As evidenced in the next section, this alignment involves a Gramscian (1988) ‘consent’ with managers, whose interest in subordinating teaching interests to those of commerce is, according to the diarists, their most significant characteristic. Managers’ priorities The major theme in the diarists’ characterizations of managers focused on the priorities that drive their management of teaching. The theme was supported by 20 examples of how managers prioritized commercial interests over those of teaching, these interests being primarily concerned with the need to retain current students and attract new ones. In addition, Collette – perhaps because of her greater experience in the sector – distinguished between managers who were concerned with profit and those who were motivated by status. A theme instantiated in only one diary is included here both because it resonates with my experience and because it draws attention to differences between teachers and managers, and between managers themselves. Illustrating why managers prioritize commerce over teaching, an incident reported by Michael again draws attention to the centrality of marketing, exemplifying how the diarists perceived managers’


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commercial priority of attracting students to override the interests of teaching. A lesson I had collaborated on with another teacher was vetoed by the Head Teacher. Reasoning was that it was too sensitive from a marketing perspective. The topic was in response to a student request. The tension between pedagogy and company demands was particularly obvious here. The other teacher was a bit surprised by all this and was under the impression that student generated subject matter was OK to use regardless of topic. I am no longer so sure about this. All the crap about needs analysis, social utility and authentic materials all seems like rhetoric these days . . . . Another teacher is crying in the staff room at the moment. She has been censored or chastised in some way for using video material concerning Pauline Hanson. This is a similar situation to the one previously experienced by me and several others. [Name of teacher] is calming her down. [She] is the media person responsible for taping radio, TV. Apparently the company sees this material as being out of kilter with the kind of image that [it] is trying to promote. She was given a note that included the following: ‘No matter what your missionary aims are . . . ’. The fact that she was sent the message rather than being invited to discuss it seems to be a feature of an organisation or a body corporate rather than a school. The lessons had focused on Pauline Hanson, a member of the Australian Federal Parliament who had developed a social/political stance that was widely interpreted, both nationally and internationally, to be racist. The example makes clear that Michael considers the selection of teaching materials – the teachers’ practice compromised in the example – to be a part of his professional expertise, a perception that is consistent with my own experience as a teacher. Michael’s rejection of ‘all the crap’ reflects a view that managers, in asserting this commercial priority, devalue the professional value of practices as they are understood by teachers. The larger patterns of commercially motivated intervention revealed in the diaries affect the range of areas teachers count as relevant to their professional expertise. The nature of these interventions and their social-theoretical significance are examined in relation to the struggles between managers, teachers and students, below. As with her observations on differences between teachers, above, Collette was the only diarist to draw distinctions between managers, explaining that some groups involved in management are motivated

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not by commercial interests but by status. In the four segments from her diary under the code ‘Profit or status drives managers’, she observes that of course there is the strange phenomenon that the more experienced the teacher, the less likely they are to actually teach. For nine staff members who might be regarded as senior – they have an MA . . . or have just been teaching for a long time . . . . There are four who do not teach at all. While often telling people how important teaching standards are, most of these people would rather have their wisdom teeth drawn than go into the classroom. Since management is happy to countenance this, it must mean that they believe that these people contribute more to the well-being of the company by not teaching. Not teaching is a sign of status, and sometimes you hear people say ‘only a teacher’. In explaining this ‘strange phenomenon’, her argument that it is ‘status’ which motivates teachers to become involved in management because ‘not teaching is a sign of status’ implies that that teachers share and perpetuate this view of their own status. Later in her diary, Collette explains that this desire among teachers to accrue higher status by entering management leads to a division between ‘management on the teaching side’ and ‘management who have never taught’, which would typically include managers in areas such as finance and marketing who are motivated by ‘commercial interests’ and ‘profit’. Returning to the links with Chapter 3, the perception that teaching has low status, especially among the most experienced teachers, provides further evidence that teachers are, as Bourdieu (1991) predicts, complicit in the devaluation of the their own practices. Again Gramsci’s (1988) notion of ‘consent’ is useful here – specifically, in his explanation of the link between ‘consent’ and ‘prestige’, according to which ‘spontaneous consent . . . to the general direction imposed on social life’ by the dominant social group is ‘caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production’ (p. 307). It is with this consensus in place, he argues, that coercion becomes less necessary and can be held in reserve, an ever-present threat for moments in which groups fail to consent. As we shall see below, this threat and the acquiescence it engenders are inseparable from employment appraisal and the risk of redundancy.


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Students as learners In describing students, the major theme was that students made little effort in learning. This was exemplified by entries that described how students lacked commitment to learning or, if they were committed, were frustrated by the behaviour of those who did not, and how students had authority over teachers based on the obligation on the college to repay its debt to students in a way which meets their expectations. To a lesser extent, diarists focused on the influence of students’ cultures on their learning, a focus that problematizes the characteristics ascribed to students by raising differences between students’ cultures as an influence on the diarists’ interpretations of their behaviour. In describing their perception that students made little effort in learning, the diarists gave examples of how students would not take the initiative in class, would not follow the teacher’s instructions and would expect to graduate to the next level of proficiency without having made an effort to study. Karen noted that the system and students’ perception of it annoys the hell out of me. Is it only me who has language learning as the goal? The students who’re most insistent about going up who spend all their time with other students, hardly open a paper and demand I tell them everything. This and the other examples under this theme suggest a view of teaching and learning that places pressure on the teacher to ‘provide’ students with learning, as if the debt owed to students by the college were to be repaid as a ready-made product to be consumed, rather than a language to be learnt. The pressure these expectations place on the teacher’s role were described by Andrew, who perceived that students expect a form of ‘entertainment’ in which teachers are responsible for students’ learning. I’m well aware of the cultural differences when it comes to basic communication in the classroom; the way the more diffident, selfconscious students tend to retreat when ‘louder’ ones are on their soap boxes, but one wonders sometimes if the silence is really a form of something else other than genuine lack of ability. It’s my opinion that many students think that teachers are there in front of them for entertainment purposes; that if they sit there long enough and keep their mouths shut, that somehow the teacher will finally get frustrated enough, stop trying to make them speak, and ‘show’ them what they SHOULD be doing.

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And Karen commented that when teachers voice concerns directors/owners will often reply by suggesting that the teachers’ skill/mastery is in their ability to achieve this impossible balance. At the end of the day the teacher aims for something which makes as many students as possible feel that they are learning, not that their teacher is teaching them without students having to put in any real effort. Karen goes on to explain that students may exert this expectation that they be, in her words, ‘spoon-fed’ using the financial authority which derives from the debt owed to them by the college. She writes that students seem to feel that all this money entitles them to make all sorts of exacting and ridiculous demands on their teacher, that I am responsible for their program and that they are there to be spoon-fed. Few students . . . show genuine motivation or display study skills/learning strategies. Most are in holiday mode and I wonder why they bother at all. This understanding of teaching and learning is, however, according to the diarists not shared by all students. Three diarists – Simon, Terry and Karen – compared students who wanted to study ‘hard’ with those who did not. Simon linked this preference to the conflict between commercial and teaching interests, explaining that he had allowed students who had not paid for the course into his class at least in part because they ‘want to study hard’. It is one of the core conflicts . . . between the business people who run the colleges for profit, often with little understanding or concern about education, and the teachers, who tend to see their work as part of a caring profession and definitely appreciate having students who like them and/or who want to study hard. Further contributing to tensions between students and teachers is the question of what constitutes working hard in language learning. As Karen explains, students who perceive that teaching does not require them to work hard may thereby reveal an understanding of language learning which differs from that of the teacher.


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A student was unhappy because she felt that by doing skills work in afternoon lessons we weren’t ‘studying English’ which is grammar and writing. I had a long discussion with her trying to explain the usual things. ‘I paid a lot of money and some people are here just for holidays and fun’. What she wanted was hard work, not fun and games. I left work feeling stressed and tired that this was a problem which could never be solved. In this situation, a student perceives that ‘skills work’ is not ‘studying English’, which for the student involves studying ‘grammar and writing’. This leads the student to complain about both the behaviour of the other students in class and the teaching methodology employed by the teacher. What Karen means by explaining ‘the usual things’ to the student are the arguments teachers use to try to convince students of the educational value of problem solving and other activities designed to develop students’ skills in using language as a means of communication, collectively called ‘communicative activities’. Karen’s reference to these arguments as ‘usual’ points to the ubiquity of these differing expectations among students and of the resources teachers develop to respond to them. As evidenced in my own narratives, tensions over the value of communicative activities are common, particularly in courses with no specific academic or vocational focus. These struggles over methodology, then, differ from those in which students expect the teacher to ‘provide’ learning – arising from expectations of language proficiency as a debt to be repaid. However, in classrooms, as Karen’s example indicates, the interaction of these two kinds of tension can exacerbate the intra- and inter-personal tension experienced by teachers. Also relevant here is the fact that, though the student in Karen’s example may not have based her expectations of teaching on the ‘provision’ of learning by the teacher, she still drew on the authority conferred by the debt to her as a client in arguing that the teaching methodology used should meet her expectations. Finally, three diarists, Collette, Terry and Andrew, provided examples of how cultural differences, both between students and between students and teachers, affected their understandings of students’ attitudes and behaviours. As with different expectations about teaching methodology, these examples show that it is not always in practice possible to separate out the effects of cultural difference from those of the commercial relationship between the college and students. This uncertainty is exemplified in the observation by Andrew cited above that, notwithstanding his awareness ‘of the cultural differences when it comes to

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basic communication in the classroom’, he still suspects that the students may remain silent in class because they ‘think that teachers are there in front of them for entertainment purposes’. Collette highlighted this intertwining of commercial and cultural factors in tensions between teachers and students in her observation that I believe there is also an element of punishment and revenge in the desire to tell the customers, who are sometimes far from fun, that their eating habits are disgusting and their politics suspect. By identifying the ‘customer’ here, Collette isolates the commercial relationship which students have with the college, and which the teacher is in turn pressured to honour in a way which meets the commercial priority of attracting more students. While the notion that teachers might take ‘revenge’ on students as customers is consistent with the frustrations the diarists expressed in trying to cope with the contradictory pressures on their roles as teachers, the implication here is that this revenge may be exacted not on the student as a customer, but as culturally different – the broader point being that cross-cultural understanding is here a casualty of commercialization. As well as underscoring the theme of struggle discussed in Chapter 3, these examples raise the question of how teachers explain the pressures they experience. This question is brought into focus in the next section in relation to the influence of absent participants. Absent participants Consistent with my experience, the diarists explained contradictory pressures on teachers as resulting from the circumstances of the organization – its particular students’ attitudes to teaching and learning, and its managers and their priorities – rather than seeing the organization itself as shaped within the broader economic, social and political context. Absent participants, then, do not figure largely in the diarists’ explanations of their practices. Of the absent participants referred to, agents and teacher training were perceived to be the most significant in shaping the teacher’s role. Six diarists gave examples of how the authority overseas recruitment agents possess shapes the commercial pressures experienced by teachers. With their capacity to recruit students, agents can contribute significantly to the commercial performance of a college. As explained in my educational manager’s narrative, the feedback they receive from students influences their decisions on which organizations to recommend


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to students. Agents, then, share with students the authority that comes from being able to influence the number of students who enrol. A difference between them is that agents usually have a greater influence on enrolments than students. Michael illustrates how he perceives this authority to operate, describing how teachers can consent to be generous in assessing students if they understand that the student or their agent can affect the commercial viability of the organization. He describes how a teacher was asked by an educational manager what mark the teacher thought a student should get. ‘What do you think?’ there seemed little doubt what sort of answer this type of question was supposed to elicit. Of course the teacher supplied the answer that was required and the student received the highest marks. This has happened quite a few times over the last month and it’s usually because the student in question (or their agent) is able to influence repeat or further business for the company. I don’t know if it’s talked about explicitly in some instances but it always seems to be just under the surface. Whereas Michael’s example emphasizes consent, Andrew reports how he perceives this process to work in another example that foregrounds the coercive potential of this pressure. The pressure being applied manifests itself in the following ways. A student may remark that I marked his/her attendance ‘too harshly’; in other words I was being honest about a lack of punctuality, etc. Word gets back to the student’s agent, who complains to a member of Admin . . . . For the sake of keeping things peaceful, I’m asked to be ‘lenient’ with my marking . . . . What the hell do I do in a situation like this one? While the commercial influence of agents contributes to the pressures on teachers’ practices, four diarists observed that teacher training was also relevant. Their comments focused on ways in which training could better prepare teachers to cope with the competing pressures on their role. Collette captures this point when she describes how a group of teachers reacted to her explaining that their role involved a commercial relationship with students. All in all, there seemed to be little realisation that we are providing a service to a customer. One man said that this was a new concept for

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him and he was happy with it, and felt that it made him more secure, because he could realise clearly what was the nature of his work. Such pragmatism is rare. Inexperienced teachers who have done a short course in one method of language teaching cannot be expected, of course, to be very flexible in their approach. By ‘one method in language teaching’ she is almost certainly referring to the teaching methodology associated with the CELTA, and her comments again draw attention to the influence of teacher training on teachers’ responses to the tensions that shape their role. Developing this point further, I suggest in Chapter 6 that, while the CELTA does not raise awareness of these tensions among trainees, the teaching methodology it promotes fits well with the commercial imperative to provide ‘ready-made’ learning to students. Unions were also included as absent participants who are able, at least potentially, to support teachers in maintaining their professional practices. Three diarists described ways in which unions could have assisted them in struggles with management, and Sandra observed that she would have asked the union for help when she was made redundant if she had been a member. Her example illustrates a way in which the influence of the union as an absent participant is less than it might be because, as explained above, the most vulnerable teachers are those on short-term contracts and they are less likely than permanent employees to join the union. As Sandra explained, ‘I wasn’t in the union, was I? Was going to join when I was more “permanent” ’. The next section turns to how the tensions identified by the diarists between teachers, managers and students are revealed in the practices in which they evaluate/appraise each other.

Evaluation and appraisal The tensions between the three groups emerge most clearly in struggles in and over evaluation/appraisal practices, in which teachers perceived their evaluations, in the form of professional opinions, to be subordinated to those of managers, reflecting the commercial priority of attracting and retaining students, and to those of students, reflecting their authority as clients. The diaries suggest that teachers may comply with the evaluations of managers and students even where these evaluations compromise their understanding of professional standards. They do so because a negative evaluation by managers, or from students to managers, can, they


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fear, reduce their employment security. While there are instances in the diaries of managers and students evaluating teachers’ practices in order to change them, there also appear to be examples of teachers selfregulating their practices in accordance with their understanding of the producer–consumer relationship. These examples suggest that fear of negative evaluation may induce teachers to shape their own practices in ways which create contradictions in their role. Again, this self-regulation recalls how, in Bourdieu’s theory of practice, less powerful classes may come to subordinate themselves (Bourdieu, 1991), and further supports Gramsci’s (1988) account of how consent operates together with coercion by enabling it to be kept in the background, the more effective as a perpetual threat, to be kept in reserve and used only when consent gives out. Teachers were unanimous in the perception that managers’ decisions on teaching matters are influenced by the commercial implications of students’ evaluations of teaching. Four diarists illustrated this theme in examples of how decisions on teaching were driven by students’ complaints. An incident reported by Michael is typical. He describes how complaints from students led a head teacher to override assessment results in order to change students to the level of class they wanted. Head Teacher overheard bowing to student complaints about levels resulting from oral and written tests. Several changes as a result. It seems the customer is always right. I suppose the last few days have highlighted just how arbitrary placement really is. I’ve always had doubts about the precision of the testing instruments but I’m even more cynical about the process. The example and Michael’s observation that ‘It seems the customer is always right’ draw attention to the significance attached to students’ complaints by managers, and the authority teachers perceive students to have in virtue of the debt they are owed as clients. Moreover, the example illustrates how managers’ acquiescence in complaints can devalue teaching practices, leading, in this case, to Michael’s becoming ‘even more cynical about the process’. Collette provided a further example, showing how she perceived managers’ decisions on teaching standards to be shaped more generally by students’ complaints. As far as teaching standards are concerned, there is little interest in them until there is a complaint, and then there is a great deal of scuttling about and allocation of blame. This happened the

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other day when a very inexperienced teacher was rostered to teach a . . . class . . . and students complained about the number of excursions she took them on. She had not been given any course outline for the [class] and was not capable of organising one for herself. Nor should she have been expected to be. She had simply been thrown in. No-one considered the matter until the complaint was made, and then she was blamed because she could not swim. In drawing attention to ‘teaching standards’ here, Collette’s example not only illustrates the importance of students’ complaints to the management of teaching, but also raises the question of how these priorities shape the definition of teaching itself. This is seen more clearly where students’ complaints not only prompt managers to intervene in teaching but give rise to a collaborative relationship between managers and students over the evaluations/appraisal of teaching itself. In meeting their side of the commercial exchange with students, managers advance a definition of teaching that reflects the students’ expectation that teachers provide learning and are responsible for students’ progress. From the teachers’ perspective, then, the diaries suggest that managers understand the primary purpose of teaching as being to maximize students’ satisfaction on receipt of learning. Implicit in this obligation on the teacher to provide learning is the combining of teaching and learning into a single process in which the teacher is wholly implicated and which constitutes the debt to be repaid to students. Within this process students are cast as passive recipients of teaching/learning. As Karen observed in recounting a director’s opinion of teachers’ responsibilities, ‘never could students be at fault, lazy, incapable bad language learners, lacking in motivation, everything came back to the teacher’. She captured this nexus of student happiness, teaching quality and the teachers’ responsibility for progress in learning in another example in which a student’s complaint might have, but turned out not to, reflected poorly on her. My difficult student situation was sorted out – everything was OK because it wasn’t my lessons that were a problem. The Head Teacher actually said ‘She was very happy with you . . . you are a very good teacher . . . but we knew you were a very good teacher anyway!’ Nobody at this school has ever observed or seen me teach – students thought I was good so I must be. Student is unhappy with other teacher Z so she must be bad. Students’ judgements about quality of teaching seem to be holier than thou. I was amazed that students


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degree of satisfaction with the product was confused with/equated with actual quality. This leads to an endless cycle of s/he’s a good teacher s/he’s a bad teacher – a game which I’m expected to play. Being good/bad seems critical in determining students’ satisfaction and is also the reason given for ultimate success or failure. Her experience illustrates how the focus on students’ happiness as the desideratum of teaching accords with the account of ‘colonization’ (Fairclough, 1992) in Chapter 3, exemplified here by the way in which performance appraisal in terms of teaching standards is replaced by appraisal that implements commercial priorities. Moreover, her account also supports Fairclough’s (1996) observation that professional development and appraisal are both practices in which colonization through technologization may occur. Elaborating this theme, a lack of explicitness about managers’ priorities was noted by two teachers. For example, Michael described how there seem to be a number of coded phrases that mean ‘Put this person up to keep them happy’ or ‘it’s necessary to achieve a balance in class numbers for this person to be promoted’. Typical egs are – ‘She always does her homework. What dya reckon?’ – ‘His attendance is good, what do you think?’ These invitations to respond illustrate how inexplicitness about the actual grounds for overriding the teacher’s evaluation can maintain the fiction that it is not being overridden, and at the same time constitute a forceful prompt to consent to the devaluation of the teacher’s own professional expertise. Collette underscored the tendency for managers to maintain the illusion that ‘quality’ in teaching was an overriding priority. Commenting on a moment when a manager acknowledged to her, ironically, the need to prioritize commercial interests over those of teaching, she observed that I thought this was particularly interesting as it revealed the fact that management is aware of the tension between the teachers’ perception of their role and their view of management with its eye on the bottom line. This might seem obvious, but sometimes it becomes obscured in our institution where there is such verbal stress put on quality control . . . . It is rather charming, though, like a fox pretending to be a chicken with the aid of a few glued- on feathers and as cardboard beak.

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Interpreted in light of the argument in Chapter 3, these examples suggest that without being sure of the criteria by which their teaching is being appraised, teachers’ ‘social capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986), the expertise that they hold as members of the teaching profession, becomes not only devalued but also destabilized, no longer defined in relation to professional standards but vulnerable to unpredictable shifts in priorities which may lie beyond the teacher’s knowledge and control. This institutional devaluation of professional standing and practice also resonates strongly with Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) account of growing deprofessionalization, explained above, in which expertise and individual specialization is undermined in a process by which professional knowledge and practices are redefined to serve institutional requirements. In this environment, teachers reported acting cautiously, exercising self-control where they could, aware that their job security depended on being careful in how they evaluated managers and to ensure that they are liked by students and that managers know this. An experience recounted by Simon exemplifies this perception of the need for caution. I’m naturally always happy when students like being in my class and I want the [educational manager] to know it too, particularly as on a few occasions over the past few years she and her predecessor ‘had words’ with me regarding students who didn’t like me or my teaching and I was put through the wringer of lesson observations to see whether I was up to scratch or not. This is a conflict due to the ‘quality control’ of teaching by the management. The trouble is that students become ‘clients’ who can damage a person’s employment prospects and management can use it to intimidate or get rid of a teacher they no longer want, for whatever reason. We deal with hundreds of students, but naturally like humans everywhere they don’t go to the boss to say something positive, but to complain. I really dislike the regular student evaluation system here and the way it is dealt with so that you often do not even hear about it if you have positive appraisals, but it makes your life hell if a couple of students, for whatever reason, complain. It’s really out of proportion if we are expected to please almost all of the people all of the time. In the example, Simon’s reference to ‘quality control’ provides a link between students’ and managers’ evaluation/appraisal of teachers and teachers’ consent to the revision of the purposes of appraisal. This is because in avoiding the risk to their employment prospects from


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students’ complaints, teachers can be seen as agreeing to prioritize the commercially motivated concern that they please students, a process that exemplifies the ‘strategically motivated simulation’ that is characteristic of the technologization of discourse (Fairclough, 1996). As Simon implies, this pressure to please is a pressure to treat students as clients and in doing so to acknowledge their commercial authority. The following entry from Karen illustrates the resulting tension. Conflicting goals, nationality, age, motivation, the image the school gives, what actually happens and what a student expects are all pulling at each other. In the middle is the teacher. I nearly decided to leave the industry that afternoon. I know that it was impossible to keep all my students happy, teach them in a way I felt was worthwhile and that they were also satisfied with. I am always aware of the fact that students must be kept happy or they’ll complain (I alerted the Head Teacher who talked to the student, who is content for the moment). I feel that I have to be all things to all people, a magician. That afternoon I wondered what course of action I should take and how I should teach – was I a good/bad teacher, what stance should I take. How should I be? The example highlights how the conflict between the need to maintain the ‘integrity’ (Keat, 1991a) of professional practice and the pressure to keep all her students ‘happy’ as a means of controlling their complaints shapes the contradictions in the teacher’s role – and in doing so provides further evidence of ‘contradictory interpellation’ (Fairclough, 1992). Moreover, through her identification of key learning variables, Karen draws attention to the implications of these tensions for teaching practices in general. These implications are taken up in the final sections of this chapter. Pressure on teachers not to criticize managers’ policies on teaching was reported by five diarists. There is some evidence that this pressure operates through both directives from managers and self-imposition by teachers, a combination that adds greater relevance to the interplay of coercion and consent (Gramsci, 1988). Seven of the diarists also described how their opinions, when they were given, were ignored or were reinterpreted according to commercial priorities. In an example which points to how teachers silence themselves, Michael describes how he was advised during a professional development session to be cautious by a teacher who was more familiar with the ‘institutional culture’ than he was.

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When paired with a teacher who I trusted and who had always taught at [level of class] for an extended period, I remarked that it felt uncool to talk about or challenge some ideals. She told me that it best to be extremely careful about what I said in the earshot of some teachers (senior teachers!) as they would make judgments about personnel based on these comments. She seemed particularly tuned in to the institutional culture and it was reassuring to hear her voice some of the reservations I had been personally entertaining about these matters. She stressed that saying the right things and being seen to fit into the school and its implicit assumptions about teaching was more important than what went on in the classroom. In this example, the mere presence of management representatives – carrying with it the threat of appraisal – is sufficient to silence teachers’ opinions. Michael’s perception that it ‘felt uncool to talk about or challenge some ideals’ suggests that through engaging in workplace practices and thereby monitoring the behaviour of others, he had come to share their caution about expressing opinions. The advice from the more experienced teacher ‘that it was best to be extremely careful about what I said’ confirms and clarifies his initial perception. This example lends support to the notion that teachers can come to self-regulate their compliance with commercial priorities through engagement in those practices which form, as Michael calls it, the ‘institutional culture’, thereby consenting to the control of the dominant group. While the example may suggest only the operation of consent, other examples provide evidence that teachers infer coercion in the authority of managers’ directives based on their understanding that these directives carry with them the threat of appraisal and therefore redundancy. Karen describes a staff meeting in which teachers are commenting on a new curriculum, about to be introduced by a director who is present at the meeting. There was lots of subtle criticism which was basically ignored – it would still be introduced. I again brought up the problem of long versus short-term students and their conflicting goals which created a great deal of dissatisfaction. Director replied that that was ‘the nature of the beast’ and that was the teacher’s challenge – to balance and manage this, implying that good teachers could and did, bad ones couldn’t and didn’t. I felt, once again, that teachers’ comments, constructive criticism was being ignored.


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The ‘problem’ of including both short- and long-term students in the same class is identified by the director not as a problem posed for teachers by commercial priorities but as a problem that is incorporated within the notion of teaching itself. This is, as the director puts it, ‘the nature of the beast’, which it is the teacher’s ‘challenge . . . to balance and manage’, implying, as Karen explains, ‘that good teachers could and did, bad ones couldn’t and didn’t’, the implication being that the stakes are the employment of teachers. In struggles between managers and teachers over evaluation/appraisal, then, the diaries provide evidence that teachers’ opinions are suppressed, either by teachers themselves or by managers, or, when voiced, are devalued by being either ignored or reinterpreted in accordance with commercial priorities. Three diarists provide evidence that this subordination of teachers’ opinions leads teachers to shore up the authority of their opinions by supporting students’ evaluations of teaching where these are directed at the organization. These include evaluations of the quality of facilities and resources, and the number of students and the range of their proficiency levels in classes. The examples suggest that when students complain about these aspects of the organization, teachers may collaborate with them because of shared interests and because – as evidenced above – students’ evaluations carry more authority over managers than those of teachers. Simon’s example illustrates this collaboration over mutual interests, and suggests that students are aware of the financial authority which forms the basis of the collaboration. Some of the ‘old’ students commented that [our classroom] was very small and I agreed. Should I have? I said I would say something about it but also hinted that students’ complaints received a quicker response than teachers’. ‘Yes, I know’ replied the student ‘because we pay money’. I nodded in tacit agreement. I know management would scream if they heard this. He went and complained at breaktime and so did I. I know whose complaint will be followed up first . . . . Do I shut up and accept the unacceptable or encourage them to complain – especially when they are paying a lot of money. Oddly enough, students are very aware of all those things once they have been at the school for a while. And, in an example that again underscores the prioritization of marketing, Joanna describes how students’ complaints were enlisted by

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teachers to support their case that a new building was inadequate for teaching. Since the day it was opened, it has largely been a marble monument for overseas agents, politicians ready to sing the school’s praises, and any other agents willing to assist the school in publicity or marketing. From the teachers’ perspective, there have been many pitfalls despite the flashy veneer both for themselves and their students. Although the . . . rooms overlook the gorgeous blue ocean horizon, they are not very conducive to teaching and learning. Today at the staff meeting, teachers complained of having to wear ‘sunnies’ in order to bear the glare of the late-rising winter sun. They revealed that students have been complaining that the back of their necks have been getting burnt as they turn from the reflected glare. Everyone insisted that we write these complaints into the minutes of the meeting, as their numerous requests to management over the past years for vertical blinds have gone ignored. OHP’s, needless to say, have become a useless tool, even though many new ones were purchased for the new building. More broadly, collaborations between managers and students over the evaluation of teachers, and between teachers and students over complaints about the organization, suggest that the commercialization of teachers’ practices draws on and gives rise to alliances, which themselves contribute to the reproduction of struggles between the three groups. This is exemplified by the assessment of students. Just as appraisal defines and measures teachers’ competence, assessment does so for students’ proficiency. The two practices are linked, then, in the way they draw on and reproduce particular definitions of teaching and learning. The diaries suggest that, consistent with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, these definitions are the focus of struggles between the groups in which assessment, like performance appraisal, is devalued. In this process, the capital that might accrue to students as an asset of their habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), in virtue of progress in language learning, is replaced by the ‘satisfaction’ they receive in virtue of their status as a client. This satisfaction takes the form of higher marks than a student’s proficiency warrants. The entries that illustrate this tendency focused on the ways in which teachers perceived pressure to reduce their standards of assessment and on how students resisted teachers’ assessments of their performance. These examples provide evidence both that the diarists


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perceived pressure to override their professional standards to ensure that students receive marks which would maintain their satisfaction as clients and that this devaluation of assessment operates through both coercion and consent (Gramsci, 1988). In an example that provides evidence of consent, Terry describes how some teachers raise students’ marks to ensure that they reflect well on how they teach. We had a discussion last week regarding ‘testing’ and I feel that too many teachers are catering the test for their students to achieve great results. I do not advocate an unfair test and am well aware of the pitfalls of assessment but without an accurate measure of ability our classes often become unworkable. Some teachers seem to think a mark of 60% is a fail or in some way a representation of their own failure to ‘teach’. Seems we have so many students with a pass rate of 80–90% who can’t speak. The interpretation that teachers may consent to inflate students’ marks to establish their success in teaching is consistent with the notion that performance appraisal is influenced by the teacher’s capacity to keep students ‘happy’. In this light, the inflation of marks can be understood as a means of enhancing job security, an example of teachers managing their fate within the struggle between commercial and pedagogic interests, and in doing so consenting to commercial priorities. On the other hand, in an example of coercion, Michael describes how he perceived himself to be directed by a head teacher to revise his assessment of a student’s proficiency level. She was a little disappointed in my ratings. She asked me to reconsider. I replied that I had thought it through carefully, yet she indicated that it was too low. I resented amending it and she asked me to erase my results and mark it for her attention. Presumably she intended to reflect a more glowing performance than I thought appropriate. She explained this by saying that he was a special case and that she would take care of it. The implication was that my professional opinion didn’t sync with another issue that I should have been aware of. I can only guess that there was a sales issue to consider. This type of thing is not atypical. Teachers usually intuit the situation better than I did. The tension between managers’ and teachers’ interests is evident here in the struggle over whether the student’s marks are to be raised. The

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teacher’s resistance, seen in his response that he ‘had thought about it carefully’, fails to prevent the head teacher from requiring him to ‘erase my results and mark it for her attention’. Michael’s explanation ‘that my professional opinion didn’t sync with another issue that I should have been aware of’ and that this was a ‘sales issue’ illustrates how, as with the examples of reinterpretation, above, the teacher’s opinion is here reinterpreted according to commercial priorities, drawing on inexplicit criteria, against a background in which such reappraisals derive their force from teachers’ fear of reducing their job security. Further evidence of how assessment is a focus of struggles between teachers, managers and students is seen in the students’ resistance to teachers’ assessments. Three diarists described how students pressed to remain in or be moved up to higher level classes despite their teachers’ opinion that these classes were too high for their level of proficiency. These examples show both the way this resistance devalues teachers’ understanding of their professional competence, and, simultaneously, compromises students’ ability to learn. Joanna illustrates this double cost in her account of how students are promoted to higher levels of proficiency than their actual competence warrants. We teachers persistently informed the directors and management about our ability to cater for the level mix in a maximally, or should I say ‘oversized’, elementary class. Nevertheless, they refused to open [another] class due to cost saving measures. In any case, returning to my original point of the consequences of this choice, this past week, I inherited the . . . class, and the student who had been at the school the longest, was in many ways the weakest. She refused to speak and wanted me to feed her words on a silver spoon, which she then ineptly reiterated. This particular student was one who had clamoured to be moved up, even though I counselled her and advised her against it because of her lack of fluency, inaccuracy, pronunciation difficulties, etc. Nevertheless, when the school itself decided to do a reshuffle, we chose this student go up. The philosophy was one I’ve seen repeatedly arise, that is ‘give the customer what s/he wants, regardless of educational objectives’. The result of following such a philosophy was the same on this occasion as always. A student left without truly improving her fluency, perhaps the one area where we can sometimes make a significance difference. Similarly, an example from Andrew described how he had advised a student not to move up to a higher level class where she wanted to


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go to be with a friend, but found that the student had later spoken to a manager, who had overridden Andrew’s advice. When I finally came face to face with her, she was obviously very upset that she wasn’t going up with her friend. I was diplomatic and sensitive to a tee, but nothing would console her and she broke down. This made me feel terrible, but I continued to try to explain the problems that she had with her language acquisition, and that if she had just another month in [current class], things might be better for her in the next module. Enter Monday morning, and there she is! Not in [lower level class] as I’d suggested . . . ! Apparently [the manager] had spoken with her and suggested that she go up . . . . I did feel rather guilty about making her cry the other day, but now I was angry. Admittedly I had spoken with [the manager] about this student’s negative response to my suggestion, (it was for her own good that she stayed . . . ), but I never thought that he would overturn my decision. Effectively what he’s done is undercut my professional opinion, and I’ve been left with the Big Bad Wolf syndrome. And the irony is . . . today the same student didn’t stop saying, ‘I don’t understand’. When do I put a student up or leave them where they are? Does it depend on theatrics, whether a student can convince a teacher to promote them? The fact that the experience left Andrew confused over what standards to apply in allocating students to classes provides further evidence for the intra-personal struggle that arises from trying to reconcile tensions between teaching and commercial priorities. It also illustrates how the value for students in having assessment results raised is that it enables them to progress to a higher level class – an outcome which, while providing satisfaction at the impression of progress, places students in classes which are too demanding for their level of proficiency. Faced with inappropriately placed students the class teacher has a choice between advising managers to overturn their own decision to promote the student and risking complaints from students by either lowering the level of teaching below those who are correctly placed to that of the weaker students or teaching to the correct level for the class and above the level of the weaker students. Struggles over assessment, then, shape and are shaped by the other struggles between teachers, managers and students. The implications of these struggles for other teaching-related practices are the focus of the next sections.

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Implications for other practices Classroom teaching According to the diarists their ability to teach classes was compromised in four ways: the composition of classes was the most-cited problem, followed by difficulties in managing student’s behaviour, the control managers exercised over teaching materials and pressure to conform to standardized ways of teachings. Chief among issues raised by the composition of classes were the placement of students in classes that were too high or low for their level of proficiency in English; the allocation of too many students to classes; and the enrolment of students throughout the duration of courses. Allocating students too high has already been explained as a consequence of easing assessment, but the diarists also draw attention to the consequence that whole classes themselves may become overrated. In other words, if a class which is named ‘Advanced’ contains a majority of students whose proficiency level is below this level, then the class may lead two distinct lives. One reflects the description of the course as ‘Advanced’, a description maintained in the marks given to students. The class’s other life is that of teaching practice, in which the teacher is under pressure both to teach to the level of the class description and to teach the students at a level commensurate with their actual proficiency. Again, it is assessment which is the focus of struggle here, not regarding individual students but rather whole classes. Collette referred to ‘a kind of conspiracy’ in which, in assessing students in classes, teachers ‘just accept’ that the scores should fall within the proficiency level rated for the class, rather than reflecting the students’ actual proficiency level. This is part of a general problem, which is that most classes tend to be over-rated – we often, for example, have intermediate classes which are really elementary. There is a kind of conspiracy that when . . . ratings are handed out they must fall within a bandwidth that has been established as acceptable for each class level. Teachers who stray outside this are asked to change their assessments, or simply have it done for them by their supervisors. Most teachers just accept this. New teachers find it puzzling, but soon realise that there is nothing they can do about it. The point is encapsulated by Michael, who observed that there seems to be a number of coded phrases that mean ‘Put this person up to keep them happy’ or ‘it’s necessary to achieve a balance


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in class numbers for this person to be promoted’. Typical egs are – ‘She always does her homework; What dya reckon?’ – ‘His attendance is good, what do you think?’ Of course only the senior teacher can say these things. It’s a very confusing process. It would be a whole lot easier if it was a little bit more upfront. This is another example of how teachers are complicit in overriding their own professional standards in accordance with the priority to ensure the ‘happiness’ of clients, and thereby provides further evidence for the operation of consent in maintaining the dominance of commercial interests. The other entries focused on the composition of classes described problems arising from too many students in classes and the enrolment of students into courses not only at the commencement of the course but continuously. This ‘continuous enrolment’ can be attractive to potential students because it enables them to start attending a course at the most convenient time for them. The effects of continuous enrolment and classes perceived by teachers to be too large is illustrated in an example from Joanna who reported that she was told that classes were starting small and my class could grow to 16 – many to be added next week. The pressures of continuous enrolment and large class size mean I won’t be able to devote sufficient attention to slower and weaker students but know from previous experience that objections to large class sizes will be met by looks of disapproval from management. I will somehow be at fault for causing trouble, rocking the boat. We all know that financial concerns are uppermost – that we can never have 2 classes of 8 when there could be a class of 16. These consideration also affect placement decisions – students will be moved up or down so that class sizes are neat and may be moved up because they’ve already ‘done the book’ of a certain class. Objections will be met with stony looks. Joanna’s experience here captures how inappropriately allocated students, class sizes and continuous enrolments combine to compromise the teacher’s ability to teach according to their understanding of professional standards. Moreover, in observing that her objections ‘will be met by looks of disapproval from management’ and that ‘I will somehow be at fault for causing trouble, rocking the boat’, she links these effects on classroom teaching to the themes that teachers’ opinions are ignored/reinterpreted and that they are held accountable for resolving the conflict between commercial and teaching interests. Adding to the

100 The Discourse of Commercialization

pressure on teachers to ensure that students remain ‘happy’ in these classes is the difficulty of controlling students who simultaneously have authority as clients of the college. Michael and Terry provided examples of this difficulty. The example from Michael draws attention to how assessment can become a focus of collaboration between students and managers against teachers’ attempts to maintain their understanding of professional standards, and in doing so again demonstrates the authority students are able to exert in virtue of their status as clients. It was brought to my attention that in testing recently (controlled listening, reading and writing) a teacher was reprimanded for sending two students out for cheating. I found several cheating in my class and felt unable to do much more that raise an eyebrow. The loss of face clients experience is apparently bad for business. Moreover, the fact that a reprimand to another teacher led Michael to feel unable to act provides support for the operation of coercion in the form of the reprimand, in combination with its inducement of Michael to consent to regulate his own professional standards, and thereby to address the concern of protecting the client’s face. Moreover, as with the examples in the previous section, this dilemma facing Michael strongly resembles ‘contradictory interpellation’ (Fairclough, 1992) in the mutually exclusive choice facing the teacher between pleasing students, and thereby addressing commercial priorities, and asserting his own professional standards. An example of how teachers manage this dilemma was provided by Terry. I have also developed a bad habit of trying to please students who are really ‘negative’ in their attitude or behaviour. It really annoys me that I focus so much on them and not on the students who really want to learn and who work really hard. I’ve spoken to my colleagues and they all say the same thing that when someone is being really negative it gains their attention and they try to please that student often at the expense of the others. This ‘habit’ resonates with Fairclough’s (1996) ‘strategically motivated simulation in discourse’ and also illustrates how teachers’ loss of professional authority can leave them with little option in controlling students but to simulate friendliness at the expense of maintaining teaching standards. This example, then, parallels those of the teachers,


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above, who perceived themselves to have compromised their professional standards in order to keep students ‘happy’. Together with these examples, the emergence of a ‘habit of pleasing’ further supports the relevance of Gramsci’s (1988) account of consent, and Bourdieu’s (1991) point that people can be complicit in the devaluation of their own capital and thereby increase the value of the capital held by the dominant group. In each case, the teachers’ disposition to please students at a cost to their own teaching standards is consistent with the evolution of a habitus that devalues the capital associated with teaching and at the same time reproduces commercial priorities in teaching. However, as well as these commercial pressures on class composition and behaviour management, the diaries provide evidence of pressure to shape classroom teaching itself according to commercial priorities, illustrated in examples of how managers control teaching materials and of pressure on teachers to standardize their teaching. An example of the control of teaching materials by managers has already been cited above to illustrate the contradictory role of teacher. The example focused on a teacher whom managers had prevented from using a video about Pauline Hanson, a person whose social/political stance was outlined previously and whose views managers perceived should not be shown to students as this might compromise the marketing of the college – a concern paralleled by the federal government over the marketing of Australia as an exporter of services, which is explored in Chapter 6. As Michael observed, in describing how the teacher responsible for selecting video materials was informed that she should not have selected the video, ‘Apparently the company sees this material as being out of kilter with the kind of image that [name of organization] is trying to promote’. While this example of how marketing priorities are incorporated into the evaluation/appraisal of teaching materials again suggests the colonization of teaching through the ‘policing’ (Fairclough, 1996) of discursive practices, an example from Karen suggests two further forms of technologization in the service of colonization: ‘pressure towards standardization of discourse practices’, and ‘the design and projection of context-free discourse techniques’. Karen recounted the introduction by a director of new ‘course programs’. It was not long before I felt that these programs were very odd indeed and even confused some teachers . . . . The new program consists of units divided into subgroups . . . . Initially one would think this was an efficient way of streamlining the school’s teaching program. It is actually an ill-informed move which seems to have no guiding


principles/methodology in mind . . . . I would heartily disagree with many of the assumptions made and herein is my dilemma. I suspect that ‘streamlining and controlling’ the final product is the goal here . . . . Many of these recent innovations do not yet seem to have their origins in teaching staff but come down from above – admin and management. It seems like teachers’ lives are going to have to be adjusted in order to fit in with the needs of the school . . . . I can already predict that it is the teachers who are more experienced and have further qualifications who quietly question the validity, necessity and wisdom of these new pieces of paper. The real dilemma will come when we are asked to comment at a staff meeting. The newest teachers will happily agree to anything, older ones will murmur, some will speak up and others will not because it would cause too much trouble – it’s easier to keep quiet and you will at least keep your job! The example draws attention to how checklists can be used to standardize and implement teaching defined according to commercial priorities. The ‘streamlining and controlling’ describes this aim in which teaching is transformed into what Karen called ‘units’, represented by items to be taught and procedures for checking that these have been taught. This results in a version of teaching which can be combined in different ways in particular timetables and courses, and which can thereby be marketed as a range of stable, divisible products. Consistent with Fairclough’s (1996) account of technologization, then, teaching is here technologized by being standardized and made context-free, in the sense that such units can be employed with any students who purchase them. Moreover, in Fairclough’s (1992, 1996) terms, these initiatives accord with the notion of commodification, seen here in the construction of teaching as a standardized product. As well as these effects on classroom teaching, there is also evidence that the influence of commercial priorities extends to teachers’ relations with students outside the classroom. Beyond the college While there were only two examples of practices which occur beyond the college, excursions and socializing with students, I have included them here because they are consistent with the broader themes identified and illustrate how the commercial pressure to ensure that students remain ‘happy’ can compromise the professional identities of teachers beyond the organization.


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The example of excursions is provided by Andrew, who recounted how he was instructed by managers to emphasize ‘fun’ on the excursions he organized for his class. The focus of the course he was teaching was Academic English, a focus which he perceived to conflict with an emphasis on fun. Indeed, he had previously explained to his students that excursions would be limited to those which had a clear educational purpose. His reaction encapsulates the sense of devalued professional identity evidenced in the diaries as the outcome of struggles between commercial and pedagogic interests. Then came the dreaded news at the Friday arvo meeting, that we are now officially untethered to the policy regarding excursions; that future excursions are to be FUN. I’ve just spent 3 odd months telling my students that we can’t go to the Aquarium, the Zoo or the cinemas . . . , because they are not relevant to our topic. I’m sure when I tell them this module that we can go anywhere they like, they’ll be wondering about the relevance that I so forcefully administered to various disappointed classes. The most frustrating thing is that I feel as though my authority has been stripped away to some degree. Even if I wanted to continue with excursions that dealt particularly with the topic at hand, my students would protest that the other classes were doing FUN things and that they weren’t. An example from Terry extends this perception of compromised identity beyond teaching-related practices to the private lives of teachers. As mentioned in my own narratives, teachers may be encouraged to socialize with students, a practice which serves the commercial priority of creating and maintaining ‘happy’ students. However, this is a practice that can create a tension for teachers between behaving in a frontstage role as teachers and revealing their backstage identities, and the risk of compromising their professional – frontstage – identity. Illustrating this dilemma, Terry asks ‘speaking of love, what are the boundaries with professionalism?’, before he goes on to recount how I’ve had a few hassles with crushes from . . . girls . . . . I’m not joking about this it’s been a real pain. I’ve stopped socialising with students due to this and the fact that it can take over your whole life! This extension of the contradictions in the role of teachers to their lives outside the organization is consistent with Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) observation that the notion of the organization itself may be


problematic because its boundaries may not be clear. The example from Terry indicates that these boundaries may not only be unclear to participants but also permeable, creating further causes of tension between pedagogic and commercial interests. Professional development The final theme in the diaries concerned teachers’ perceptions that professional development is a focus of struggle between teaching and commercial interests. The diarists focused on two sources of tension. The first involves teachers’ perceptions that professional development is inadequate, based on both a lack of development opportunities and the inappropriateness of those that are provided. The reasons given for the lack of opportunities include the fact that part-time teachers are often unable to attend professional development sessions, a point consistent with the practice of employing teachers on casual contracts. The issue of inappropriate professional development was raised by Michael, who commented that providing edu-tainment tailored and sanitised for changing groups is probably the best job description for the kind of work [name of organization] is undertaking these days. I guess I really don’t mind but the fiction of the inservice sessions meeting teacher practice is sometimes a little hard to swallow. Here, he identifies the fact that although commercial pressures transform teaching, thereby creating what the diaries more generally suggest are conflicts in the teacher’s role, professional development does not acknowledge the implications of these tensions for teaching practice. This is another example of the way in which commercial interests are not made explicit and again suggests that the explanation lies in the need to induce teachers to consent to the commercialization of their practices while maintaining the fiction, for commercial purposes, that quality in teaching is the overriding priority of the organization. The second form of tension is between professional development as a means of enhancing teachers’ professional knowledge and skills and as an opportunity for performance appraisal. This tension is illustrated in an experience recounted by Andrew in which a senior teacher observed his teaching with the stated aim of supporting his professional development.


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Last week, the senior teacher in charge of curriculum development approached me to ‘offer’ her services as an objective observer/advice giver in the realms of classroom management. I agreed to have her observe my class for the first hour on Tuesday morning on the understanding that we would later discuss some the points that I inevitably forget to practice in my classroom; concept checking not the least most forgotten when I get carried away within the intricacies of simply ‘teaching’. Whenever I’m observed I try my hardest to relax and just imagine that the teacher is not there. In fact sometimes I’ve even tried to involve the visiting teacher in the running of the class, or at least get involved in the monitoring of particular students. Of the subsequent feedback, I’ve been nothing but totally positive and enthusiastic; at least until last week . . . . Strangely, I found myself being more than observed. I felt as though the teacher was evaluating me far beyond what could be considered reasonable for the purposes of ‘feedback’. During my session of observation, a few of the other teaching staff were peering into my room through the window, giving me little signs of encouragement, winks and expressions of exasperated disbelief that I had to endure 2 hours of this treatment. Later, discussing the ordeal with others, I mentioned my feeling of discomfort at being observed so strenuously and for such a long time, and they also advised me that I wasn’t the only one to have been pressured into this kind of experience . . . . I can only hope that the observation and the subsequent feedback I received, were kept confidential, and not used in any way to affect the outcome of a possible application for permanency which I’d like to make later this year. The tension between professional development and performance appraisal has already been noted in relation to the emergence of appraisal as a focus of struggle between the interests of managers and teachers, where the extension of appraisal to professional development was shown to reinforce the fear of job insecurity and thereby induce consent to the commercialization of teaching practices. Andrew’s example illustrates how the tension created for teachers arises because professional development involves disclosure by teachers of their professional concerns and weaknesses. The effectiveness of professional development from a teaching perspective therefore depends on trust that these disclosures will not be appraised for employment purposes. If this does occur, then ‘professional development’ is transformed into an appraisal practice in which the developmental purpose of the


observation is revised and the vulnerability of the teacher to commercial pressures increased.

Links to the social-theoretical resources Drawing together the argument of the previous two chapters, the diarists’ experiences lend support to and help elaborate the account of commercialization foreshadowed in Chapter 3. Processes of ‘commodification’ and ‘marketisation’ (Fairclough, 1992) are represented in the diaries as pressure on teachers to ‘provide’ learning to students, and in the extension of commercial values and interests to define teaching. The affect of these processes on teachers was to face them with the dilemma of maintaining their professional standards while serving commercial interests, a problem which caused teachers inter- and intra-personal conflict: indeed, to led them to see their role itself as contradictory, a condition strongly reminiscent of Fairclough’s (1992) notion of ‘contradictory interpellation’. Again consonant with Fairclough’s account, these ‘moments of crisis’ were revealed in situations in which teachers believed themselves compromised in acting as teachers in the face of pressure to subordinate their professional standards to commercial interests. The diaries also suggest ‘evaluation/appraisal practices’ as a medium through which this subordination occurs, and that these practices exhibit features of ‘technologization’ (Fairclough, 1996), which facilitate the colonization of teaching practices by commercial interests. Evaluation/appraisal practices, then, involve struggles between the three groups not only over who has control of teachers’ practices but what purposes they serve; in other words, how teaching itself is to be defined. This revaluation of teaching is consistent with Bourdieu’s (1991) emphasis on how, in seeking to improve their life chances, those who suffer most are complicit in bringing about the dominance of more powerful groups. This complicity arises within the struggle between the interests of different classes over the accumulation and valuation of the capital assets they produce and reproduce through their different habitus. The struggles between teachers, managers and students reported in the diaries illustrate how certain groups can come to dominate the market for the most valuable capital and thereby come to determine what counts as desirable capital. In this process, ‘the dominated classes allow [the competitive struggle] to be imposed on them when they accept the stakes offered by the dominant classes’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 165). In other words, through their domination of both capital and its valuation, the more powerful groups – in this case managers – are able to consolidate


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their authority by imprinting their determinations of value on the habitus of less powerful groups. It is in this way that the dominated groups – here, represented by teachers – come to recognize the ‘legitimacy’ of the valuations of the dominant classes, and thus become complicit in their own subordination. Support for this interpretation is provided in the diaries by the way in which the diarists reported teachers’ expertise to be devalued through evaluation/appraisal practices, primarily performance appraisal and student assessment. These practices devalue teaching expertise by implementing a definition of teaching which prioritizes students’ sense of happiness and the impression of progress in their studies over teachers’ understandings of teaching and learning. The diarists’ accounts of how this revaluation is implemented also provide evidence for the establishment of the equilibrium between consent and coercion (Gramsci, 1988) required to maintain the dominance of those groups in control. Consent is evidenced in teachers’ self-regulation of teaching practices in accordance with the commercial priority to create ‘happy’ students, induced by their fear of appraisal and redundancy and facilitated by inexplicitness about the primacy of commercial interests over those of teaching. On the other hand, this consent is complemented by coercion in the form of managers’ directives to teachers requiring them to compromise their teaching standards to meet commercial priorities if they do not demonstrate, or if they resist the pressure to, consent. Also supported by the analysis is the notion that consent can be induced through a common perception of the prestige of the dominant group (Gramsci, 1988). This is evidenced by the high status ascribed to managers, the low status attached to teaching, and the way these evaluations facilitate the revaluation of teaching according to commercial priorities. There is also evidence that these commercial pressures on teachers penetrate both the front- and backstage regions (Goffman, 1959) of their professional and social lives, evidenced in patterns of appraisal, consent and coercion that appear in both teaching and non-teaching contexts, both inside and outside the college – including socializing with students. This pressure to compromise teachers’ professional standards in order to maintain the happiness of students recalls Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) notion of deprofessionalization, and the uncertainty about their role as teachers which it produces strongly resembles the insecurity about social identity identified by Giddens (1991) and Bourdieu (1998, 1999) in which – to combine their positions – continual (r)evaluation though reflexive practices serving institutional goals devalues the assets that define teachers as professionals and thereby breaks down their sense


of a stable self. As we have seen, this theme is prominent in the diaries, and encapsulated by Karen’s observation that ‘I wondered what course of action I should take and how I should teach – was I a good/bad teacher, what stance should I take. How should I be?’.

Summary of the participants’ perspective The three-way struggles reported in the diaries provide support for and extend the account of commercialization introduced in Chapter 2. This is both consistent with the diarists’ perceptions and points beyond them to an explanation of these struggles in terms of the broader context of social change associated with contemporary society. Within this context, the brochures are also shaped. The relationship between the brochures and the diaries – the focus of the next chapter – leads back to the rationale for the study, namely to the question of how relations between teachers, managers and students are represented in the brochures; and whether these representations provide evidence of an interdiscursive relationship between the brochures and the experiences reported in the diaries.

5 Constructing Communities of Consumption

In this chapter I explain the features of the discourse of commercialization that emerged from the analysis of the brochures. The first section of the chapter identifies the brochures as examples of the discourse of advertising and summarizes how the analysis drew on Halliday’s (1985; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) systemic functional linguistics to investigate evidence of interdiscursive links between the discourse instantiated in the brochures and the experiences reported by teachers in the diaries. As explained in Chapter 2, I anticipated that such evidence would support the notion that the discourse(s) associated with teachers’ practices are being colonized in Fairclough’s (1992) sense by the discourse instantiated in the brochures. The following sections explain the evidence for these interdiscursive relations and their construction of the relations between teachers, students and managers as inherently conflicted ‘communities of consumption’.

Analysing the brochures The brochures, the discourse of advertising and consumer culture Brochures gathered as data were representative of those which promote organizations in the sector, being designed to persuade members of target groups in particular markets to convert to the role of students. They comprise between four and eight A4 pages, and 1000–2000 words of text arranged in columns, divided into sections, and interspersed with full-colour pictures of the college, its location, facilities and images of students using college facilities, and interacting with each other and with members of the organizations in classes and at locations in the surrounding area. The brochures instantiate what Cook (2001) 109


has called the discourse of advertising. This is a discourse which tends to defy categorization, not least because producers continually manipulate advertising discourse itself in the attempt to woo clients. The economic and cultural significance of advertising in contemporary society is well attested (Featherstone, 2007), and it is this central role combined with its reflexive focus on discourse which has led Fairclough (1992) to identify advertising as an exemplar of strategically motivated discourse and a discourse technology that is implicated in the colonization of other discourses through processes of marketization. In a comprehensive study of the social significance of advertising, Leiss et al. (1997, 2005) explain that the strategic, reflexive nature of advertising arises because it is the primary means by which the market orients individuals’ attempts to satisfy their needs towards consuming goods and services – a role which puts advertising at the heart of the struggle between the interests of producers and consumers, identified by Abercrombie (1990) as characteristic of consumer culture. The centrality of advertising in social life has evolved in tandem with the emergence of this culture, based on the frenetic production and consumption of new products, to the point where advertising’s role within relations of production and consumption forged in the mediated marketplace should be seen as not only economic, but cultural as well . . . . Advertising is not just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving some merchandise of the store shelves, but is rather an integral part of modern culture. Its creations appropriate and transform a vast range of symbols and ideas; its unsurpassed communicative powers recycle cultural models and references back through the networks of social interactions. This venture is unified by the discourse through and about objects, which bonds together images of persons, products and wellbeing. (Leiss et al., 2005, p. 5) Advertising is self-consciously strategic because it seeks continuously to realign the attitudes of consumers with the interests of producers and thereby minimize the ongoing challenge that misalignment presents to the sale of new products. To achieve this, advertising discourse reconstructs the relationship between producers, products and potential consumers such that consumers come to desire an identity which can be attained by consumption of the advertised products (Wernick, 1991). This reconstruction is not a matter of informing potential consumers of the utility of products and how to acquire them, nor of

Constructing Communities of Consumption 111

persuading consumers of the utility of products to them. In a culture in which products with similar utility are promoted by producers competing to maximize their consumer base, it is not sufficient to differentiate between products on the basis of their utility to users. This would not create the differences between products necessary to enable competition for market share. Rather, to create a competitive space for essentially similar goods, advertising has shifted its focus to the experience of consumption, moving from arguments for the value of products based on falsifiable evidence towards representations of the satisfaction which comes with using the product (Falk, 1997). In this shift, products themselves are transformed into sets of qualities which are aligned with a construction of the consumer which emphasizes the ‘symbolic gratification’ (Wernick, 1991) that can be gained from acquiring the product. Accomplishing this alignment of product qualities and consumer identity requires the construction of an identity which the consumer desires and which is simultaneously grafted onto the product and attained through consumption. In this role as carrier and creator of the consumer’s identity, the product is what Wernick (1991, p. 31) has called a ‘symbolized commodity’; and the constructed consumer identity with which it is aligned is the ‘attributed consumer-ego . . . the “you” to which the ad speaks’. In this relationship, the symbolized commodity refers both to the product for sale and to the value it has for the attributed consumer-ego. It is, he argues, the ‘the genius’ of advertising to ‘fuse and confuse’ these two meanings in the promotion of products. The value of symbolized commodities for consumers, then, is not a function simply of the utility of products but is accomplished through the discourse of advertising, through which the attributes of the product are precisely constructed to remove a deficit in a desirable identity constructed for the potential consumer. In this relationship, the focus is not on what the consumer can do with the product, but, in an inversion of agency which emerges as central in the analysis of the brochures, on what the product can do for the consumer. Leiss et al. (2005, p. 148), citing Pope (1983), describe the worlds that advertising creates to promote products as ‘consumption communities’. Within these communities the product/consumer relationship is consummated in consumption, promoted as the accomplishment of a desirable lifestyle. In advertising, the identities and relationships between people and products are transformed. The onus of consumption is not placed on consumers, who are cast as passive – benefiting from but not having to invest effort in consumption; it is products themselves which


are animated, shouldering the responsibility of providing consumer satisfaction by acting as agents of their own consumption. As Leiss et al. (1997, p. 26), explain, this is a process in which people are magically changed – but so are goods, from inanimate objects into living things. Products dance and sing, they engage in relations with humans as if they themselves were alive . . . because human personalities are correlated with specific qualities ascribed to products, people become more like goods. In this dual exchange things appear as animate and people appear as inanimate. The consumer may be centred in this transformed world, but this does not involve being isolated from other consumers because the identities promoted are always cast as socially desirable, referenced to the esteem of others and the social status of the potential consumer. Advertising plays to and shapes this need by constructing communities in which members have a higher status than the potential consumer, and for which membership requires only the consumption of the advertised product. As a consequence, advertising constructs endless possibilities for mutual comparison in which potential consumers, Wernick’s (1991) attributed consumer-egos, are invited to compare their current social attributes with the lifestyle enhancements which accrue to those who consume the symbolized commodities. In relation to the brochures, I draw on these points to argue below that the construction of organizations as ‘communities of consumption’ is central to their purpose of rendering teaching and learning in ways which will attract new students, and that it is to this same configuration of identities and relationships that teachers are pressured to conform in the struggles revealed by the diary analysis. Systemic functional grammar and the coding system The coding of the brochures took as its starting point Halliday’s (1985; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) account of transitivity which ‘enables human beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what goes on around them and inside them’ (1985, p. 101). The component of the clause which expresses this reality is the ‘process’ – associated more narrowly in traditional grammar with the verb – which potentially includes participants involved in the process and circumstances associated with it. In drawing on the transitivity system, I was also influenced by Fairclough’s (1992, p. 235) account of the value of transitivity for exploring the construction of social identities and relationships in which, for example,


the objective is to see whether particular process types and participants are favoured in the text, what choices are made in voice (active or passive), and how significant is the nominalization of processes. A major concern is agency, the expression of causality, and the attribution of responsibility. This emphasis does not deny the importance, discussed in Chapter 2, of the multiple resources drawn upon to create meaning, including here the use of images, layout, juxtapositions and typography (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001). Rather, the sharper focus on transitivity fitted particularly well with my interest in comparing the diarists’ perceptions of participants and relationships with how these were constructed in the brochures. Ten brochures were gathered for the study, including those produced by the organizations in which the participating teachers worked. Following the approach taken in the diary analysis, the coding started with a brochure chosen as a typical case from which to develop a start list of codes (Miles and Huberman, 1994). This first pass over the data yielded a preliminary coding system which was then extended and refined through the analysis of subsequent brochures. The coding continued until the sixth brochure, when the coding system was judged to be to have reached ‘saturation’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Through this process, 917 clauses were analysed and the range of grammatical features coded increased to include patterns of modality, wordings, verbal groups, clause complexes, the personal system and ergativity – the significance of which are explained below. While the number of codes expanded, the themes remained more stable than in the diary analysis. This difference between the analyses was, perhaps, to be expected because while the diarists varied in their knowledge, experience and approaches to completing the diaries, the brochures were produced by colleges representative of the sector, in which, as explained above, their markets, marketable assets and commercial interests had much in common, and they are subject to the same regulatory requirements. The brochures reflect these similarities, varying to an extent in how themes are textualized, but less in the themes themselves.

The construction of a community of consumption The construction of participants and relationships in the brochures exemplifies a community of consumption in the sense outlined above. The world constructed in these texts is one in which an array of products


is given ‘performance figures’ somewhat along the lines of automobile advertising, in which a car might ‘seat four in comfort and get you from 0 to 100 km in 6 secs’. In this world, courses do a wide range of things associated with teaching and learning, such as preparing, focusing, covering, developing, improving and introducing. However, things are done to teachers. They are recruited, trained, employed and used, but seldom, if ever, do anything to others – unless supervised – or act autonomously in teaching, except as part of their prior experience in other countries. Though excluded as independent agents, teachers are constructed as responsible for ensuring that language learning occurs; and students are represented as passive beneficiaries of the lifestyle which comes with successful language learning. Overseeing this alignment of products, students and lifestyle is the college, which is constructed as the ‘producer’, a role which incorporates both the production of products and the supervision of their delivery and consumption. The construction of this community requires what Kress (1987) has called ‘systematic absences’, and the replacement of absented participants and processes by those which are conducive to the purpose of attracting students to the college. The struggles perceived by the diarists between managers, teachers and students are thereby transformed in the brochures into relationships of production and consumption between producer, products and consumers. Figure 5.1 illustrates these participants and the relationships between them which together comprise this community. Illustrated in the upper circle, ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ are constructed in the brochures as products. The justification for interpreting these constructions as products lies in the roles they take within the transitivity system, in which they display the characteristics of symbolized commodities (Wernick, 1991), and, consistent with Leiss, Kline and Jhally’s (1997) account, are animated as participants that enhance the attributes ascribed to current and potential consumers, a construction of consumers which closely resembles Wernick’s (1991) attributed consumer-egos. Products constructed in this way include ‘courses’, ‘classroom teaching’, the ‘learning environment’ and ‘assessment’. These displace teachers and other human agents within the text while the products themselves are ascribed attributes and take on roles associated by the teachers in the diaries with teachers and other staff. In this process, the modalities of risk, disappointment, failure and obligation associated with learning are removed, leaving products that offer consumers only stable, predictable attributes.


Teaching/learning as products

College controls teaching

Teachers provide learning

Consumption processes The college as producer

Figure 5.1

College assures satisfaction

Students/readers as consumers

Community of consumption.

The attributes ascribed to these products are dominated by the descriptions of skills that help commodify the content of language education, in the sense that it facilitates its division into discrete units, which are in principle separately teachable and assessable, and can be bought and sold as distinct goods in the range and commodities available on the educational market. (Fairclough, 1992, p. 209) In this standardization of teaching/learning, students are themselves ‘standardised’ as having precisely those needs which are enhanced by the skills offered. Thus, in the brochures, the construction of both products and consumers in terms of skills – to be simultaneously provided and enhanced – allows products and consumers to be aligned in Wernick’s (1991) sense, as symbolized commodities matched to the attributes ascribed to attributed consumer-egos.


Though the initial stages of coding suggested that only products were constructed, a distinction emerged between products and attractions. The former are those constructions for which consumers enter a contractual relationship with the college – and which therefore form part of the debt owed to the consumer. The latter comprise those constructions which are not part of the commercial exchange between the college and student but are promoted as incentives to enter into the exchange. These include an array of desirable experiences associated with the notion of an ‘international’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ lifestyle. In order to offer students this lifestyle, the college, the surrounding environment, Australia as a whole, and the lives of students after they complete their English studies are transformed into a world in which they can achieve goals in their personal and social lives, careers, business, travel and studies. The students’ achievement of this lifestyle through language learning is supported by further products, together identified as ‘student services’, including ‘social activities’, ‘further study placement’ and ‘student welfare’. Together with the products associated with teaching and learning, then, the promotion of an ‘international lifestyle’ and ‘student services’ provide: the environment in which the consumption community is set; products that match themselves to the needs constructed for consumers; and the incentive for joining the community – a community from which the risks and obligations associated with learning, along with the teachers and other staff who manage them, are excluded. Moving to the left of Figure 5.1, along with products and attractions the colleges themselves are constructed as agents that replace teachers and other institutional members as the creators and providers of education and other products. As ‘producers’, the colleges are ascribed with the capacity to possess and control those participants and processes involved in providing satisfaction to consumers. This reconstruction of teachers and others as agents, or ‘operatives’, of the college enables the college to provide assurances that products have attributes that match the needs ascribed to students, and therefore to make claims about the benefits students will gain on consumption of the products. The circle on the right of Figure 5.1 illustrates how the construction of current and prospective students as consumers completes the consumption community of products, producers and consumers. To align students, as consumers, with the products on offer, students are represented in two ways: as ‘beneficiaries’ and as participants in ‘consumption processes’, indicated at the intersection between the three circles in Figure 5.1.


As beneficiaries, they are attributed with the aspirations, needs and skills which, when met and enhanced by the college’s products, offer entry to the ‘international lifestyle’ promoted in the brochures. Access to this lifestyle is assured through descriptions of language learning as without the risk of effort, imposition or failure. To achieve this, the students are represented as subject to change through no form of personal effort or exertion. In this process, products typically enhance students’ attributes unmediated by other participants, who, along with any risk of imposition they may pose, are withdrawn while learning is taken for granted. The processes which align products with students mirror those which align readers with the community of consumption in which students and products participate. This creates a ‘match’ between the construction of students and the construction of the reader with the result that the one ‘fits into’ the other in a merging of identities, which supports Wernick’s (1991, p. 35) observation that The consumerist address imprisons the subjectivity it projects in a totally commodified ontology. Being is reduced to having, desire to lack. No needs or desires are speakable without a commodity to satisfy them; no commodity without at least an imagined place in our affections. Applied to the brochures, the notion of the commodified ontology highlights how any enhancement of students’ attributes is to be effected through consumption of products, a process in which consumption requires no exertion on the part of the student – but rather a passive accumulation of enhanced attributes. The student is relieved of all the onerous aspects of consumption: the tedium, frustration, and mental and social effort of language acquisition. All change in the student is brought about by the organization, typically by means of its ‘staff’, whose task it is to ensure that the student successfully undergoes the various processes involved in consumption, but whose capacity for agency has – as noted above – been replaced by the college and its products. On this account, then, teaching and learning collapse into what I have called ‘consumption processes’, a supervised system of automated production and consumption that combines teaching and learning in a single set of processes, with ‘staff’ constructed as supervised by the college to ensure that consumption occurs, and students passive in receiving the benefits.


Interdiscursive relations: the brochures and the diaries The organization of the remaining sections of the chapter reflects the structure of Figure 5.1. The first section focuses on how teaching and learning are constructed as products; the next section on the characteristics ascribed to the college as producer; and the final section on how current and prospective students are constructed as beneficiaries of consumption processes. In each section, evidence of interdiscursive connections between the brochures and diary analyses are explored as evidence of the operation of the discourse of commercialization. Through these sections the six brochures are referred to as B1-6.

Teaching, learning and other products and attractions The construction of products is primarily accomplished through a combination of grammatical features: nominalization, nominal groups, modality and the occupation by products of roles otherwise associated with human agents. In this process, teachers and other human agents are marginalized by products that are themselves constructed as agents and endowed with the capacity to provide themselves to students. Nominalization is a form of what Halliday (1985, p. 321) has called ‘grammatical metaphor’. It refers to selections in the language by which meanings are expressed in combinations of words that do not reflect the organization of the world. Grammatical metaphor arises as a linguistic option because some selections in the grammatical system are more ‘congruent’ with the world than others. A selection is congruent to the extent that it makes explicit within the grammar those processes, participants, relationships and circumstances it represents in the world. Nominalization is a prime means by which grammatical metaphors are created (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004, p. 656). It describes the process by which these real-world complexities are edited down to the meanings that can be conveyed within the nominal group. A nominal group consists of a ‘head’ and ‘modifier’, a group of words preceding and/or following the head whose meaning they may modify in a range of ways (Halliday, 1985, p. 170). Nominal groups allow only a restricted range of grammatical options within them, and exclude particularly the grammar associated with processes and modality, thereby restricting entry to other meanings and constraining the way the world can be represented. Typically this transformation involves ‘backgrounding the process itself – its tense and modality are not indicated – and usually not specifying its participants, so that who is doing what to whom is left implicit’ (Fairclough, 1992, p. 197).


Modality refers to selections in the grammar that establish either the degree of probability or commitment the writer or speaker attaches to a process. Halliday (1985, p. 335) called the former ‘modalization’ and the latter ‘modulation’. In the brochures the interplay of these different forms of modality emerged as significant in establishing the authority of the colleges as providers and of minimizing obligations on potential students. The third feature involves the displacement of human agents in the clause by products. This happens in particular where products take the role of ‘actor’. The actor is the ‘doer’ in a clause, the participant that brings about or initiates processes that materially affect other participants (Halliday, 1985, p. 102). The notion of actor highlights this agentive role and differs from the idea of the subject in traditional grammar because the subject is defined by its relationship of agreement with a verb. A key difference is that if an active structure is changed to passive, the subject of the verb changes but the actor remains the same. The other participant to be foregrounded in the analysis was the ‘goal’ – in more standard terminology, the ‘patient’ – which in the transitivity system is the ‘done to’ (Halliday, 1985, p. 103); in other words, the participant in the clause that is directly affected by a process. In the construction of products in the brochures, nominalization is used to create both the names of products and the attributes ascribed to them. These nominalized identities enable, on the one hand, the exclusion of human agency and its processes and modalities – such as teachers, and teaching and learning – and, on the other, the inclusion of qualities which can be aligned with the needs that must be met for consumers to enjoy the lifestyle which accrues from membership of the consumption community. Nominalization thereby facilitates the alignment of the identities of products with the attributes ascribed to consumers, providing support for the interpretation of these products as symbolized commodities and students as attributed consumer-egos (Wernick, 1991). This process of product construction and further themes covered in this chapter are exemplified by an example in B1, which encompasses all the above products in a single ‘meta-product’. [name of college] offers a complete education package for overseas students seeking an international education. The unification of ‘complete’, ‘education’ and ‘package’ in the nominal group with ‘package’ as its head creates a highly incongruent representation of the identities and relationships involved in actual teaching and learning. The exclusions include teachers and students, classroom


practices, and processes of teaching and learning, with their attendant risks, tensions and uncertainties for students and teachers. These complexities have been transformed into a single stable entity: the product to be transacted with consumers. This is then matched to potential consumers through ‘for’, which casts ‘overseas students’ as the beneficiaries of the product, an outcome which is subject to no questions of modality within the nominal group, and which extends the semantic reach of ‘complete’ to imply a fit between the benefits offered by the product and the needs of ‘overseas students seeking an international education’. Part of the larger nominal group, this narrowing of the reference of ‘overseas students’ to those ‘seeking an international education’ anticipates an identity for students that is linked to the ‘international lifestyle’ offered to prospective students as an incentive for studying and enhancing their English language skills. This also illustrates how nominalization facilitates product construction not only at the level of the nominal group but also at the level of the clause, in which the product itself becomes a participant, further marginalizing teachers and other human agents. This capacity to behave as a participant is seen in the product’s occupation of the goal position, enabling the college – as actor – to ‘offer’ the product to the implied consumer: the reader. In this way, the reader is identified with ‘overseas students’ as a potential ‘beneficiary’ of the products offered, the term used by Halliday (1985, p. 132) to describe the participant in the clause ‘to whom or for whom the process is said to have taken place’. The role of the student as a beneficiary and that of the college are themes explored in more detail below. Products not only participate as the goals of processes. Other examples illustrate how products – typically ‘courses’ – also occupy the role of actors, thereby displacing teachers as agents in the management of teaching and learning. For example, in B6 The intensive General English program prepares students of all English levels for work, University . . . or College, or travel. Classes focus on effective communication in English and involve speaking, listening and situational ‘role plays’ designed to prepare students for confident use of English outside the classroom. Text books are supplemented by authentic materials including newspapers, radio and television for reading, listening, conversation and group discussions. In the first clause, the ‘program’ in effect provides itself for consumption; in the first clause of the second sentence, ‘classes’ become actors in teaching and agentless passives elide whoever might be doing the designing of educational activities or the supplementing of text books.


Here, modality also contributes to the construction of products at both levels: within the nominal groups, as previously explained, and in the clause, through the use of the simple present tense without modal conditions. This is the most frequently used tense/modality combination in the brochures, a combination that constructs assertions about products as unqualified statements of fact, thereby adding to the impression created within the nominal groups that products are stable and their performance reliable – free from the modalities of risk associated with human agents and processes. These same patterns of nominalization, modality and tense emerged throughout the coding of products and attractions. For example, products related to teaching and learning included ‘courses’, ‘classroom teaching’, ‘learning environment’ and ‘assessment’. A further pattern to emerge was how the language of skills dominated the nominalized identities of these products, exemplifying Fairclough’s (1992, p. 209) observation that commodified educational discourse includes not only types and sub-types of skill but ‘a whole wording of the processes of learning and teaching based upon concepts of skill’. Thus, the wording of products created from ‘courses’ typically identifies a particular kind(s) of English (textualized as the purposes or students it is ‘for’), a proficiency level, and the duration of the course – illustrated by a course offered by B1 which is referred to in a three-line heading as English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/Intermediate to advanced/ Minimum 10 weeks. In addition, these and other attributes, such as the skills focused on, are commonly ascribed to courses through post-modification involving separate nominal groups, such as a ‘program’ from B3 for intending university and post secondary college students which includes Advanced General English Skills Development, Study Skills and Exam Techniques. This construction of a range of courses by means of the division of educational content into different types, levels and skills exemplifies the more general use of skills in the brochures to commodify the content of language teaching. Similarly, products based on ‘classroom teaching’ draw on the skills teachers employ in using teaching resources. As with ‘courses’, nominalization here excludes teachers, thereby marginalizing their role in language teaching and learning. In this process, teachers as agents are separated from their ability to facilitate and manage learning.


This ability is simultaneously incorporated into products, where it is represented in terms of the resources and facilities teachers employ in teaching, such as techniques, methodologies, materials and classes. Examples include ‘the latest in modern teaching methods’ (B2), ‘current, effective methodology’ (B6), ‘a variety of modern techniques’ (B4), ‘authentic materials’ (B6) and ‘proven text books’ (B1). This separation of teachers from their professional resources blurs the distinction between teaching and learning, as in B1 where We help you develop the four skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) through the use of proven text books and also through the use of dialogue, television, video and radio extracts and a variety of printed materials from books, newspapers and magazines. These materials present you with range of accents to develop your ability to understand English speaking people from all over the world. The opacity of ‘we’ and elision of an explicit agent in ‘through the use of’ enable the omission of teachers as agents in teaching but the retention of their professional resources. This facilitates the conversion of these resources into products and into actors that can deliver themselves to students – illustrated in the second clause by the role of ‘materials’ as the actor presenting skills to the prospective student – and the construction of teaching and learning as attributes of these products which are provided and consumed as part of the commercial exchange between the college and the student. This is exemplified in an example from B6, in which Classes focus on effective communication in English and involve speaking, listening and situational ‘role plays’ designed to prepare students for confident use of English outside the classroom. Here ‘classes’ as an actor ‘focus on’ a second product ‘effective communication in English’ which is divided into the further products ‘speaking, listening and situational role plays’ which themselves ‘prepare students for’ acquisition of the final product: ‘confident use of English outside the classroom’. Also illustrated here is the way that passive forms, exemplified by ‘designed’, close the grammatical space available for human actors, thereby, like nominalization, excluding teachers as agents from the community of consumption. Among numerous examples, this from B3 omits teachers both in the design of classroom activities and in the use of teaching ‘techniques’.


At [name of college] English is an active process. Classroom activities are designed to encourage communication. Techniques such as pair and group work, discussions, dialogues, debates, interviews, language games and pronunciation drills are frequently used. In addition to courses and classroom teaching, features of the learning environment in which students study are constructed as products that can also operate as participants within the clause – and themselves enhance learning. These products are often presented as provided by the college, as in [Name of college] provides an optimum learning environment in a modern air-conditioned building (B1). Products that draw on aspects of assessment also contribute to this exclusion of teachers and teaching, and construction of products as offering only benefits to students. These include the four main types of test conducted within colleges: ‘on-arrival’, ‘in-course’, ‘end-of-course’, and entry tests into courses that articulate into other educational institutions. ‘On-arrival’ refers to the test used to determine which level of course students will be allocated on arrival at the college. This type of assessment is constructed in the brochures as the ‘placement test’, a nominalization which implies no risk of failure or disappointment, only the painless matching of a student’s skills to a product to enhance them. An example in B3 illustrates how this construction operates in conjunction with other elements in the clause to minimize the risk and obligations posed by assessment: A placement test is given on arrival to place you in an appropriate class. Here, the imposition on the consumer is minimized by combining ‘placement test’, the agentless passive ‘is given’ involving the omission of both the student tested and the tester, and ‘appropriate’. The result is that it is not clear what or who places ‘you’, as this agency is lost within ‘a placement test is given on arrival’. As in the example of ‘overseas students’, above, this construction of consumers positions them as the ‘beneficiary’ (Halliday, 1985, p. 132). Here, the ‘placement test’ is the goal of the process ‘given’, freeing the absented consumer to become the ‘beneficiary’ of the process. This constructs the consumer’s relationship with the test as free from the imposition which would be implied


by being the goal of a process such as ‘tested’. Similarly, an example from B1 reinforces this construction of ‘placement test’ in which it is ‘completed’, a process which does not imply levels of performance. On your first day at [name of college], after you have completed your placement test, our welfare staff will give you an orientation lesson. As with ‘classroom teaching’, then, the construction of assessment removes uncertainty or obligation in the relationship between the consumer and the product which could arise from human agency and processes. In references to ‘in-course’ and ‘end-of-course assessment’, assessment is again constructed as having only positive outcomes for students, exemplified by the construction of positive outcomes as a mathematical certainty in ‘regular testing = faster progress!’ (B5), or for negative outcomes to be obscured, again by the judicious use of ‘appropriate’, as in You are tested every five weeks and promoted to the next class when you achieve the appropriate level (B5). and the exclusion of processes of assessment altogether: Upon completion of your study at [name of college] you will receive an English Proficiency Certificate stating the details of the course(s) and your level of achievement (B4). Finally, references to tests linked to course entry requirements are included where the college has articulation arrangements with universities and is therefore accountable to them for its assessment of students’ proficiency. Although three of the colleges had these arrangements, only B2 referred to testing requirements relating to them. This marked inclusion can probably be explained by B2’s positioning itself in the market as a college with an ‘academic’ focus, thereby seeking to differentiate its products from those offered by other colleges. This is an example of how the promotion of tests as offering rewards for those who pass facilitates the diversification of the market for English according to the different ‘kinds’ of English assessed; and tests and test scores in turn help to match potential consumers to each ‘tested segment’ of the market. This use of tests to shape the market through the tailoring of rewards is consistent with Shohamy (2001), who argues that tests constitute a form of ‘symbolic power’ (Bourdieu, 1991) which controls the behaviour of


students/consumers by offering them the hope of increasing the value of their capital by gaining the market value of a pass, but who, in seeking this reward, subordinate their own life chances to ‘those with vested interests’ (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 118) in testing. The other colleges were not positioning themselves in the market in this way and therefore did not have a reason to risk compromising the construction of the consumer as free from uncertainty and obligation by including compulsory assessment requirements. In B2, these risks are reduced primarily using the nominal ‘entry’: [Name of college] tests all students on entry to EAP [English for Academic Purposes] courses. Entry is only available to those whose English is of the appropriate level. Students who pass all the course components for EAP 2 satisfy the English language entry requirements for the [name of university] without further English testing. While not removing these risks completely, ‘entry’, like ‘placement test’, enables a construction of assessment which excludes actual participants – notably teachers – and negative outcomes, thereby minimizing anxieties and risks for students. Moreover, ‘on entry’ constructs the students’ access to the courses as assured, so reversing the construction of imposition and risk produced by ‘all students’ as the goal of ‘tests’, and to the extent that these risks and impositions cannot be avoided, they can be attributed to the universities, as in Students who pass all the course components for EAP 2 satisfy the English language entry requirements for [name of university] without further English testing (B2). This reference to the university can be interpreted as drawing on the authority over students which Fairclough (1996, p. 78) identifies as the ‘traditional professional- (or ‘producer’-) oriented relationship between university and applicant’. On this interpretation, referencing the university authority provides English language colleges with a way of countering the authority of consumers without themselves being responsible for constraining the students’ freedom as consumers. For the purposes of advertising, it is not sufficient, however, for products to be constructed as having stable identities which can enhance needs imputed to students. As explained above, there is also the need to construct a ‘lifestyle’ which is calculated to attract prospective students as something they will attain during and through studying at


the college. The value, then, of the products offered by the college lies less in the scarcity of the skills they provide than in the exclusivity of the lifestyle they make available to consumers. This addition of value to the product through its connection to a desirable lifestyle provides further evidence for the construction of a community of consumption, in which the value of products lies less in their utility than in how, as symbolized commodities (Wernick, 1991), they can increase the social standing of the consumer, the crucial perception through which advertising enhances the desirability of products (Leiss et al., 2005). The construction of these attractions typically parallels that of products, in which nominalizations, and the exclusion of human agents, actual processes and the modalities of risk and obligation, construct attractions as stable, reliable rewards for learning English. However, unlike the construction of products, the dominant wordings derive not from the concept of skill but from a world of attractions associated with the notions of ‘international’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, the most frequently occurring modifiers. These wordings construct a lifestyle which is, for example, ‘exciting and modern . . . ’ and ‘healthy’ (B1), ‘very safe’ (B5), ‘adventurous’ (B3), involving ‘the maximum opportunity to make friends’ (B1), in which ‘major shopping centres, golf courses, tennis courts and an Olympic pool are all close by’ (B2), where the ‘people are warm and friendly and happy to welcome you to their country’ (B4) and the ‘wonderful temperate climate offers a relaxed and easy lifestyle’ in ‘a major cosmopolitan retail and commercial centre with good shopping, restaurants and recreation facilities’(B6), and where having an international mix of students with English as the only common language means students are able to practise their English skills while learning about other cultures and ideas (B6). These wordings render as attractive the social and self-development opportunities presented by studying with students of different nationalities and first languages; the social, cultural and sports activities available where the college is located and in the country more generally; and the global opportunities made available through studying English – such as tourism, international business and studying at tertiary level in an English-speaking country. Access to this lifestyle is facilitated by an array of products including ‘orientation’, ‘social activities’ and ‘further study placement’; and also ‘courses’ – exemplified in an example from B1 according to which


Whether you are a student who needs English competence for further study or career advancement, a tourist who wishes to improve conversational skills or an international businessman or woman with professional English communication needs, you will benefit from our specialist courses. Here ‘our specialist courses’ are said to ‘benefit’ three kinds of potential consumers, each distinguished by different lifestyle needs. Each of these identities, the ‘student’, the ‘tourist’ and the ‘international businessman or woman’, is drawn from the cast of the ‘international lifestyle’ promoted as the reward for learning English, thereby exemplifying Wernick’s (1991) notion of the attributed consumer-ego in which consumers are attributed with desires which can be effortlessly sated by consumption of the symbolized commodities with which they are aligned. Interdiscursive relations In regard to the correlations between the brochure and the diary findings, the combined effect of the patterns of product construction reported above is to exclude or minimize the role of teachers in processes of teaching, to remove the risks, uncertainties, impositions and obligations from processes of learning, and to render learning as stable, divisible products constructed from skills. These constructions mirror the marginalization of teachers revealed in the diary analysis, where they were employed on the basis of cost rather than pedagogic expertise, pressured through fear of redundancy to provide learning to students – standardized in modules, units and skills – as a debt to be repaid. Furthermore, the construction of ‘attractions’ helps explain the finding in the diaries that English language teaching is not valued by managers in pedagogic terms, but in so far as it makes students ‘happy’. In terms of the link between learning and lifestyle, the creation of happy students depends on teachers creating and providing students with the means to achieve the lifestyle they desire. These links, then, between products, attractions and the diary analysis, provide initial evidence that the same discourse is implicated in the diaries and the brochures, in which the struggles in the diaries are resolved to maximize the appeal of the producer/consumer relationship to potential students. In this process, the risks posed to the consumer by processes of teaching and learning are removed as teachers are separated and excluded from teaching/learning, and their ability to teach is incorporated into products. The construction of products and attractions,


however, is only one condition which must be met in the construction of the community of consumption. The next section explains how the college is constructed as the producer.

The college as producer ‘College’ is a nominal which, like the products and attractions cited above, replaces human agents in the brochures. It differs from these, however, both in its dominance of agency within the brochures and in the persistent ambivalence of its identity. As the dominant agent, the college displaces teachers and other staff as actors in clauses involving the provision of products. An example from B3 illustrates this displacement and how the products, as explained above, are constructed from the skills and resources employed by teachers. [Name of college] uses modern teaching methods, and highly qualified and experienced professional language teachers to help you achieve the maximum level of learning possible. Here the ‘college’ not only displaces teachers as the users of teaching methods but – in a move which exemplifies the construction of the college in a controlling role – ‘uses’ teachers themselves to maximize consumers’ satisfaction, captured in the nominalization ‘the maximum level of learning possible’. Moreover, the separation of ‘methods’ from ‘teachers’ and their reconstruction as resources of the college introduces a further characteristic of the construction of the college: that it possesses and controls participants and processes. This theme highlights the ways in which the college is constructed to control contingencies which might otherwise introduce uncertainty into the relationship between the products and consumers. The resources in the grammar that are drawn on in particular to construct the world in this way are personal pronouns, possessive forms and circumstantial elements. The personal pronouns ‘our’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ are used throughout the brochures as interchangeable with ‘college’s’ and ‘college’. To interpret the referent of a personal pronoun entails that those involved in producing and interpreting the text can readily identify each other at the time and in the place in which the exchange is taking place (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). Their use within the brochures exemplifies ‘synthetic personalization’ (Fairclough, 1992), in which interpersonal


meanings are simulated for strategic effects. Operating rather like grammatical flags of convenience, the use of ‘our’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ suggests an identity for the college which is human-like in its implication of a collective voice and in its relationship to the reader, while the actual referents of these terms as well as of the college itself remain unclear. These ambivalences are revealed in the shifting relations between the ‘college’ and other participants in the clause, in which the referents of ‘our’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ shift continuously. These shifts reveal a contradiction in the construction of the ‘college’ which results from the need for it both to include staff in its ‘collective voice’ as professional members of the college and at the same time to appropriate their professional resources and subordinate them to its control in the provision of products. This contradiction can be seen in the following example from B2 in which the potential referents of ‘we/our’ progressively narrow as the list of nominalizations for which ‘We have won an international reputation’ expands. We at [name of college] welcome you to Australia – a beautiful, safe and inexpensive country where you can study, travel and enjoy yourself. [Name of college] is one of the finest English language schools in Australia. We have won an international reputation for our educational standards, our highly qualified staff and our commitment to the needs of overseas students. Though the first examples of ‘we’ and the first ‘our’ might include all personnel at the college in a collective which shares the same ‘educational standards’, the second instance of ‘our’ distinguishes the ‘highly qualified staff’ from members of this collective. As well as separating ‘educational standards’ from ‘staff’ in a move which exemplifies the appropriation of teachers’ resources, this exclusion of the staff from the collective creates a dilemma for the interpretation of the final instance of ‘our’. The problem is that ‘our commitment to the needs of overseas students’ implies either that ‘our’ has expanded again to include ‘staff’ or that they do not share the ‘commitment’. The first interpretation contradicts the second use of ‘our’; the second interpretation contradicts the construction of staff required to attract students to the college. The problem points to tensions between the need (1) to present the college in a collective voice whose members share values which will attract students to the college, (2) to establish the college as the controller of staff as potential sources of uncertainty in the product/consumer relationship and (3) to promote staff as professionally competent. The resolution


of these tensions lies in the construction of agency and responsibility within the consumption community, which I explain later in this chapter. The use of ‘our’ in the example also illustrates how possessive forms are used to construct participants and processes as included within the sphere of influence of the college. These participants include not only the products and attractions discussed above, but also members of staff, who emerge not as independent agents but again appear as resources of the college to be used to provide satisfaction to consumers. These uses of possessive forms extend the reach of the college’s agency to processes of which ‘its’ staff are actors. Thus, in an example from B3 [name of college]’s own academic counsellor provides a special service for our students. As the example also illustrates, ‘students’ are subject to possession too, not to represent them as controlled by the college but to represent the college as their protector in their consumption of products and enjoyment of the lifestyle offered by the college. This use of possessive forms to represent the college as controller of product provision and as the protector of students as consumers is illustrated in a further example from B2 in which Our superb heritage buildings set in beautiful gardens provide our students with a unique campus atmosphere. Here the control of the buildings implied by ‘our’ underwrites their capacity to ‘provide’ students with the lifestyle associated with ‘a unique campus atmosphere’, and the fact that these are ‘our’ students identifies them in terms of the capacity to be provided with this lifestyle by the college. Similarly, in B5, students are identified as ‘our’ in virtue of the ‘quality of teaching’ they receive at the college. The success of our students in Public English Exams and in entering the school, university, or college program of their choice demonstrates the quality of teaching at [name of college]. The only group not constructed as controlled, protected or in some other way affected by the authority of the college are managers and owners themselves. The upshot is that although the identity of the college may shift between including and excluding teaching staff, it has


a core membership which, though never referred to as members, is nevertheless the group which by default is identified with it. So far we have seen how casting the college as a producer involves its construction both as the controller of teachers and their resources and the protector of students as consumers. These constructions are, however, not sufficient to enable the college, as the producer, to assure potential consumers that it can provide products which will satisfy them. The need for producers to act as guarantors of consumer satisfaction arises to counter a ‘culture of suspicion’ (Sulkunen, 1997) which permeates the consumer/producer relationship because, in the absence of utility as a rational basis for promoting and purchasing products, the evaluation of consumer choices and of any risks involved in consumption – such as failure to learn English – is itself left with no rational basis. The lifestyles promoted to persuade people to consume products do not provide such a rational basis for choice because their attraction depends on how individuals experience happiness and pleasure, so to counter this uncertainty about the value of choices there is a need for producers to provide ‘protection and reassurance’ (Sulkunen, 1997, p. 15) to consumers. The construction of the college as able to assure product provision and satisfaction to students is accomplished through the combination of three operations. The first constructs the college as an expert in the products it offers, the second constructs teachers and other staff as qualified to deliver these, and the third draws on the first two as well as on the authority of the college as the dominant agent to construct as predictable and certain the outcome that the products provided by the college will satisfy students. The distinction between the college as expert and teachers as qualified extends the construction of the college as the dominant agent which controls teachers and their resources. To achieve this, nominal groups are used to emphasize the colleges’ publicly acknowledged success/reputation in providing ‘high quality’ courses and other products. An example from B5 illustrates this construction of expertise, according to which [Name of college] is one of Australia’s most successful international English Language Colleges. Here, the success of the college is identified within the context of the whole of Australia and by comparison with other ‘international English Language Colleges’ – thus linking its expertise to both English language


teaching and the ‘international lifestyle’ to which this provides access. Similarly, in an example from B6, [Name of college] is one of the few colleges that can meet the needs of very advanced learners. While the nominal group is ascribed as an attribute which constructs the college as an expert, the post-modifying ‘that can meet the needs of very advanced learners’ further constructs the college as the actor which employs this expertise. The construction of the college as expert is supported by that of managers in which they too become experts in the products delivered by teachers. The following example illustrates how this optimizes the consumer/product relationship by putting the college – represented here by managers – in control of the product offered and correspondingly removing the autonomy of teaching staff. Thus, All classroom teaching at [name of college] is overseen by the Director of Studies (B1). Here the ‘director of studies’, an educational manager, dominates as expert to the exclusion of teachers as agents, reduced here to the agentless meta-product ‘All classroom teaching’. The example also illustrates how, when members of management or owners are included as participants in clauses, special arrangements are made within the grammar to ensure that they are not constructed in contra-distinction to the college. As in this example, the presence of the manager as an actor requires the absence of the college as the controller, made possible in this case by constructing the college as the location within which the process occurs rather than as an actor. Including the college as a ‘circumstantial element’ (Halliday, 1985, p. 137) in the clause thus enables the college to circumscribe ‘teaching’ without excluding the manager from the collective represented by the college. The exclusion of teachers as agents is perpetuated in their construction as qualified, which does not imply that holders have the means to act autonomously, only that they have certain knowledge and skills which provide them with the potential to do so. Furthermore, while the notion of being qualified allows for the supervision of those qualified it does not rule out their responsibility for action. An example from B6 illustrates this construction, in which


Our teachers are all highly experienced professionals with specialist qualifications in teaching English as a foreign language. Here ‘teachers’ are distinguished from the referents of ‘our’ and represented as an attribute of the college, thereby enhancing its expertise at the expense of their capacity to act as independent agents. At the same time, teachers are identified in this and other examples as ‘professional’, with its implication of independent judgement and standards. This point raises again the tension identified above between the college as the controller of teachers and their resources and the need to construct teachers as competent to teach. The resolution to the problem of how teachers can both be subject to the expertise of the college and remain ‘professional’ is suggested in the rare cases where teachers are constructed as actors. In these examples, teachers are either constructed to have been unsupervised only prior to their employment at the college or, after employment, to be not fully responsible for teaching. In an example of the former, and the only example in the brochures analysed of teachers’ as the actor in the process ‘teach’, B4 explains that Many [teachers] have taught in other countries and bring the benefit of their varied experience to the college. It is, though, the examples of the latter which show how teachers can be constructed as both controlled by the college and ‘professionally’ responsible for their actions. In these examples, teachers and other staff may be included as actors, but they do not decide the purposes of their actions, as in the following example from B1 Teachers participate in regular seminars and language conferences on new practices and theories in the teaching field to ensure the most up-to-date teaching techniques are used in the classrooms. Here ‘teachers’, as the actor in ‘participate’, are constructed as involved in the process by which they become qualified but they have not been carried over as the agent in the following non-finite hypotactic clause (Halliday, 1985, p. 214). In other words, it is not clear from the text who is doing the ensuring. However, the implication is that the college, as the dominant agent and expert, is the one who ‘ensures the most up-to-date teaching techniques are used in the classrooms’. The upshot is that teachers are capable of carrying out actions but not capable of establishing their purposes – and therefore not of evaluating


whether these have been achieved. This construction transforms the professional expertise teachers employ in establishing teaching methods and purposes. In this reworking, teachers are reconstructed as operatives, able only to carry out and be held responsible for supervised or directed procedures, specifically those involved in providing learning to students. The construction of the college as expert and teachers as qualified operatives enables the college to assure prospective students that teachers will provide products which satisfy them. These assurances about product provision draw on resources associated with modality, the part of the grammatical system which ‘construes the region of uncertainly that lies between “yes” and “no” ’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004, p. 147). The particular parts of the modality system used to represent product provision in the brochures are ‘modalization’ and ‘modulation’. The former includes the expression of degrees of probability and is textualized in the brochures as ‘will’ and ‘can/may’. The latter, again textualized in the brochures using ‘can’, includes the expression of obligation and ability. The use of ‘will’ shows how the provision of products is represented as both predictable and certain, as in an example from B4 in which We provide special training modules which will offer ideal preparation for study at [name of further education institution]. We will give you counselling about which institution is best for you. Similarly, the actions of staff are subject to this predictability, and therefore determination and loss of agency, as in Our friendly and experienced administrative staff will help make your stay in [name of city] a comfortable and enjoyable one, and will look after all aspects of your enrolment and accommodation (B2). Teachers will assist you in choosing appropriate material from the College’s audio and video cassettes, textbooks or readers (B3). Our counsellors will assist you with your choice of further study, understanding the different course requirements and completing applications (B6). On the other hand, the examples of ‘can/may’ in the brochures are the only textualizations of the possibility that product provision might be compromised, exemplified in the following examples from B1.


We recognise that living and studying is a new country can lead to unexpected difficulties and our staff are trained to cope with any difficulty. This combines the college as expert, represented by ‘we recognise’ with the anonymous nominalization ‘living and studying is a new country’ to create the discreetly nominalized risk suggested by ‘unexpected difficulties’, a construction which, while acknowledging the potential for unspecified risk, does not identify students as either responsible for or subject to it. This is followed by the pattern noted above in which staff are constructed as operatives whose ability to ‘cope with any difficulty’ both removes all risk previously suggested and is assured not by the ability of staff themselves but by those with the expertise to train them. The final way in which assurances of product provision are textualized again involves ‘can’, used to reassure consumers not regarding the predictability of product provision but, in examples of modulation focusing on ability, regarding the college’s capacity to provide products. These assurances of capacity complement the appropriation of teachers and their resources – and their construction as merely qualified – by including them within the college’s ability to meet consumers’ needs. This is seen in their replacement by the college or the opaque ‘we’ as actor and the modalization of the process, as in [name of college] can prepare you for these examinations (B3). If you wish to study at University or at the local [technical] college then we can help you (B4). and [name of college] is one of the few colleges that can meet the needs of very advanced learners (B6). Moving from the assurance of provision to assurances of consumer satisfaction, modalization again plays a key role. Here ‘will’ is used to construct as predictable and certain satisfaction on consumption of products. However, the assurance of satisfaction differs from assurances of product provision by focusing on the beneficial effects of consumption for the consumer. For example In AEP [Academic English Preparation], you will learn the language skills necessary for success in further studies (B2).


and You will have the maximum opportunity to make friends with your fellow students and experience Australian society and culture during your visit (B2). In the second example the assurance is made but qualified by the lack of certainty implied by ‘opportunity’ – though this is shored up by the use of ‘maximum’ – an acknowledgement perhaps that the making of friends represents a limit to the products about which a college can assure satisfaction, dependent as it is not on relations between the college, its products and consumers but on relations between consumers themselves. These assurances of satisfaction using ‘will’ do not imply, however, that the consumer is without agency, as teachers and other staff are constructed in assurances of product provision. With consumers, the appearance of determination arises in the absence of an account of the freedoms enshrined in the process of consumption itself, the aspect of the consumption community addressed in the final sections of this chapter. Before turning to the process of consumption, there remains one final way in which the college is constructed as ‘expert’. This is through the inclusion of additional, supporting voices and agents. These are included in letters addressed to readers from the director, testimonials addressed to the reader from students, and references to accreditation and other evidence of recognition by accreditation agencies and other organizations which are invoked as macro ‘guarantors’ of quality. Letters and testimonials are significant in revealing options in the discourse which enable the inclusion of voices other than those implicated by the college and its substitutes. In constructing these voices, the personal system is used synthetically to personalize the relationship with the reader (Fairclough, 1992, p. 216). Thus, while other elements in the personal system appear throughout the brochures, ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ appear only here. Most significantly for the construction of assurances, ‘I’ is included as the agent in ‘mental processes’. These are processes which reflect how people perceive, understand and value the world, processes in which the agent is construed as the ‘sensor’ and that which is sensed, the ‘phenomenon’. Halliday (1985, p. 109) explains that, grammatically, phenomena behave less like things than facts because facts can be sensed or thought but they lack the capacity to affect anything else and nothing can affect them. Examples from the testimonials include ‘studying in Australia’, as in


[name of college] is a very good college and I enjoy studying in Australia (B4). and I like the attitude of the teachers and I appreciate their enthusiasm (B5). It is significant that neither ‘attitude of the teachers’ nor ‘their enthusiasm’ are phenomena which undermine the more general construction of teachers as ‘qualified’ but not ‘experts’, in the sense explained above. However, the more general significance of mental processes for the student testimonials is that they establish a voice in which products are transformed from ‘things’ produced by the college into phenomena whose qualities reflect the perceptions of consumers. This is the voice of the satisfied consumer who speaks, as it were, from a possible future constructed for readers, testifying that in this future studying English does indeed provide access to the international lifestyle, exemplified by The teachers are good and I like the communication with other students from around the world (B5). In this synthetically personalized relationship between sensors and readers, the construction of products as phenomena both adds to the credibility of claims about them, because they appear to be expressed by a human voice – identifiable both as an individual and as embodying the desirable lifestyle that comes with learning English – and simultaneously makes these claims less accountable because, as phenomena, they are tied to the perceptions of individual sensors. In letters from the director, the personal system is also used to personalize synthetically the relationship with potential consumers, thereby adding to the attractions of the college. However, as the participant closest to representing the voice of the college, and the person who is ultimately accountable for the integrity of teaching and learning at the college, these letters reflect the tension between producers, consumers and regulatory authorities. The following example illustrates this tension on one of the rare occasions where students are constructed as accountable for their learning – a construction which creates risk for the producer because it implies a lack of certainty in the product/consumer relationship.


I hope that, through hard work and participation, you achieve your goals and have fun at the same time (B4). The mental process ‘hope’ locates the phenomenon which follows not as an obligation for which the student will be held accountable but as a perception of the sensor, and therefore not enforceable. The potential student is then positioned as the actor of ‘achieve’, a process of which the goal includes ‘your goals’. The question of how these goals are to be achieved is answered by ‘through hard work and participation’, but here the student as the agent is blurred by the nominalization, which through the use of parenthesis is itself constructed as an optional element in the clause. This construction, while acknowledging the need for the student to be the agent in learning, a question of the college’s integrity, still shields the student from the full onus of responsibility, a reflection of the commercial pressure on the college to ensure the satisfaction of consumers. Interdiscursive relations Returning to the argument for interdiscursive relations between the world constructed in the brochures and that reported in the diaries, the construction of the college as guarantor of satisfaction resonates strongly with the diarists’ experience that teachers are held accountable for delivering students’ success in learning as a ‘debt’ to be repaid. At the same time, the construction of the college as the controller, and teachers as operatives, correlates with teachers’ inability to teach effectively because their professional authority is subordinated to a model of teaching and learning designed to attract new students, a process in which – exemplifying the role of operative – their ability to question or decide the effectiveness and purposes of teaching and learning is minimized. Consolidating this subordination, the college as the controller of teachers’ resources is reflected in the diaries in the control of teaching materials by managers, and, extending the notion of ‘resources’ to those brought to teaching as part of the teachers’ professional habitus, in the manipulation of teachers’ habitus that was reported through evaluation/appraisal practices. On the other hand, the construction of the college as the protector of students in consumption has strong affinities with the reported behaviour of managers in protecting students from the risks of failure and disappointment involved in language learning – exemplified by the creation of the ‘impression’ of learning through the over-promotion of students, and the pressures on teachers to ease assessment.


In summary, then, these correlations provide evidence that the discourse of commercialization constructs students as assured of success in learning but without responsibility for achieving it, and teachers as charged with this responsibility but denied professional autonomy in doing so because this is appropriated and transformed by the college in its efforts to retain and attract new students. Together, these constructions both align with the teachers’ perception that they have lower status than managers and establish the framework of identities and relationships within which consumption occurs. However, two further conditions must be met in order to complete the construction of the consumption community: the alignment of consumers’ ‘attributed consumer-egos’ with the benefits which accrue from the consumption of products as ‘symbolised commodities’ (Wernick, 1991); and an account of the process of consumption itself.

Students and readers as consumers In the final step in the construction of the community of consumption, the construction of students as consumers and readers as potential students, the brochures focus on establishing how each can benefit from the products offered and how the process of consumption works. In the former, students and readers are ascribed attributes which can be enhanced by consumption of the products offered to them. In the latter, the construction of the consumer is merged with the process involved in consumption itself. In each case, apart from their representation in the personal system as ‘they/their’ and ‘you/your’, the constructions of students and readers mirror each other: indeed, they become interchangeable. This ‘premature’ construction of the reader as a student and the effortless conversion of identities it implies are perhaps to be expected given that the construction of students within the consumption community is designed to persuade readers to become students. Reflecting this merging of identities, I will not deal separately with the construction of readers and students. Rather, I will focus first on the construction of both as beneficiaries, and second on how they enter consumption processes. Nominal groups again play a key role here, enabling the construction of students as the possessors of aspirations, needs, skills and other qualities which can be aligned with the beneficial properties of products. In this alignment, there is a precise fit between the aspirations, needs and skills presented and the enhancements provided, a relationship in which the degree and types of attribute ascribed are mirrored in the


range and types of products offered, as at B1, where ‘English language study’ is aligned with ‘your personal and professional needs’. They [the courses] enable you to specialise in the English language study which best suits your personal and professional needs. The skills to be enhanced include, in the following example, ‘their business vocabulary’ and ‘their speaking skills’: Students will increase their business vocabulary, learn to use business vocabulary appropriately and improve their speaking skills (B2). The attributes ascribed to readers precisely parallel those of students. For example, in the following ‘our teaching’ is cast as providing a product – a particular ‘ability’ – which will improve ‘your communicative ability’ and ‘your pronunciation’. Our teaching aims are to give you the ability to understand and use grammatical structures, to improve your communicative ability through a series of activities designed to practise listening and speaking, [and] to practise and improve your pronunciation (B4). And aspirations are exemplified by ‘your academic and career goals’ in the following example: Through its close links with universities, business colleges and high schools, [name of college] can help you plan a pathway of study to meet your academic and career goals (B6). While the colleges offer these alignments, the matching of products to attributes is a matter for consumers. Significantly for the construction of teachers and other staff, the capacity to select products is unmediated by other participants – teachers do not employ their expertise in identifying students’ learning needs; rather, consumers select the products of their choice. This is a relationship in which consumer choice is unconstrained by the modalities of failure or imposition, in which choice is, as it were, itself a matter of consumer choice. For example, at B2 Students can enter at any level for beginner to advanced, and progress as their skills develop.


In this example, the only constraint on the students’ freedom to choose is the link to the rate at which their skills ‘develop’. This can be viewed as an ‘ergative’ process (Halliday, 1985, p. 144) which, I argue below, is more generally used to reduce the process of consumption to a relationship between consumers’ skills and products, thereby excluding all participants – including the consumer – and processes which could condition the enhancement of these skills. Anticipating this argument here, in the example from B2 the students’ capacity to choose a level in which to ‘progress’ is not subject to evaluation or constraint; rather, ‘progress’ is a benefit which accrues to the consumer through the alignment of products to skills. A further grammatical resource which enables the construction of consumer choice is ‘projection’. Halliday (1985, p. 266) explains that projection expresses ‘a relationship between processes – between a mental or verbal process on the one hand, and another process (of any kind) that is mentalized or verbalized (projected) by it’. What is projected is a ‘meta-phenomenon’ which is tied to the perceptions of the actor and therefore may or may not actually occur. In the brochures, however, any uncertainty created by projection is usually offset – immediately and unconditionally – by the products offered by the college. For example, in each of the following cases the mental process ‘wish’ projects a further process; in first case ‘combine’ and in the second ‘proceed’.

[Name of college] offers a range of courses for students who wish to combine language learning with a holiday in Australia (B1). This course is designed for students who wish to proceed to business related studies or to a career in business (B2).

In such cases, the use of projection constructs as a ‘meta-phenomenon’ an aspiration which defines the consumer, and, by aligning a product with this aspiration – typically a course – simultaneously eliminates any doubt about its potential to be met. For an aspiration to be met, it only remains for the consumer to choose the product aligned with it. This constructs learning as a function of consumers’ choices in the service of their aspirations but as otherwise unconditioned, thereby reinforcing the exclusion of participants and processes – exemplified by teachers, teaching, learning and assessment – which might introduce uncertainty or imposition into the relationship between consumers and products. Finally, this unmediated relationship between aspirations,


choices and products is also constructed through what are called in systemic functional linguistics ‘hypotactic clauses’. These are clauses which in some way modify other clauses and are thereby dependent on them (Halliday, 1985, p. 195). They include conditional structures, as for example at B4, where If you wish to study at University or at the [name of further study institution], then we can help you. Here the projecting ‘wish to’ is included within the dependent ‘if’ clause, constructing the meta-phenomenon ‘study at University or at the [name of further study institution]’ as uncertain because it is both projected and conditional – an uncertainty which is immediately resolved by the ‘help’ offered in the main clause. Similarly, at B5, If you are interested in popular culture, you might study English through Music, English through Television and Media studies. Here the consumer is not attributed with an aspiration but an interest which is cast as a condition – to be immediately met by an array of products which are precisely aligned with the forms this interest might take. As beneficiaries, then, consumers are constructed as possessing the resources and authority to select products which are precisely aligned with their aspirations, needs and skills in a process which is immediate and unconditioned by the expertise of teachers and other staff, or the possibility of constraints or failure. This construction of the consumer almost completes the consumption community. However, there remains the important question of how consumers and the products they select enter the process of consumption itself. In others words, what does learning actually involve within the consumption community? Within the brochures, this involves three aspects: the production, provision and automation of consumption. The first two construct the college, its products and staff as the agents responsible for providing learning to students, a process from which students’ own agency – and therefore responsibility – is excluded. The third also disengages students as agents from the learning process by constructing learning as independent of agency itself – an automated process in which skills ‘undergo’ enhancement without the need for other participants or processes. The student thus constructed is the recipient of learning but free from responsibility, agency or imposition in bringing it about.


The provision of consumption is constructed using three grammatical operations. The first two involve types of hypotaxis, which was mentioned above in relation to conditional structures. Here it does not involve conditionals but modifications to do with causation and purposes. Each provides a different way in which students can be relieved of agency and responsibility in the process of learning, which is constructed as ‘brought about’ by other agents and processes. The following examples show how this is achieved within the verbal group. At B2 you benefit from lessons specially created by your teacher to meet your needs. And B1 offers A course designed to train students in the English language and academic study skills they require to enter and successfully complete their academic studies at [Name of further study institution] or university. And at B3 and B6 Our courses . . . are carefully structured to develop your fluency and accuracy. Classes . . . involve speaking, listening and situational ‘role plays’ designed to prepare students for confident use of English outside the classroom. Here, it is not human actors, notably teachers, who are the agents in teaching but the products, the ‘lessons’, ‘course’, ‘courses’ and ‘role plays’, which they create/design/structure. Within the causative structure of the verbal groups it is these products which in turn bring about learning through ‘meet . . . ’, ‘train . . . ’ and ‘develop . . . ’ and ‘prepare . . . ’. In this construction, human participants are textualized as the ‘initiator’ (Halliday, 1985, p. 263), this being the participant who does not act directly but may do so by some indirect force. In this capacity, teachers are constructed as responsible for, but not directly involved in, bringing about learning. The two examples illustrate how the production of learning does not involve an imposition on consumers because the causative relationship between the two processes in each verbal group ensures that human participants do not act directly on students; rather,


their learning is produced by the properties of products for which these other participants are responsible. As well as constructing staff as acting on products which bring about learning, causative verbal groups enable the college, its staff and products to produce the actions of students themselves. Students are, for example, ‘encouraged’, ‘helped’, ‘assisted’ and ‘enabled’ to learn, processes which support – and therefore shoulder agency and responsibility for – student’s actions. Thus at B4, The classes are interesting, enjoyable and varied, and you will be encouraged to participate as much as possible. As with the examples of causatives in which products produce learning, there is no obligation or other imposition implied for the consumer here: within the hypotactic structure the support implied by ‘encouraged’ brings about action which produces consumption while simultaneously reducing consumers’ agency and responsibility for these actions. The actual processes which link the support to its result – and the possibilities of failure and imposition these imply – are obscured within the causative connection between the two processes. As well as these constructions within the verbal group, causal links between clauses are used to construct what occurs in the first clause as resulting in what comes in the second while simultaneously ensuring that the actions of participants in the first do not act directly on those in the second. An example from B3, already discussed above, illustrates how the potential imposition posed by assessment is eliminated not only by the nominalization ‘placement test’, the agentless passive, the use of ‘appropriate’ and the consumer as ‘beneficiary’, but by the hypotactic construction of the two clauses. Thus, A placement test is given on arrival to place you in an appropriate class. Here, the consumer is absented from the first clause and it is the giving of the placement test which actually brings about the placement in the second clause, signalled by ‘to place’. The actual processes by which placement occurs – and the personal responsibility and risks they entail – are thus excluded, replaced by the minimum link required to construct the relationship between the two. Similarly, at B1 Teachers combine the use of modern teaching resources with proven teaching techniques to ensure your rapid progress.


In this example, the consumer’s ‘rapid progress’ is brought about through a hypotactic relationship in which the second clause signals the purpose of the first though ‘to ensure . . . ’. Crucially for the construction of consumption, this obscures the actual processes involved in making progress – constructing the relationship between the actions of teachers and the production of learning as inevitable. This use of the causal link to insulate consumption from the actual processes involved in learning raises the question of what happens when consumers are constructed as the goal of processes in which the college, its staff or products are actors. There are only six examples of this in the construction of consumption, in B1 and B6. Indeed, these are the only examples of this construction in the brochures as a whole, perhaps reflecting the potential risk of imposition on the consumer that this construction poses. Minimizing this risk, the colleges and their representatives typically ‘assist’, ‘guide’ and ‘prepare’ students. While ‘assist’ and ‘guide’ suggest support, ‘prepare’ moves closer to implying a degree of imposition. This risk, however, is itself minimized by restricting the actors of ‘prepare’ to products, as at B6, where The program prepares students for entry to Australian high schools. And reserving ‘assist’ and ‘guide’ for human actors – as in The Accommodation Officer assists students with all accommodation needs (B1). And [Name of college]’s Academic Counsellors guide you in your studies at [name of college] (B6). The second aspect of consumption involves its provision. Here the risks posed by acting directly on consumers are constructed so that consumption is generated without their responsibility or agency. Actions are ‘done for’ but not ‘done to’ consumers. They are, in Halliday’s (1985, p. 132) terms the ‘beneficiaries’ of processes, being either ‘the one that goods are given to’ or ‘the one that services are done for’. Students, whether included as a participant or absent but implied, are consistently the beneficiaries of processes which have learning as their goal, most commonly ‘give’, ‘provide’ and ‘offer’. In B5, for example, Your [name of college] teachers are excellent teaching professionals who give personal attention and encouragement to every student.


Here it is the ‘attention’ and ‘encouragement’ which are the goal of ‘give’, while ‘every student’ is insulated from any imposition resulting from the actions of the ‘teaching professionals’ by being their beneficiary. Likewise, We will give you counselling advice about which institution is best for you (B4). Here ‘you’, as the beneficiary of the advice given, is neither imposed on by ‘We’ nor responsible for establishing ‘which institution is best for you’. The third and final aspect of the construction of consumption, automation, draws on Halliday’s (1985) account of ergativity, in which he contrasts ‘transitive’ and ‘ergative’ perspectives on the clause. In the former, the key question is ‘does the process extend beyond the Actor, to some other entity, or not’ (Halliday, 1985, p. 145). If it does, the process is transitive; if not, intransitive. From this perspective, the actor as ‘doer’ is the obligatory participant and the ‘done to’ optional. On the other hand, in terms of the ergative/non-ergative distinction, the key question is which participant ‘undergoes’ the process: if the actor, then the process is ergative, if the goal it is non-ergative. From the ergative perspective, then, it is the undergoer or, Halliday calls it, the ‘medium’ which is the obligatory participant, and the ‘external cause’ is optional because ‘either the process is represented as self-engendering, in which case there is no separate Agent; or it is represented as engendered from outside, in which case there is another participant functioning as Agent’ (Halliday, 1985, p. 147). Processes in the brochures which have this capacity to be selfengendering include ‘benefit’, ‘improve’, ‘develop’ and ‘increase’. The ergative potential of these processes is used in the brochures to construct learning itself as self-generating, thus removing the risks posed to learning by the involvement of external causes such as the actions of teachers and students themselves. This is exemplified in a student testimonial from B5, in which the student asserts that My English skills have developed quickly and I would recommend [name of college] to my friends. Here, the medium ‘skills’ have undergone development without an external cause – thereby constructing them as having enhanced themselves. The capacity of these processes to self-generate learning also


enables the blurring of the relationship between an external cause and the process, such as in B2, where Students can enter at any level from beginner to advanced, and progress as their skills develop. Here ‘skills’ are the medium that ‘develop’ without any reference to external causes, thereby constructing learning as sui generis and unconstrained by exigencies. Similarly, You will benefit from our specialist courses (B1). And Once you reach Upper Intermediate level you benefit from a special curriculum (B5). In these cases, though it is clear that ‘you’ is the medium which undergoes ‘benefit’, the relationship of this process to the ‘specialist courses’ and ‘special curriculum’ is less clear, and the ‘benefit’ is left to accrue unconditioned and uncaused. Together with production and provision, then, the process of automation creates an immediate and effortless ‘fit’ between the consumer and the product. This construction of consumption as a relationship of instant gratification between products and consumers completes the consumption community and in doing so epitomizes the relationship foreshadowed by Wernick (1991) between ‘symbolised commodities’ and ‘attributed consumer-egos’. Interdiscursive relations We can now draw together the argument for interdiscursive relations between the world constructed in the brochures and the world as it is experienced by teachers. To what extent does the latter resemble a community of consumption? Perhaps most striking is the construction of students as free from risk or imposition in learning in the brochures. This implies that, if either does occur, students have a warrant to complain that they are not satisfied with the product provided. In terms of the discourse of commercialization, the parallel here is with students in the diaries who were reported to complain to managers and teachers about teaching, who can be understood as ‘policing’ (Fairclough, 1996) their relationship with the products they are entitled to receive. At the same time, the construction


of an assured alignment between the college’s products and the aspirations, needs and skills of students leaves managers and teachers with little recourse because, as the arbiter of product selection and satisfaction in the consumption community, the consumer’s experience of consumption is not open to challenge. In the diaries, this construction of consumers resonates strongly with the authority students were reported to exercise in virtue of the ‘debt of learning’ owed to them by the college. Faced with this authority, managers were reported not to take issue with the students but to override teachers’ expertise and to realign teachers’ practices with students’ aspirations in order to maintain their ‘happiness’ – thereby equating good teaching with ‘happy’ students. Moreover, the construction in the brochures of students as ‘provided’ with learning, without responsibility or agency, and unmediated by teachers’ expertise in identifying their learning needs or evaluating their progress correlates in the diaries with the struggles with students over control of teaching practices, in which teachers’ expertise was challenged by students’ classroom behaviour, lack of effort in learning, and resistance to teachers’ assessments of their language proficiency. As with managers, the students’ authority in challenging teachers’ expertise derives from the ‘debt of learning’ owed to them by the college. However, whereas managers sought to realign teachers’ practices with students’ aspirations in response to pressure from students, the teachers’ response to the twin pressures from managers and students was seen in the diaries by the emergence of teaching as ‘edutainment’ and a ‘habit of pleasing’. ‘Edutainment’, with its implication of students as passive recipients, and ‘pleasing’, as the process which links edutainment to this audience, connect the diarists’ accounts and the construction in the brochures of teaching and learning as ‘consumption processes’. Here, the processes which link products and consumers are insulated from responsibility, effort, and the risks of disappointment or imposition; the ‘instant gratification’ constructed by the production, provision and automation of consumption in the brochures is, then, mirrored in the diaries by the process of ‘pleasing’ and the provision of ‘edutainment’. If we move to Sarangi and Roberts’s (1999a) account of professional and institutional discourses, we can identify these interdiscursive relations as evidence of an institutional discourse which in colonizing and compromising the professional lives of teachers constructs colleges as sites of social struggle. It is this institutional discourse I have called the ‘discourse of commercialization’. Arising from the need to retain and attract students to the colleges and to honour the debt of learning owed to them, this discourse reflects and advances the commercially


oriented definition of teaching and learning evidenced in the diaries. On this interpretation, the community of consumption represented in Figure 5.1 can be understood as both the premise and endgame of the pressures on teachers. As the premise, it reflects the model of teaching and learning advanced by managers in response to the commercial imperative to attract new students; as the endgame, it represents the configuration of identities and relationships towards which teachers are pressured to align their practices. The value of interpreting the relations between the brochures and the diaries as interdiscursive, then, is to reveal this community as a commodified ontology (Wernick, 1991) which drives the pressures on teachers to transform their practices, and against which they are evaluated/appraised. This interpretation is consonant with Bourdieu’s account of social production and reproduction, introduced in Chapter 3 to explain how commercial classes are here exercising symbolic power through technologization to revalue to their own advantage, and against the professional interests of teachers, the capital assets associated with teaching, and therefore the habitus of teachers. On this account, the discourse of commercialization represents the ‘official language’, the term Bourdieu (1991) uses to describe a discourse which supports the domination of the markets by classes which have a controlling share of capital – and simultaneously facilitates the subordination of those which hold less capital. The official language is both the discourse of the dominant classes and the discourse which secures their domination of the market by subordinating the interests of weaker classes to their own. To achieve this subordination, the official language must come to be ‘misrecognised’ as having legitimacy by classes with less authority in the market; in other words, it must be accepted as the linguistic capital with the greatest value in the market. The key point about misrecognition is that in accepting the official language as legitimate, weaker classes subordinate their own interests and shape their own habitus to serve the interests promoted through the official language. It is this manipulation of value at the expense of the interests of weaker classes which identifies the official language as a form of ‘symbolic violence’. In the interdiscursive relations between the brochures and the diaries, this manipulation of value is seen in the brochures in the strategic construction of the community of consumption as desirable, and its imposition – through technologized pressures – to transform the habitus of teachers, who, in trying to improve their life chances by avoiding unemployment, consent (Gramsci, 1988) to their own subordination.


Developing further the argument introduced in Chapter 3, the discourse of commercialization exemplifies Bourdieu’s theory of practice by contributing to the production and reproduction of society – and the interests of dominant classes – by pressuring teachers to subordinate themselves and their practices to the identities and relationships implied by the community of consumption. Drawing on these constructions, the brochures and the forms of technologization identified in the diaries are the discursive means by which the economic fields of consumer and promotional culture are produced and reproduced, devaluing the capital associated with the field of education and pressuring teachers to synchronize their habitus with these revaluations. On this interpretation, the interdiscursive relations between the brochures and diaries can be seen as an example of the ‘unification of the market’ (Bourdieu, 1991), manifested in the evaluation/appraisal of teachers’ practices against a model of teaching referenced to the community of consumption. Such revaluation illustrates, on a local scale, how markets in social and cultural capital, Bourdieu (1998) argues, are being unified globally according to the economic values of those classes whose interests are served by the dominant neoliberal discourse, a point that I take up in the next chapter. According to Bourdieu, this revaluation advances an economic model which legitimizes and exploits a culture of insecurity and fear of unemployment among those – such as the teachers in the diaries – who stand to lose from neoliberal policies. It is this expansion of the neoliberal model through the unification of the market which is evidenced in the extension of the community of consumption from a construction of the discourse of advertising to the model of teaching and learning advanced through the discourse of commercialization – the ‘official language’ (Bourdieu, 1991) of the colleges.

Summary of the semiotic resource perspective The construction of students as consumers and teaching and learning as consumption processes within a community of consumption completes the argument for the operation of a discourse of commercialization as the dominant discourse in the colleges. However, there remains the question of the extent to which the identities and relationships advanced by this discourse can be traced to the influence of actors that operate on a global scale, and how this discourse contributes to the nature of contemporary society. This is the focus of the next chapter.

6 The Role of Macro-Actors in Professional Practice

This chapter expands the focus developed so far to explain how interrelations between managers, students and teachers are shaped by the operations of macro-actors and why this is occurring in contemporary society. The use of ‘actor’ here draws on Mouzelis (1995, 2008) who employs it to refer to an individual or collective social entity which influences the social world. According to this usage, actors are ‘micro’ or ‘macro’, depending on their relative capacity to influence the social world, and therefore each other. To this, I have added ‘meso’ actors to refer to those whose capacity to influence the social world lies between that of micro- and macro-actors. This use of ‘actor’ is not meant to imply a particular relationship between individual actions and social structures and processes, or to deny that the word crudely glosses the complex realities of social life. Rather, it is ‘a convenient shorthand to avoid longwinded descriptions of complex processes of representation and of group decision-making’ (Mouzelis, 1995, p. 15). In developing the explanation I bring this account of social actors to Bourdieu’s critiques of globalization, neoliberalism (1998) and consumer culture (1984). The chapter starts by outlining these. It then traces the ways in which Bourdieu’s critique explains the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization before extending this explanation to include the influence of macro-actors.

The discourse of commercialization and contemporary society Globalization, neoliberalism and consumer culture If there is one point that is agreed upon about globalization, it is that it is a highly contested concept (McGrew, 2007; Ritzer, 2007) which, at 151


a minimum, refers to ‘a growing interconnectedness . . . a magnitude of global flows to a degree that all levels of human organization are interweaved into one system’ (Brahm, 2002, p. 1). While the literature on globalization may share this focus on interconnectedness, there is disagreement on the constituents of the system, the relationships between them and their social implications (O’Neill, 1997). Notwithstanding these differences of opinion, there is a consensus that globalization refers to complex intersections of the local and the global involving economic, technological, cultural and political changes (Robertson and White, 2007). It is these intersections which have been the focus of concerns about the social and cultural consequences of globalization, seen in the spread of inequalities created by the operations of the market and with it the emergence of consumer culture as globally dominant. As a manifestation of the market, consumer culture, according to Leiss et al. (1997), dominates those subject to it by reconstructing their lives according to the mechanisms and values of the market. For them, to live according to the principles of a market economy is to be immersed in buying and selling transactions every day, where everything one has (especially one’s mental skills and physical energies) and everything one wants or needs has a price. In other words, as a market-industrial economy expands, more and more elements of both the natural environment and human qualities are drawn into the orbit of exchanged things, into the realm of commodities. Everything has some use to someone (it is hoped), and likewise everything has a price at which it can be acquired. (pp. 322–323) The concern raised about consumer culture in relation to globalization is that it represents a form of cultural globalization whose operations involve ‘processes of unequal power, which bring old practices and identities into question raising the potential for conflict’ (Brahm, 2002, p. 6). Compounding this concern is the fear that the social costs of globalization outweigh any gains which may accrue from the economic efficiencies of deregulated markets, creating a new manifest destiny (Popkewitz, 2000) of social inequality for populations subject to free markets, including the national and international exacerbation of poverty through the reduction of employment security, and the erosion of welfare systems and other social support mechanisms. These are processes in which governments may have little authority to intervene because, in what Brecher and Costello (1994) have called a ‘race to

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the bottom’, they are constrained by the need to compete for globally mobile capital and thereby pressured to implement neoliberal economic policies at the expense of those which seek to redress social inequality. According to George (1999, p. 4), this shift of authority from government to the operations of the market is the inevitable outcome of neoliberal policies, according to which ‘the economy should dictate its rules to society and not the other way around’. It is to this nexus of market expansion, cultural domination and inequality that Bourdieu’s critique of contemporary society is addressed.

Bourdieu’s critique As foreshadowed in the previous chapters, at the centre of Bourdieu’s critique is what he (1998) has called ‘neo-liberal discourse’, arguing that, as the dominant global discourse, this advances on a global scale not an economic theory but a political programme which serves the interests of those groups who stand to gain from neoliberal policies at the expense of more vulnerable groups. On this account, neoliberal discourse is a means of advancing what Bourdieu (1991) calls the ‘unification of the market’, a process in which a closed circle is created that encloses and transforms the social world within the production, promotion and circulation of economic and cultural goods. This ‘entails the progressive obsolescence of the earlier mode of production of the habitus and its products’ (1991, p. 50). Driving this obsolescence is the neoliberal construction of ‘individual rationality’ (Bourdieu, 1998) which excludes the economic and social conditions which shape and are shaped by the habitus. In doing so, it promotes an asocial construction of individual freedom in which people are cast as exclusively responsible for their own success or failure, irrespective of the conditions in which their habitus evolved and with which it is synchronized. In advancing this construction of freedom, neoliberal discourse does violence to those whose habitus is not synchronized with the economic field, in which the capital of greatest value circulates. It exercises this violence by legitimating free-market policies as inevitable (Bourdieu, 1998) and as common sense (Bourdieu, 1994), thereby endowing them with the power to enlist those who stand to lose by them in their own subordination. To achieve this legitimacy, neoliberal discourse represents an array of presuppositions as self-evident, including ‘maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness [as] the ultimate and sole goal of human actions’ and a ‘radical separation . . . between the economic and the social’ (1998, p. 30), as well as


the language of the free market itself, which in appearing self-evident represents globalization itself as inevitable (1998, p. 34). Bourdieu thus explains globalization not as a phenomenon related to neoliberalism, but – in so far as it is used to justify neoliberal policies as inevitable – as a form of symbolic violence exercised through the discourse of neoliberalism itself. Globalization, according to Bourdieu, then, is not a matter merely of homogenization but a means of legitimating and thereby bringing about the subordination of vulnerable to dominant groups on a global scale. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, this process is constructed as an inevitable outcome of what Bourdieu (1998, p. 35) has called the ‘law of the market’ according to which ‘the economic world abandoned to its own logic’ becomes ‘the norm of all practices’. Subjected to this norm, established social practices – such as those providing security of employment – have been devalued in a process legitimized by notions such as ‘flexibility’ and ‘competence’. The former legitimates as necessary changes in working conditions which advantage those groups which stand to gain from neoliberal policies; the latter involves the commodification of the habitus itself, constructing as necessary a job market in which there are winners whose competencies are in demand and losers whose competencies are oversupplied in the market. In justifying this ‘intensification of insecurity’ (1998, p. 84) for those who do not have saleable competencies and the privileging of those who do, the discourse of neoliberalism legitimates inequality and disadvantage, casting those who fail to succeed as lacking what Bourdieu (1991) has called the ‘legitimate competence’. This is a condition which cannot be rectified within the economic field and which is – with the connection between the economic and the social severed – constructed within neoliberal discourse as irredeemable and inevitable. Bourdieu’s account of the social world which results from these processes focuses on the consequences of ‘flexploitation’, the term he (1998, p. 85) uses to describe ‘the rational management of insecurity’ – exemplified by the casualization of work – in which perpetual fear of unemployment induces people to yield to the pressures of the market. In this climate, the more easily a person can be replaced by others with similar competencies the more precarious their life chances and the greater their dependence on decisions which lie beyond their control. In the workplace, this dependency results in a ranking of employees based on competencies, which are continually appraised and reappraised in the light of changing market demands, thereby creating and legitimizing a regime in which fear dominates the motives of employees and


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in which the most easily replaceable have the least security. Through this constant need to prove themselves in terms of competencies whose content and value are determined by the market, and therefore beyond their control, people are isolated from the dispositions and values which accrue from the past and, by implication, the aspirations to which they give rise. This destabilization of their habitus further devalues the capital associated with more vulnerable groups, thereby compounding their capacity to be subordinated to the interests of dominant groups. According to Bourdieu (1998, p. 98), then, the basis of the social order implemented by the policies which neoliberal discourse legitimizes ‘under the banner of freedom’ is the ‘structural violence of unemployment, of insecure employment, and of the fear provoked by the threat of losing employment’. Those subjected to this violence are isolated not only from their own pasts and futures, but from each other by the need to compete for the little job security that is available. In attempting to improve their conditions, they succumb to the need to comply with the dominant discourse, a process which further enhances the freedom of the market to determine their conditions (Bourdieu, 1999). Consistent with this account of neoliberalism, Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of consumption focuses on how it produces and is reproduced by the tastes and consumption patterns of different groups in their efforts to acquire cultural capital. I draw on the analysis here because Bourdieu’s (1984) account of ‘distinction’ and ‘lifestyle’ extends the account of consumer culture developed through this study to include its contribution to the production and reproduction of contemporary society. In Chapter 5, the desire to achieve lifestyles through the consumption of goods was explained as a desire for the social status which is both drawn on and promoted by advertising discourse, in which potential consumers are offered products which claim to provide lifestyles customized to meet their aspirations. Bourdieu’s account of distinction reinterprets this process within the theory of practice, according to which social status is not a property of lifestyles, but refers to relations which are produced by and differentiate between classes. Interpreted in these terms, it is consumers themselves who produce and reproduce these relations of distinction between classes through their own consumption choices. Thus, in selecting and consuming products, they assert the desirability of capital which has a greater value than their own: that is associated with the fields drawn on in the construction of the lifestyles to which they aspire. Within this account, lifestyle refers to the full complexity of social and cultural practices which combine to produce the habitus associated with a particular group.


In attempting to attain the most valued lifestyles through consumption, consumers, then, reproduce the dominance of those fields with which they desire their habitus to be synchronized – those associated with the groups that have greater authority than their own in the market. The desire for distinction is therefore inseparable from the assertion of the interests of particular groups over those of others – and the practices that perpetuate consumer culture, such as advertising, are to the extent that they devalue the capital of weaker groups, revealed as forms of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 51). Hence, in their efforts to acquire for themselves the dominant forms of cultural capital, consumers’ tastes are ‘markers’ of their class (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 2) and consumption itself is revealed as a site of social struggle.

Explaining meso- and micro-relations We can now bring Bourdieu’s critique to the task of explaining the interrelations between teachers, managers and students. The starting point is his (1991) identification of the progressive obsolescence of established practices as characteristic of neoliberalism. In the community of consumption, this obsolescence is reflected in the devaluation of professional practice, central to which are appraisal practices in which teachers – as in Bourdieu’s (1998) account of replaceable employees – are continuously obliged to prove themselves in economic terms. In addressing these market-driven demands, the appraisal of teachers rewards the ability both to create students’ happiness and to conduct teaching as a set of supervised procedures without questioning their purposes. In Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, these abilities correspond to the legitimate competence which advances the interests of dominant groups by simultaneously increasing the value of their economic capital and devaluing the social capital of those appraised. As evidenced in the operation of the discourse of commercialization, this process erodes teachers’ motivation for work based on commitment to, and control of, professional standards. These are replaced by motivation based on each teacher’s self-interest: specifically, on the need to calculate how to manage their behaviour so as to minimize the risk of unemployment. These effects resonate with Bourdieu’s (1998) account of the separation of the social – teachers’ professional knowledge and standards – from the economic in the legitimization of ‘individual rationality’, the competition and isolation between individuals which results, and the perpetual fear of redundancy created by ‘flexploitation’. As Bourdieu predicts, the resulting intensification of insecurity


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among teachers acts as a disincentive to join unions. Indeed, any such attempts to enable the social to intervene in the economic are undermined by the pervasiveness of market-driven appraisal and the threat of redundancy. The result is the reduction in teachers’ ability to unite in improving their employment security and defending their understanding of professional practice against the interests of managers and students. In relation to the construction of students as consumers, Bourdieu offers an explanation of both the attraction of the ‘international lifestyle’ and the construction of students as not responsible for learning. The international lifestyle is attractive because it offers students access to a world of financial and social success, security and leisure – a ‘lifestyle’ in Bourdieu’s (1984) sense which exemplifies the rewards of distinction promoted by the discourse of advertising. This is precisely the aspect of consumer culture through which it exerts symbolic violence by increasing the demand for and therefore the value of the capital held by dominant groups – the ‘winners’ in neoliberal terms – and devaluing that of the rest. Consistent with this, and seen in Chapter 5, the discourse of commercialization advances a construction of consumers according to which they are valued only in terms of attributes which lead them to consume products: their aspirations, needs and skills. By including only these market-driven attributes, those associated with effort, responsibility and the management of risk are systematically excluded, constructing a habitus for consumers which, while it can be precisely matched to learning-as-products and allows the unmediated freedom to consume required for the operation of ‘individual rationality’ (Bourdieu, 1998), lacks precisely the dispositions necessary for learning. Viewed from this perspective, then, students – like teachers – are revealed to be contradictorily constructed, and to possess, like teachers, what Bourdieu’s has called a ‘divided or even torn habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 127). As with teachers, this condition arises at the intersection between the economic and pedagogic fields. Here, students are commercially advantaged by being assured of the provision of the ‘learning’ they have purchased, but are simultaneously disadvantaged because – mirroring the removal of teachers’ capacity to teach – the process of consumption advanced by the discourse of commercialization denies them the capacity to learn. The ‘freedom’ of the student as consumer within this discourse is thus revealed as illusory in so far as it revalues – as in Bourdieu’s critique – social in terms of economic capital.


In the economic exchange between students and the college, the ability to learn to communicate in English is valued as the habitus required to attain an ‘international lifestyle’. It is on the assurance of being provided with this habitus in the form of English language learning that students acquiesce in the devaluation of their own capital as learners by seeking to secure the value of their economic capital. This is a process which reproduces the value of economic capital as dominant in the market and therefore students’ authority as enterprising consumers (Abercrombie, 1990), but simultaneously reduces the value of capital associated with both teaching and learning. This argument finds support in a finding in the diary analysis which has not yet been explained: the struggles between students over the need for ‘hard’ work in language learning – in which some students complained that others thought this unnecessary, a difference which can be explained within Bourdieu’s critique as the former resisting and the latter acquiescing to the devaluation of their capital as learners. Though a full explanation of these differences would inevitably draw in complex cross-cultural and teaching-methodological issues, the fact that Bourdieu’s critique offers an explanation which is consistent with the data as a whole suggests that the contradictory construction of the student may contribute to this struggle. If both teachers and students ultimately lose within the community of consumption, the question arises as to the identity of the groups whose capital dominates the market, and whose members stand to gain from the economic order advanced by the discourse of neoliberalism. As explained in Chapter 4, the diarists drew a clear line between the interests of teachers and those of managers. The exception was Collette, who observed differences between managers’ motivations, distinguishing between those who move from teaching to management positions to gain ‘status’, and those whose concern is ‘profit’. It is these differences between managers which are brought into focus when viewed from the perspective of Bourdieu’s critique. While managers are a meso-class in relation to teachers, Bourdieu’s critique highlights the need to differentiate between actors within this class. Managers, in this sense, are a fractal class, organized in a hierarchy of sub-classes determined by their interest in and influence on increasing the value of economic capital generated by the operations of the college. Thus owners are positioned at the top along with directors, who may also be owners, managers in marketing and finance typically come next, followed by those involved in educational management – who have typically moved from teaching into management. Within Bourdieu’s


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critique, this hierarchy is significant because the ranking of the subclasses in terms of the value of their habitus in generating economic capital exemplifies what he (1998) calls the ‘hierarchy’ of competencies that differentiates between winners and losers – according to the extent to which people hold the ‘legitimate competence’. Teachers, then, while subordinate to this hierarchy because their habitus – qua teachers – is not synchronized with the economic field, potentially share interests with those managers whose habitus is also not fully synchronized with it. Such managers include those who are recruited from the ranks of teachers and as a result are potentially subject to the intra- and interpersonal tension produced by a habitus divided between the fields of economics and pedagogy. In terms, then, of which group stand to gain most in the hierarchy from the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse, it is those, such as owners/directors and those involved in marketing and finance, whose habitus is best synchronized with the field of economics and whose capital is thereby enhanced. This point marks a crucial difference between members of the dominant group and teachers because even if a teacher’s habitus were synchronized with the economic field, the value of their economic capital would not thereby increase because their class does not dominate the market in this form of capital. Rather, the value of the capital of the dominant class would be enhanced at the expense of pedagogic capital. This point is developed further in relation to the construction of teachers’ habitus through teacher training, below. Drawing these points together, Bourdieu’s critique offers an explanation of the social-theoretical significance of the meso- and micro-identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization. In this, teachers, managers and students are valued to the extent that their habitus is synchronized with the economic field, against which any habitus synchronized with the social field – represented by teachers’ expertise and students’ capacity to learn – is devalued in the advancement of teaching and learning as consumption processes. The struggles which result within and between these classes and sub-classes of meso- and micro-actors caught in the intersection of these two fields illustrates well Bourdieu’s analysis of consumption as a locus of struggle between classes.

The influence of macro-actors Each of the three texts selected as a focus within the social/institutional perspective provides evidence of a different ‘line of influence’ between


the operations of macro-actors and these micro- and meso-relations. These are links, evidenced in interdiscursive relations, between the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse and the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization. The focus on the influence of macro-actors is not meant to deny the possibility of reciprocal influence; rather, it points to the fact that – in line with Mouzelis’s (1995) distinctions – the dominant influence lies with the macro-actors. First, a sector newsletter was included because it was produced to inform those managers whose interests and influence lie in the commercial operations of colleges of national and international developments which are relevant to their decision making. In terms of the discourse of commercialization, then, the newsletter serves the interests of these groups by enhancing their ability to maintain the competitiveness of their colleges in the national and international education market. The value of the newsletter for the investigation of the relationship between the discourse of commercialization and neoliberal discourse is that it represents a line of influence between the national and international operations of macro-actors on which it reports and the interests and policies of managers which advance and are advanced by the discourse of commercialization. This line of influence, then, provides an opportunity to investigate whether the macro-operations reported in the newsletter evidence the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse, and therefore whether it is this discourse which legitimizes the discourse of commercialization. Second, the industry regulations governing the sector were chosen because they represent a line of influence between the operations of macro-actors – the national accreditation authority, NEAS, and the federal government – and the managerial interests and policies which shape meso- and micro-relations within the sector. However, whereas the newsletter provides information selected to enhance their competitiveness, the regulations are designed to place controls on the commercial and educational practices of colleges. These controls are textualized as ‘Standards and criteria’, produced by NEAS, the version current at the time of the study, which colleges must meet in order to be accredited to promote and provide courses, and in accordance with which they are subject to a yearly inspection. The pressure on managers to meet the standards arises because failure to do so can result in the removal of accreditation, without which the college cannot conduct its business. The purpose of the standards, criteria and


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regulatory practices into which they enter is to ensure that students receive a quality of education defined by relevant federal legislation and that promotional materials produced by colleges provide an accurate account of the educational services offered. The regulations, then, are designed to influence both the kinds of products which are offered and to specify the information that colleges must provide about them. In terms of meso- and micro-relations, the regulations thus advance the interests of students by intervening to their advantage in the construction of identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization. As argued above, however, the ‘interests of students’ is itself problematic – a focus of struggle between students, and between them and teachers, over social and economic constructions of learning. The value of this line of influence for the study, then, is that it provides an opportunity to investigate the relationship between the macro-operations which produce and are reproduced by this intervention, and the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse. Finally, the training materials chosen were from the CELTA course, the most influential qualification in the sector and internationally. This represents the final line of influence investigated between macro-actors and the micro- and meso-identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization. The course shapes the construction of teachers’ practices by influencing both teachers’ and managers’ understandings of what teaching is, and what constitutes ‘good teaching’. This influence arises because the CELTA training sector both produces graduates with competencies which match the employment preferences of managers and, through their dominance of the market in training, advances these as the competencies which managers – and prospective trainees – should prefer. The texts for the CELTA training materials comprised The practice of English language teaching (Harmer, 1991, 2001), the first edition of which was published in 1983 and which in this and subsequent editions has been commonly used in Australia and internationally as the basis of CELTA training programmes. The value of these materials for investigating the relationship between the discourses of neoliberalism and commercialization is that they evidence the construction of teaching and learning advanced by the training sector. This construction reflects the priorities of the teacher training sector as a macro-actor and therefore provides a further link between the economic order advanced by the discourse of neoliberalism and the identities and relationships advanced by that of commercialization.


Subordinating the social to the economic As explained in Chapter 2, the analysis of the social/institutional data involved a shift from the investigation of emergent patterns generated through inductive coding procedures to a more selective approach in which the emphasis shifted from discovery to search (Sarangi and Candlin, 2001), in this case in seeking to confirm the relevance of Bourdieu’s critique to the study. In order to do this, I looked for evidence that would support the central feature of the critique: that the discourse of neoliberalism advances an economic order in which the value of social capital is determined within the economic field, and, therefore in terms of economic capital. The search, then, was guided by the questions, ‘Who are the macro actors who produce and are represented in the data sets?’ and ‘Do their operations evidence the subordination of social to economic capital?’. Constructing markets The newsletter includes information on the relationships between the operations of the sector and those of national and international actors such as markets, governments and related industries. The significance of these relationships for Australia’s economic interests is monitored by Australian government departments, agencies and industry bodies who produce the texts on which the newsletter draws. These texts reflect a global web of interlocking and competing economic interests and activities which shape those of the sector. The construction of this world exemplifies the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse in being premised on the inevitability of the subordination of social to economic capital in accordance with the ‘law of the market’ (Bourdieu, 1998). This is the globalized world of economic interdependencies which Bourdieu identifies as the ‘justificatory myth’ constructed by neoliberal discourse, in which the value placed on regions, countries, institutions and individuals is determined by the operations of international markets, and their inclusion in this world is decided by their significance for particular, in this case Australia’s, economic interests. Among the macro-actors in this world are other countries, whose identities and operations are consistently constructed in economic terms, typically as ‘competitors’, ‘target’ or, as in the following example, ‘mature’ markets, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia are all considered ‘mature’ markets that have experienced strong growth over the last 10 years. These


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growth rates are not sustainable in the longer term and a slowdown in growth is not surprising. While a slowdown has been expected in our mature markets it is too early to tell if this is a long term or a short term correction. These countries, like the products constructed in the brochures, are animated within the texts and provided with identities in the form of nominalized attributes based on their economic value, typically percentages or other measurements of ‘growth’. These measurements are based on units such as ‘student visas’, ‘enrolments’ and ‘student weeks’, nominals which construct students solely in terms of their economic value, an interpretation supported by the use of these statistics as key measures of understanding, as in The leading indicator of trends in our offshore markets is visa granted statistics. So far this year there has been growth of only 6%, less than a third of the 19% growth achieved last year. These ‘trends’ are explained with reference to shifts in the demand for products in the global education market, which is itself shaped by national and international social, political and economic developments such as currency movements and the demand for skilled labour, exemplified in this extract The relative cost of studying in Australia is one of our key competitive advantages in attracting overseas students. Currency movements in a number of Asian economies may enhance this advantage. The Australian dollar has depreciated against our major competitors due to Australia’s overall level of trade with the Asian region. This has made our education and training services more price competitive relative to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. While there is expected to be a slowdown in the rate of growth of overseas students coming to Australia, growth is forecast to continue. Overseas educational qualifications will continue to be strongly valued in Asian economies and in the longer term the demand for skilled labour will persist. It is these economic factors which macro-actors associated with Australian government and industry seek to manipulate in order to shape demand in ‘target’ markets to serve the economic interests of the Australian education export industry, a form of self-interested


intervention in free markets which supports Bourdieu’s (1998) argument that neoliberalism follows not an economic theory but is a political programme. This programme is evidenced more generally by the construction and evaluation of the social world in economic terms – exemplified by the significance of the death of a Japanese tourist cited in a report on factors affecting a reduction in the numbers of Japanese tourists coming to Australia. The three biggest tour operators in Japan have cited a number of factors contributing to the decline, including increases in consumption, depreciation of the yen and high package prices. They said, however, that the murder of Japanese tourist . . . ‘had not affected bookings’. The construction of national and international developments in the newsletter, then, reflects not only their economic significance for the sector and related industries, such as tourism, but also the degree to which these developments can be influenced by government and industry bodies – and the extent to which these share the economic interests of and can be influenced by the sector and its members. In this construction, ‘Australia’ is itself fractal, comprising macro-, meso- and micro-actors who struggle to maximize their economic advantage in the market. In this process, some developments such as currency movements lie beyond their influence; some, such as the federal government’s tightening of visa regulations, create conflicts between them; while others, such as the promotion of an international image of Australia, draw them together because it is in their common interest to manipulate this image in order to maximize the country’s attraction as a destination for international capital – including that provided by international students. The following example of the strategic construction and promotion of this image exemplifies the subordination of social to economic capital. During the late 1990s, there was a decline in the number of students coming to study in Australia from Taiwan, while the number of students coming from other countries in the region remained steady or increased. For this reason, Taiwan was the focus of a number of articles in the newsletter which provided statistics on the decline, offered explanations for it, and reported on initiatives being taken to raise the demand for Australian education in Taiwan. One of the reasons given for the decline was the actions of a member of the federal parliament, Pauline Hanson, who had developed a political stance which was widely interpreted, both nationally and internationally, to be racist. In Australia, though her


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policies were condemned by many, they gained support among some sections of the population – to the point where her party won a number of seats from both major parties. The political authority she thereby gained transformed her into a macro-actor who threatened the political base of the major parties, was widely reported in the media in South East Asia, and brought into sharp focus the question of Australia’s attitude to people in the region. In Chapter 4 evidence of these divisions has already emerged in the control by managers of teaching materials that referred to Ms Hanson in order to protect the image of their colleges. However, viewed from the social/institutional perspective, a line of influence emerges between the actions of managers and those of macro-actors – a line which traces the subordination of the social to the economic from the discourse of neoliberalism to that of commercialization. Thus, while the teachers selected these materials for their value as authentic stimuli for language learning – a value determined within the field of pedagogy – their control by managers reflected the larger scale foregrounding of economic evaluations of Ms Hanson’s actions by macro-actors attempting to protect Australia’s economic interests. This subordination of the social to the economic by both meso- and macro-actors is evidenced in the construction of Taiwan in the newsletter, a construction which, as in Bourdieu’s (1998) account of neoliberal discourse, naturalizes the inevitability of this subordination according to the ‘law of the market’. It is this construction, then, which suggests that the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization are legitimated by that of neoliberalism. This legitimation occurs through a series of articles in which Taiwan is constructed as a ‘market’, thus subordinating the social complexities of the country to the operation of economic forces. In the following example, this economic construction is extended to students as well. The . . . figures on total student visas issued by Australian posts recently released by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs indicate that while growth is continuing, it is continuing at a slower rate than previously. In the . . . March Quarter 23,488 student visas were issued by offshore posts, an increase of 6 percent on the corresponding quarter in [the previous year]. Here, students are constructed as ‘student visas’, a nominal group which – as explained above – further legitimates the subordination of social to economic value, a process in which the number of student


visas issued in Taiwan becomes the measure of its declining value. This identity as a market is developed through the attribution of nominalizations drawn from the discourse of economics, such as ‘negative growth’, ‘turnaround’ and ‘slowdown’; and the construction of the ‘Taiwanese market’ as an actor, as in The Taiwanese market has recorded negative growth for the last three consecutive quarters and is clearly a market that has turned against Australia. This constructs a relationship between Taiwan and Australia in which the Taiwanese market as a macro-actor is capable of acting against the economic interests of Australia. The question then addressed is what has caused this change in Taiwan’s behaviour, and how Australia – as a macro-actor – can intervene. Intervention is advanced as necessary through the construction of the Taiwanese market as serving Australia’s interests, and its decline as a threat to Australia’s status as a macro-actor, a construction in which, for example, The Taiwanese market is a market that requires immediate and longer term attention if Australia is to maintain its position and redress the decline. Unquestioned and therefore advanced as self-evident is the legitimacy of intervening in the decisions of Taiwanese people in order to maximize Australia’s economic advantage. Here again the construction of Taiwan and Australia advances the subordination of the social to the economic, in this case drawing on and legitimizing a further assumption of neoliberal discourse, that individual rationality – in this case that of macro-actors – is the legitimate basis of action, the goal of which is the maximization of productivity and competitiveness in the interests of economic growth (Bourdieu, 1998). It is the management of international perceptions of social developments in Australia, specifically the ‘fallout from the racism debate’, which is identified as a way to redress the declining economic relationship with Taiwan. The first move in this process is the use of the nominalization ‘racism debate’ itself which obscures the divisive effects of Ms Hanson’s stance in Australia, replacing any implication of social conflict with ritualized disagreement. This de-socialization is taken further in the ‘short term’ strategy to counter the ‘fallout’ and is explained as


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seeking to counter recent negative publicity with good news stories supplied by institutions. In the longer term, a multi-faceted strategy to improve Australia’s performance in Taiwan is being developed . . . . The strategy builds on the theme of promoting Australia’s image as a technologically advanced country with outstanding research excellence. In the shift from the ‘racism debate’ to ‘negative publicity’ to ‘Australia’s image’ the last vestiges of social conflict are excluded from the construction of Australia, a process which reconstructs and legitimates the social as an ‘image’ to be manipulated by using counter images in the form of ‘good news stories’ focused on reimaging Australia as a ‘technologically advanced country with outstanding research excellence’ – and provided by those institutions whose economic interests it is which are at stake in ‘Australia’s performance in Taiwan’. Finally, these constructions and the subordination they advance are further legitimized by the report of a decision by the federal government to establish a ‘task force specifically designed to counter the impact of the racism debate in Asia’, a task force which had produced a strategy document which ‘is now being considered by the Prime Minister’. In summary, the construction of macro-actors advanced through the newsletter supports Bourdieu’s (1998) argument that neoliberal discourse constructs as legitimate and inevitable the subordination of the social to the economic, and these constructions provide evidence that it is this discourse that ultimately legitimates as self-evident and necessary the construction of education evident in the community of consumption and advanced by the discourse of commercialization. Constructing quality The body that regulates the sector, NEAS, intervenes in the operations of the market to protect the interests of consumers in their economic relationship with producers. It has this authority because state and federal governments acknowledge it as the regulator and accreditor of colleges in the sector. This acknowledgment is based on legislation in some states, and in all states draws on federal legislation – notably the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act, which provides for legal sanctions against educational providers which do not comply with its requirements. Also reflected in this regulatory role are requirements established by federal immigration legislation on the visa types under which students may study, and on their attendance requirements. Likewise included is a requirement that all courses themselves must be


accredited and listed on a national register before they can be marketed internationally. From the perspective of Bourdieu’s critique, this line of authority from government through the operations of the regulatory body to the management of colleges raises two questions. The first concerns whether the dominant interests of government in providing the regulatory body with this authority are economic or social; the second whether the operations of the regulatory body contribute to the production and reproduction of operations which serve these interests. An answer to the first question can be found in the introduction to the federal government’s regulatory guidelines for all providers of education to overseas students, the ‘National Code’ (Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs, 2001), where the need for regulation is explained as follows: Australia’s Federal and State and Territory Governments recognise the benefits which our education and training export industry brings to the nation. It strengthens our relations with the countries and regions from which students come, and yields valuable financial revenue. The internationalisation of education enriches the life of educational institutions and benefits domestic students by promoting the crossfertilisation of ideas and cultures. Competing in the international market-place is a stimulus to quality and innovation in the interests of all students. (p. 1) Here, the social is constructed as a series of ‘benefits’ (line 1) associated with the ‘internationalisation of education’ (line 4): specifically, the strengthening of ‘our relations with countries and regions’ (line 2), enrichment in ‘the life of educational institutions’ (line 5) and promotion of ‘the cross fertilisation of ideas and cultures’ (line 6). The combination of these nominalizations constructs a notion of social globalization as an attraction which can only be achieved by, and therefore legitimates, the neoliberal economic order – exemplified by the operations of ‘our education and training export industry’ (lines 1–2) in ‘the international market-place’ (line 6). This subordination of the social to the economic provides further support for Bourdieu’s (1998) account of globalization as, in so far as it is used to justify neoliberal policies, a construct of neoliberal discourse itself. This interpretation is both consistent with the dominance of economic interests evidenced in the newsletter and provides an answer to the question of how to explain how students’ ‘interests’ (line 8) are


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constructed here. As explained above, the construction of students as consumers in consumption processes subordinates their ability to learn – in Bourdieu’s (1986) terms, their ‘social capital’ as learners. In the light of the economic interest of the government, the unqualified assertion that international competition ‘is a stimulus to quality and innovation in the interests of all students’ (line 7–8) suggests that the interests here are those of students as consumers rather than learners. Further evidence for this interpretation is provided by the construction of ‘consumer protection’, the following explanation of which is provided in the ‘National Code’: Consumer protection must cater for the fact that students who travel to Australia cannot usually see before they purchase, and, if there is reason for discontent with the services they have obtained, they may not be able to remain in Australia to pursue the consumer protection remedies provided through the courts. (2001, p. 1) Here identities and relationships are constructed which resonate with those advanced by the discourse of commercialization – specifically, in the construction of learning as a product which students ‘cannot usually see before they purchase’ (line 2) and which is ‘obtained’ (line 3). This construction implies an unmediated relationship between the product and the consumer in consumption processes, complemented by the identification of students as consumers, who, if they do not benefit to their satisfaction from the consumption process, may experience ‘discontent’ (line 2), a word which connotes no critical engagement in learning – an example of the social capital of the student-as-learner – but instead constructs students in terms of their feelings as a ‘consumer’ (line 1). As I have argued above, it is these feelings which are the measure of ‘quality’ in the consumption community and therefore the ‘reason for discontent’ (line 2) advanced within colleges by the discourse of commercialization. The construction in the ‘National Code’ of the benefits of international competition, quality, students’ interests and consumer protection suggests that the discourse employed here – in its legitimization of the subordination of the social to the economic – is a manifestation of neoliberal discourse. This subordination, in turn, raises the second question posed above: whether there is a line of influence from the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse – through regulation – to the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of


commercialization. The answer to the question of influence depends on the construction of quality, specifically on how the quality of teachers’ practices is regulated and how the identity thereby advanced for teachers compares with that to which they are pressured to conform by the discourse of commercialization. Through the NEAS ‘Standards and criteria’, the practices of the teachers are shaped by controls which include the design of premises and facilities; the qualifications of teachers; their professional development; the qualifications and responsibilities of directors of studies; curriculum design and management; teaching materials and resources; student assessment and timetables and class sizes. The construction of quality which emerges here does not evidence the construction of teaching and learning as consumption processes; indeed, it broadly aligns with the pedagogic understanding expressed by the diarists. The following two examples illustrate this, each being drawn from a practice in which teachers’ professional standards are reported in the diaries to be compromised. First, in relation to professional development (National ELT Accreditation Scheme, 2001, p. 30), the criteria include the requirement that The institution provides for the ongoing professional development of teaching staff to ensure teachers are kept up to date with current knowledge, theory and practice in the field. and that teachers receive ongoing guidance and support from the Director of Studies on course design and lesson planning, with particular attention to the less experienced teachers. Here, the regulatory body as the absent, though implied, regulator of compliance, not only replaces the ‘college’ as the controller, but subordinates it in a construction of relations between the regulatory body and teachers in which their professional expertise is the beneficiary of regulation. In this relationship, the ‘college’ is – in a construction which parallels that of teachers in the brochures – transformed into a supervised operative whose actions are dependent on and accountable to the authority and expertise of the regulatory body. In this relationship, ‘professional development’ reflects the value placed on it by the diarists in Chapter 4. Thus, the use of ‘current knowledge, theory and practice in the field’ constructs teachers as members of a broader professional collective in which expertise is developed, distributed and


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evaluated: the antithesis of the ‘qualified operative’ in the consumption community. Indeed, it is precisely the conflict between the institution’s obligation to provide professional development in this sense and its use of professional development for appraisal which is the focus of teachers’ concerns in the diaries. In the second example, the standard covering student assessment (National ELT Accreditation Scheme, 2001, p. 43) requires that the institution’s practices and procedures for the assessment of students are appropriate, fair and equitable and operate at all times in the best interests of the students. Here again, the value of the practice is measured in pedagogic terms, through the conditions of ‘appropriacy’, ‘fairness’ and ‘equity’. Here, however, the interpretation of ‘best interests’ is critical: that it advances a pedagogic, rather than an economic, construction of ‘interest’ is supported by further criteria which, for example, link assessment to students’ ‘language level, maturity and the objectives of the course’. On this evidence, then, the construction of teachers and their practices does not legitimate the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization. This, however, leaves unanswered the question of how the regulations allow teachers to be pressured to conform to this identity, as evidenced by the experiences reported by teachers’ in their diaries. The explanation may lie in the omission from the regulations of explicit reference to performance appraisal and employment security, and the minimization of social capital, in the form of teaching expertise, in employment criteria. These omissions and minimization are significant because they disconnect the ‘quality’ of teaching from the ‘quality’ of the workplace, specifically from the fears of redundancy which drive teachers to comply with pressures to commercialize their teaching. The explanation for these omissions is no doubt connected to a more widespread division between the quality of products and the quality of workplace conditions, in which the former have traditionally been the focus of safety and other consumer standards, and the latter matters for state arbitration, and of struggle between management and unions. With the reduction in union membership wrought by casualization, and reduction in the role of state in arbitrating workplace conditions (Burbules and Torres, 2000), only the protection of consumer standards remains – standards which are themselves jeopardized by the absence of protection for the quality of employment security.


Consistent with this explanation, appraisal and employment security are not made explicit in the construction of the workplace under the criterion which comes closest to connecting these to the quality of teaching. The criterion (National ELT Accreditation Scheme, 2001, p. 30) states that the college is required to ensure that teachers’ working conditions and rates of pay compare favourably with similar teaching systems, to promote equitable and harmonious employment arrangements which enhance the quality of education offered. Here the workplace is constructed as capable of promoting the ‘quality of education’ through measures which, though relevant to teachers’ interests while they are employed, omit those practices which threaten their employment security – the prime means by which the commercialization of teachers’ practices is advanced. Finally, the regulations allow the subordination of the social by minimizing the social capital required in teaching. As in previous chapters, social capital here refers to the expertise teachers draw on in teaching students as learners – a form of capital which teachers acquire through the combination of gaining teaching qualifications, teaching experience and membership of the profession, and whose value is produced and reproduced through the synchronization of their habitus with the field of pedagogy. In the ‘Standards and criteria’, two combinations of qualifications and experience are acceptable (National ELT Accreditation Scheme, 2001, p. 32). The first is a pre-service teacher training qualification resulting from a course which is ‘at least three years full-time’, confers ‘trained teachers’ status’ and includes a specialization in English language teaching. Such a qualification would be acceptable within the mainstream school education sector and represents a higher level of expertise than the second minimum, which is the most common employment requirement. This is a degree or diploma in any field, 800 hours’ English language teaching experience, and an English language teaching qualification resulting from a course which includes at least 100 hours’ tuition, with a ‘content focus on English language, language learning, TESOL teaching’ and ‘a practical component including at least six hours supervised and assessed practice teaching in TESOL’. This description of the minimum qualification matches the dominant teaching qualification in the private English language teaching sector, the CELTA. In the next section I will argue that by reducing the social capital required for teaching to this minimum, the regulations


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legitimize the construction of good teaching in terms advanced by the CELTA, a construction which subordinates the social to the economic by meeting the economic imperative to construct teachers’ practices as consumption processes. Drawing these points together, government policy in advancing export education exemplifies the subordination of the social to the economic through the construction of social globalization to justify neoliberal policies which construct students as consumers. On the other hand, the regulatory authority contributes to the production and reproduction of the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse through its construction of teaching as a workplace practice. Excluded from this construction, and thereby legitimizing their disconnection from the quality of teaching, are those practices which enable the subordination of social capital to economic capital through the ‘the rational management of insecurity’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 85): namely, market-driven performance appraisal and employment on casual work contracts. It is this subordination which characterizes the neoliberal economic order of ‘structural violence’, in which people’s life chances depend on the ‘arbitrary decision of a power responsible for the “continued creation” of their existence’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 99). Further legitimizing the implementation of this economic order is the minimization of the social capital required for teaching – the focus of the next section.

Constructing professional expertise The teaching training sector’s status as a macro-actor derives from the international scale of its operations and its influence on teachers’ and managers’ understandings of what language is and what language teaching and learning involve. Reflecting this dominance of the market in training, the CELTA is the most well-known and widely accepted qualification world-wide. As the market for English has expanded so has the market for teacher training qualifications, in particular those, such as the CELTA, which are based on courses of approximately a hundred hours of tuition designed for people with no previous teaching experience. In this form, the first version of the CELTA was started in the 1970s by the Royal Society for Arts (RSA), the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate took it over in 1988, and it is currently run by Cambridge ESOL Examinations. While the CELTA is an initial qualification which provides an introduction to teaching it has nevertheless become the dominant


teaching qualification in the sector. Indeed, the demand for graduates internationally is such that the CELTA is delivered internationally through 286 centres in 54 countries around the world, running around 900 courses with 10,000 graduates each year (Cambridge ESOL Examinations, 2010). The demand for graduates has paralleled growth in the operations and influence of publishers of English language teaching materials (Gray, 2002), macro-actors whose publications both draw on the construction of teaching advanced by the CELTA and are drawn on in its courses – a relationship which adds to their joint capacity to shape understandings of teaching and learning and thereby increase demand for their products in the market. In the case of the teacher training sector, these products include the qualification itself and the graduates it produces. The strength of demand for graduates depends on the sector’s capacity to produce teachers who meet the requirements of managers in English language teaching organizations. Here, the dominance of the sector in the training market enables it to influence these requirements, evidenced for example by the fact that ‘Cambridge ESOL . . . works with international ELT organisations to ensure the acceptance of CELTA globally’ (Cambridge ESOL Examinations, 2010). The CELTA, then, is a product promoted to potential trainees as enabling them to promote themselves to managers whose understanding of English language teaching and learning is itself shaped by the CELTA. The strength of this demand is, in turn, used in the promotion of the course to potential trainees, to whom it is offered as a lifestyle in which, for example, it is cast as ‘your passport to work around the world’ (Education Worldwide Online, 2010). With its implications of financial rewards and international mobility, this lifestyle simultaneously suggests the freedom to combine work and travel, while matching trainees’ aspirations to the need for short-term workers in the internationally casualized English language teaching job market. The line of influence this suggests starts with the construction of a lifestyle of global opportunities as the reward for potential trainees. This is a further example – following the international lifestyle offered to students and the social benefits of neoliberal policies advanced by the federal government – of globalization constructed as an attraction for those who stand to lose from neoliberal policies. Thus, it combines both the lifestyle which, through consumers’ efforts to achieve it, increases the value of the economic capital of the dominant classes (Bourdieu, 1984) and a construction of globalization which legitimates the neoliberal economic order (Bourdieu, 1998). It is on the promise of this lifestyle that the CELTA sector, while increasing the value of its


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own economic capital and dominance in the training market, trains a labour force which is prepared (in both senses) to comply with the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization. In doing so, it subordinates the social capital – the expertise – associated with teaching to a construction which serves the economic interests of both the teacher training and English language teaching sectors: namely, the teacher as operative. In its global operations and influence, the CELTA exemplifies what Littlejohn (2000) has described as a trend towards the global standardization of what is considered a ‘good teacher’, a process which involves the standardization of classroom interactions to the point where students and teachers cannot recognize each other as individuals. Similarly, Block (2002, p. 121) has argued for the emergence of ‘McCommunication’, a global tendency to standardize language teaching ‘as a rational activity devoted to the transfer of information between and among individuals in an efficient, calculable, predictable and controllable manner via the use of language, understood in strictly linguistic terms’. According to Littlejohn (2000), this standardized construction of teaching practice is based on the trainee’s ability to conduct model lessons based on a teaching methodology known as presentation-practiceproduction or ‘PPP’. By reducing teaching to lesson-sized units of repeatable procedures, the expertise required of the teacher is reduced to ‘a script to be unfolded regardless of context, to be acted out with adults and children alike, rendering schools detached from any wider educational goals in the pursuit of an efficient, predictable means towards language proficiency’. (Littlejohn, 2000, p. 4) Consistent with Littlejohn’s critique, the CELTA course materials gathered for this study provided evidence that, through its employment of PPP, the CELTA course constructs and legitimizes good teaching as standardized and repeatable procedures, a construction which reflects the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization. The starting point for this construction is the distinction between ‘input’ and ‘output’, a sequence of teaching designed to lead students


to language proficiency. In ‘The practice of English Language Teaching’, Harmer (1991, p. 40) Harmer explains that We can divide the classroom into two main categories: those that give students language input, and those which encourage them to produce output. Whether acquisition or conscious learning takes place, there will be stages at which students are receiving language – language is somehow ‘put into’ the students (though they will decide whether or not they want to receive it). But exposing students to language input is not enough; we also need to provide opportunities for them to activate this knowledge, for it is only when students are producing language that they can select from the input they have received. This division of the ‘classroom’ (line 1) into ‘input’ and ‘output’ (line 2) facilitates the construction of teaching, learning and language itself as products in consumption processes. Thus, the language which is ‘put into’ (line 4) students is constructed as divisible into standardized – and therefore commodity-friendly – skills and items. These are elaborated elsewhere as ‘the four major language skills’, ‘receptive’ and ‘productive’ skills and ‘sub-skills’, ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ skills, ‘new language’ and ‘grammatical items’. It is these skills and items for which the student is the repository and beneficiary; and it is the teacher who puts them into the student as language input. This construction of language as divisible units, and learning as a sequence of input and output stages gives rise to and legitimates a hierarchy of procedures which together constitute and constrain the options available in teaching. These procedures, like the skills and items of language, are ‘eminently trainable’ (Skehan, 1998, p. 94), being themselves divisible and standardized, which both facilitates the construction of teacher training itself as a product and the teacher’s role as that of an operative, qualified to select and conduct but not to establish or question teaching procedures. Thus, input involves ‘presentation’; and output ‘practice’ and ‘communication’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 40) (the latter more commonly known as ‘production’), and each of these stages is itself constructed from different sequences of ‘components’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 55), including ‘lead-in, elicitation, explanation, accurate reproduction, and immediate creativity’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 60). Each of these components is in turn made up of different kinds of ‘activities’ ranged on a cline between ‘non-communicative’ and ‘communicative’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 50). To conduct these activities, teachers follow different ‘procedures’ or ‘techniques’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 62), which in turn


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imply different ‘roles’ for the teacher: specifically, those of ‘controller . . . assessor . . . organiser . . . prompter . . . participant . . . resource . . . and tutor’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 235). Notwithstanding the fact that ‘ultimately the students’ success or failure is in their own hands’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 7), this is a model of teaching in which, as in the consumer identity advanced by the discourse of commercialization, students’ responsibility for learning is minimized – in a process in which procedures enacted by teachers bring about learning. Thus, by engaging in ‘communicative activities . . . [students] . . . will be forced to access the language they have in their language store, and will gradually develop strategies of communication’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 40). Here, mirroring the construction of consumers in the brochures, students are not responsible for learning – participating as the goal of ‘forced’ and the medium (Halliday, 1985, p. 146) which undergoes the ergative process ‘develop’, a process not brought about by students but the implied result of the first clause. Similarly, in the following example, the nominalized procedures ‘language production’ and ‘receiving feedback’ participate as the initiators (Halliday, 1985) of the causative verbal groups which enable the students’ rehearsal of ‘language use’ and the changes in their ‘perceptions’. Language production allows students to rehearse language use in classroom conditions whilst receiving feedback (from the teachers, from other students and from themselves) which allows them to adjust their perceptions of the language input they have received. (Harmer, 1991: 40) Here, as in the discourse of commercialization, learning does not involve an imposition of responsibility on students because the causative relationship between the two processes in the verbal groups ‘allows students to rehearse’ and ‘allows them to adjust’ ensures that human participants do not act directly on students: rather, their learning is delivered through procedures for which others – namely teachers – are responsible. Furthermore, this construction of teachers as the responsible agents in learning extends beyond their conduct of procedures to the creation of student motivation itself. Thus, ‘teachers need to do everything possible to create a good rapport with students’ (Harmer, 1991, p. 6), including conducting lessons which are ‘interesting and motivating’. This overriding need to create a ‘good rapport’ places the onus of responsibility for students’ experience of learning on teachers, thus providing a link to the managerial priority to create and maintain


students’ happiness – identified in this study as a characteristic of the consumer identity advanced by the discourse of commercialization and a market-driven criterion in the appraisal of teachers. This reflects closely the construction of learning required by the discourse of commercialization, according to which language is reduced to simplified, and therefore commodifiable, units, and successful learning, through the consumption of standardized products, is assured. That these are assumptions of teacher training is, according to the argument developed here, the predictable pedagogic cost of constructing learning in accordance with the dictates of the discourse of commercialization. These points underscore the tendency for the construction of the ‘good teacher’ in the teacher training sector to legitimize a habitus for teachers which is synchronized with the economic field. It does so by constructing teachers as operatives with a capacity to conduct procedures without questioning their purposes; a capacity which aligns closely with Bourdieu’s (1991) ‘legitimate competence’ whose content and value are determined by the needs of the market. However, as I have argued above, unlike managers whose habitus is more likely to be synchronized with the economic field, having this competence does not increase the value of teachers’ capital; rather, it enhances the economic capital held by the dominant class at the expense of the social capital held by teachers – their expertise as teachers. Viewed from this perspective the construction of teaching as a hierarchy of standardized procedures shapes the habitus of teachers and managers. It shapes teachers’ understanding of what teaching is and what constitutes good teaching, constructing teachers as low status operatives, without an expert role in establishing and evaluating the purposes of teaching. Trainees’ efforts to obtain the CELTA qualification thus reflect what Bourdieu (1981, p. 314) has described as ‘a whole process of investment’ which ‘leads workers to contribute to their own exploitation through their efforts to appropriate their work and their working conditions’. On the other hand, the CELTA course shapes managers’ understanding of what teachers and ‘teaching practices’ are and legitimizes a standardized measure of good teaching which advances the construction of teaching and learning as products. As Skehan (1998, p. 94) has explained, such a methodology ‘lends itself very neatly to accountability, since it generates clear and tangible outcomes, precise syllabuses and a comfortably itemized basis for evaluation of effectiveness’. In doing so, the CELTA produces teachers with a habitus that reproduces the economic value of the mainstream teaching resources published and the products offered by colleges.


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In addition, the CELTA provides a basis for the construction of students as consumers, and in doing so provides a link with Bourdieu’s (1984) critique of consumption. The rendering of language as standardized skills and items enables the construction of students’ learning needs in these same terms – thereby enabling needs to be matched to the attributes of products offered in the form of English language courses. This mutually legitimating relationship between needs and products in turn justifies the PPP methodology itself – as a set of procedures designed to match language skills and items to needs. In this process, students are subject to procedures choreographed by the teacher to meet their learning needs, a process which both requires and legitimates a student whose habitus as a consumer is itself synchronized with the economic field. As I have argued above in relation to meso- and micro-relations, this is a construction of students which, mirroring the construction of teachers, subordinates their social capital as learners to their economic value as consumers. This subordination of the social to the economic in the construction of both teachers and students provides further evidence for a line of influence through the operations of the teacher training sector between the economic order advanced by neoliberal discourse and the consumption community advanced by the discourse of commercialization. While this line of influence may explain how the teacher training sector contributes to the larger themes of contemporary society, it does not explain the reports in the diaries of tensions experienced by teachers between pedagogic and economic interests. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that, though the CELTA may prepare teachers to comply with the construction of teaching and learning as consumption processes, it produces only part of the habitus which teachers bring to and develop through teaching. They are, therefore, not only graduates of teacher training but have and develop multiple memberships which, in shaping their evolving habitus, have the potential to create a ‘divided or even torn habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). For example, their other experiences – including their own experience as students – may mitigate against uncritical compliance. Moreover, their experience of teaching itself typically includes the struggles – explained above – between students, between teachers and students, and over teaching methodology itself, struggles which may raise awareness of tensions in the relationship between teaching methodology, consumption and learning. Further examples of influences against compliance include more advanced qualifications in teaching English, which tend to promote less procedural, more reflective, approaches to teaching.


In sum, then, through its global interconnections with the economic interests of other macro-actors and its penetration of teachers’ practices through the habitus of teachers, the teacher training sector exemplifies the ‘unification of the market’ (Bourdieu, 1991) on a global scale, creating teachers as consenting operatives, matching their habitus to the identity advanced for them by the discourse of commercialization and a job market based on insecure, casual employment – while constructing these conditions as a desirable lifestyle of global opportunities. As a consequence, in this subordination of the social value of trainees and pedagogy to the economic value of training and teaching as products, the habitus of teachers is enlisted in the devaluation of their own capital.

Summary of the social/institutional perspective Focusing on three macro-actors and the texts through which they shape the lives of teachers, students and managers, I have argued that each in a different way advances and legitimizes the subordination of social to economic capital. Together, these lines of influence advance the interests of macro-actors who benefit from the neoliberal economic order. In this way, each is a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991). Thus, by constructing the world according to the dictates of the market, the reports in the sector newsletter legitimate the logic of the economic world as ‘the norm of all practices’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 35) – the norm which justifies the Gramscian coercion of and consent by teachers to subordinate their expertise to commercial interests. On the other hand, the exclusions and minimization identified in the regulations of the regulatory authority legitimize the means by which this pressure is exerted. Specifically, the omissions from the regulations weaken the capacity of teachers to defend their standards of teaching by disconnecting teaching ‘quality’ from the quality of employment security, thereby increasing the potential for coercion and the motivation for teachers to consent. At the same time, the minimization of the expertise required for teaching supports the final line of influence, evidenced by the training materials. Here, the teacher training sector, promoted through the construction of globalization as a lifestyle, manipulates the habitus itself, a process in which teachers are matched to the identity advanced for them by the discourse of commercialization; and, as we have seen in Chapter 4, if consent wavers because of a divided habitus, fear of redundancy provides the structural violence (Bourdieu, 1998) that coerces compliance.

7 Understanding Practice and Informing Change

The path I have taken in this book has been to explore both how and why discourse is implicated in the commercialization of professional practice. This chapter brings us to the ‘So what?’ question. It focuses on the value of the study, the findings and the multi-perspectived approach to discourse. I argue here that, as foreshadowed in Chapter 1 and highlighted through the study, the value resides in revealing the organization as a complex linguistic and social ecology and the importance of understanding it as such. Emphasized in the notion of ecological validity (Cicourel, 1992, 2007) and realized through the multi-perspectived approach, the metaphor of ecology has guided this conceptualization of organizational life by emphasizing the interdependence of members, both in relation to their environment and to each other. Extending the metaphor a little, a key theme foregrounded in the preceding chapters has been that this recognition of mutual dependence is fundamental not only to understanding organizations but to their sustainable management and development. This link to sustainability has been captured by Capra (1996, p. 298) who writes that all members . . . are interconnected in a vast and intricate network of relationships . . . . They derive their essential properties and, in fact, their very existence from their relationships to other things. Interdependence . . . is the nature of all ecological relationships. The behaviour of every living member . . . depends on the behaviour of many others. The success of the whole community depends on the success of its individual members, while the success of each member depends on the success of the community as a whole. The importance of considering organizations in this light is underscored when we follow through the implications for understanding the 181


practices in which people participate and how this understanding may inform ongoing change. To the extent that this implies a particular position on the relations between people the interest is per force ethical. It is not only a matter of understanding professional life through the lens of social practices, or semiotic resources or participants’ perceptions or larger scale social structures and processes, or of the analyst’s particular perspective on these. Rather, the study highlights the importance of understanding and investigating these as an ensemble, socially and temporally situated and dynamically and mutually imbricated. Understood in this way, the tensions identified in the study were seen to operate not only at particular points but to permeate and be perpetuated over time through the ecology of the organization as a whole: within and between individuals, between the different groups involved, and within the national and international contexts in which they were situated. The implication is that, if sustainable organizational change and development is the aim it is necessary to understand this ensemble not only as dynamic but as consequential – in the past, in the past as it becomes the present and in the future; in other words, to recognize these multiple perspectives as continuously and interdiscursively at play in the reproduction of the institutional order and of the habitus of members. This view gains support from and is illustrated by the study and its findings. Chapter 1 situated my motivation for the research within the context of broader concerns that have been voiced about contemporary society, in particular about trends in education in which teaching has been reformulated to reflect market imperatives and the purposes of education have been translated into the language of the market. Both trends have been linked to neoliberal policies that have been pursued internationally over the last 30 years and have represented, in Giroux’s (1999, p. 141) memorable phrase, ‘the most powerful educational reform movement’. Against this background Chapter 3 linked the study and its theoretical starting points to concerns I developed as I worked with people who struggled to maintain an understanding of their professional role in this environment. In the study, the locus of this tension was most succinctly captured by Michael, who observed in his diary: More and more I am becoming acutely aware that this is a company selling education rather than a school that is organised like a company. Here he identifies the competing models of education at play, one whose interests are defined by the market; the other in which education

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is understood to have interests which transcend those of the market. As with experience more generally, however, it was not the broader context but the immediate causes and consequences of this tension that were most pressing for teachers and that they learnt to manage in their daily lives. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, these ‘local’ ways of making sense of what was going on and how to deal with it were inseparable from the perceptions that individuals held of their relationship to the organization, to interactions with others within it and to the risks these posed for their professional credibility and employment security. At the same time these relationships and interactions were part of a larger and more complex environment that required organizations to survive in increasingly competitive national and international markets. At this global level, the players involved and their influence in the market reflect the scale of commercial interests at stake, exemplified by the value of educational exports to countries that can compete successfully, a process driven on the supply side by reductions in state funding for education at all levels and on the demand side by the need internationally for people to acquire educational qualifications offered by developed countries if they are to survive in an increasingly competitive world. Chapter 2 elaborated Candlin’s (1997, 2006) multi-perspectived approach to discourse analysis to investigate teachers’ practices within this complexity. The approach brought together, kept in play and sought emergent, interdiscursive relations between analytical perspectives associated with the analyst, participants, semiotic resources, interactions and the social-institutional context. The subsequent chapters developed the account of the discourse of commercialization as this became visible through the different perspectives and their interdiscursive relations.

Characterizing communities of consumption The perceptions of the diarists recounted in Chapter 4 provided evidence that their professional practices were shaped by three-way struggles between managers, teachers and students. In these struggles, the diarists perceived their authority as teachers to be overruled by both managers and students, thereby compromising their ability to teach according to their understanding of professional practice. This threeway interplay of tension emerged most clearly in the data in practices of evaluation and appraisal, in which managers, teachers and students were mutually implicated in struggles over how teaching was to be practised and understood. Beyond the immediate experience of teachers, the correlations between the findings of the diary analysis and the brochure analysis,


discussed in Chapter 5, provided evidence of interdiscursive relations in the form of the colonization (Fairclough, 1992) of professional practices by the discourse instantiated in the brochures. The analysis showed how this constructs teachers, managers and students as a community of consumption in which teachers are operatives, responsible for carrying out tasks and procedures but not for deciding or questioning their purposes. This is the role of the college, identified with managers who, as experts, determine the purposes of teaching by supervising teachers to meet the commercial priority of creating and maintaining the happiness of students. In this process, the task for which teachers are held responsible is the repayment of the debt owed to students by providing them with learning, a consumption process in which teaching is constructed as freeing students to achieve their aspirations without effort, risk or imposition. Arising from the overriding need to attract students to the organization and to honour the consequent debt of learning owed to them, it is this colonizing discourse that I called the discourse of commercialization. Instantiated in the brochures and experienced by teachers in pressures to compromise their practices, the community of consumption can be understood as both the premise and endgame of the need to redefine professional practice in response to the requirements of the market. As the premise, it is the definition required by the imperative to attract new students; as the endgame, it reflects the configuration of identities and relationships towards which teachers are pressured to align their practices. We saw how these pressures arise from and shape the risks that confront teachers, managers and students and how the relations between the three groups are interwoven by their efforts to secure these competing interests. For teachers, there is the risk of losing their jobs, for managers the risk of losing market share, and for students the risk of losing the education they have purchased. In seeking to reduce these risks, their fates become mutually dependent: managers hold teachers responsible for providing the learning owed to students; teachers struggle to reconcile these pressures with their understanding of teaching and learning and their fear of unemployment; and students seek to acquire the learning owed to them by exerting their commercial authority over teachers and managers. Chapter 6 explained how these identities and relationships are implicated in the operations of macro-actors on a global scale. In tracing these lines of influence, Bourdieu’s (1984, 1998) critique of contemporary society provided an explanation of why, in the struggle over how teachers’ practices are to be understood and the purposes they are to serve, it is


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the commercial interests which dominate. In this process, the social capital of teachers and of students – respectively, their expertise and their ability to learn – is subordinated to serve these commercial interests. The discourse of commercialization thus exemplifies an organizational discourse that is in conflict with professional discourse (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999a). More specifically, the findings underscore Sarangi and Robert’s (1999a, p. 16) point that ‘the institutional order is held together not by particular forms of social organization but by regulating discourses’. The findings reveal the discourse of commercialization as just such a regulating discourse which as a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991) draws on processes of technologization (Fairclough, 1996), and operates through practices of evaluation and appraisal to redefine teaching and learning to the advantage of commercial interests. In this process, the capital assets (Bourdieu, 1994) held by teachers in virtue of their membership of a profession are devalued. Reflecting this realignment of their habitus with the field of commerce evidenced by, for example, the high status of managers, teachers’ involvement in their own devaluation is consistent with the emphasis in Bourdieu’s theory of practice on how, in seeking to improve their life chances, those who stand to lose most may be complicit in bringing about their own subordination. This complicity also provided evidence of how the institutional order is sustained through the equilibrium between consent and coercion (Gramsci, 1988) required to maintain the dominance of those groups in control. As a way of further specifying the characteristics of the community of consumption it is helpful to compare it with Lave and Wenger’s (1991; Wenger, 1998) notion of the ‘community of practice’ which has been influential in theorizing learning and participation in organizations, and in studies of the work of professionals in diverse organizational contexts. This emphasizes how community coherence is created and maintained through the coordinated work of individuals in developing and learning to engage in social practices. As Scollon (1998, p. 13) explains, in this sense ‘a community of practice is a group of people who, over time, share in some set of social practices geared towards some common purpose’. Within his theorization of communities of practice, Wenger (1998) provides little discussion of how they are situated within larger scale social structures and processes, and how these may shape the community and the perspectives of its members. It is true that he (see, for example, 1998, p. 132) cautions that the benign connotations of the word ‘community’ do not imply that learning within communities of practice is necessarily a benevolent process, arguing, on the


contrary, that they can be the locus of the reproduction of ‘counteractive patterns, injustices, prejudices, racism, sexism, and abuses of all kinds’. However, though in more recent work he has discussed how the formation of communities of practice within organizations may be facilitated, notably by means of management strategies (Wenger et al., 2002), the common theme is that shared interests are central to the ‘joint enterprise’ required for sustainable communities of practice and that for members this involves the ‘negotiated response to their situation and thus belongs to them in a profound sense, in spite of all the forces and influences that are beyond their control’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 78). In contrast, the community of consumption arises precisely from the enforced resolution of struggles over the conflicting purposes of members and the groups whose interests they share. This is a process in which the habitus of teachers as professionals and students as learners are subordinated to commercial interests which range beyond their control or knowledge; in which the notion of ‘community coherence’ is itself problematized as a stake in the struggles between members – the question being how this is to be defined and whose interests it is to serve. As the findings show, this question is inevitably decided by those who, in Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, have the ‘legitimate competence’ and speakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence. (p. 55) In these respects the community of consumption and the multiple perspectives through which it becomes visible are aligned more closely with critiques which have focused on the need to acknowledge the influence of the wider organizational and social context and the potential for divergent worldviews and dispositions among members (Roberts, 2006). For example, Gee et al. (1996) have argued that communities of practice need to be viewed from within the broader perspective of social, political and economic change in order to recognize the danger that membership can amount to manipulation, specifically that socializing people into communities of practice can position them as the kind of people who will accept insecure employment conditions while demonstrating the strongest possible commitment to the goals of an organization. Again foregrounding the potential for lack of homogeneity within the community, Mutch (2003), has stressed the need to acknowledge the enduring dispositions that people bring, exemplified by Bourdieu’s (1977) notion


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of habitus, which condition their perspectives as members and may not be subject to modification by participation, concluding that the analytical interest lies in the extent to which such dispositions are challenged by and altered by different practices, or to what extent they remain immune to such influences. (Mutch, 2003, p. 397) Highlighting the potential for intra- as well as interpersonal conflict, Handley et al. (2006, p. 648) have noted how the need for individuals to negotiate the ‘ “self” within and across multiple communities’ can create ‘intra-personal tensions as well as instabilities in the group’. Also focusing on the potential for lack of homogeneity and again recalling the findings of the study, Candlin and Candlin (2007) have argued that, given the potential for tensions arising from competing interests and agendas, regulatory discourses along the lines proposed by Sarangi and Roberts (1999a) will be required to ensure the sustainable governance and regulation of the community. Drawing these points together with the findings of the study, the discourse of commercialization emerges as integral to an organizational ecology in which it advances the community of consumption as a form of institutional order that is • aligned with promotional constructions of identities and relationships; • regulated through the technologization of discursive practices; • reproduced through the revaluation of the social capital of subordinate members; • maintained by an equilibrium between consent and coercion on their part; • characterized by intra- and interpersonal struggle as members seek to minimize the risks membership poses for them and • justified according to the naturalized assumptions of neo-liberal discourse. It is appropriate that the last word on the community of consumption should go to Sandra. In the following extract from her diary we see how her own perspective and prospects as a professional have been shaped within this ecology. She has just lost her position after a long struggle to reconcile the commercial and the educational demands on her role as


a teacher, and these competing obligations have in effect cancelled out her understanding of herself as a professional. There are now large holes in my consciousness. I am on automatic pilot. Today I walked all the way . . . to my car to find no handbag on my shoulder. Panic. Did someone snatch it and I didn’t even notice? I walk back. It is on the floor of the staffroom. I have never, ever forgotten my bag before. I consider the symbolism of this: my handbag is my identity, it contains all the possessions that define me, and I lose it. Today two teachers left. At the farewell lunch, flowers etc. I suddenly think, how will I leave? Will there be flowers shoved at me? Will I have the courage to give them back? Reflecting her internal struggle to maintain a coherent sense of her professional identity, she explains the tension she feels in relation to her own past and future, to her interactions with others, and to how she will respond to the discrepant meanings that these interactions hold for her, for others and for the organization. In doing so she underscores the central argument of the book; that if we are to understand how such tensions affect people’s lives and the nature of their work, then in the interests of policy and practice we need to understand these as reproduced through the ecology of organizational life.

Broadening the field: comparable sites While evidence of pressure to conform to the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization has been adduced in English language teaching, there remains the question of its scope, of other sites at which it operates and the extent to which people actually conform to it. What can this understanding of the organizational ecology of teaching tell us about professional practice more generally? In the light of the evidence produced it is clear that the discourse of commercialization is likely to arise where the marketization and commodification of services make the need to compete for consumers the desideratum of provision. That this has emerged as a concern across educational sectors at all levels is attested in the literature cited in Chapter 1. In considering the broader relevance of the findings presented in this book, it will be useful to look at the extent to which the points that emerged as salient to the experience of the teachers in the study may be relevant to other domains of professional life. This takes us in the first instance back to concerns about the expansion of commercial interests


189

that were outlined in Chapter 1. These concerns focus on the human cost of subordinating social to commercial values and interests, epitomized for teachers in the study and the organizations in which they work as a struggle not only over the definition of their profession, but over the question of how its members are to understand and justify their relations with others. For individuals, the challenge is ultimately ethical, a matter of deciding the grounds that guide, constrain and legitimize relations between people and how their value is to be decided. The evidence presented in Chapter 6 showed how pressure to revalue the social is evident at all levels; from the lived experience of individuals to the global scale of polices whose premises have become naturalized within discourses that construct the identities of and relations between nations. I started the book by quoting Harvey (2005) on the pervasiveness of these assumptions and the common sense status that they have achieved. He has also captured powerfully their ethical significance, explaining that in so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable as acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethics beliefs,’ it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximised by maximising the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. (2005, p. 3) The extent to which individuals are subject to and conform to these pressures will depend in large part on their capacity to perceive themselves and act as a group. The relevance of this for professions and other groups whose common expertise and interests are not defined in market terms is laid out in Bourdieu’s (1991) account of the ‘unification of the market’. We touched on this earlier as the process which subordinates all values and interests to those of the market and in doing so makes obsolete those practices and the habitus of individuals which are not so aligned. Now the further significance of this unification becomes relevant, in particular to how it leads to what Bourdieu (1998) calls the ‘destruction of collectives’, central to which is his (1986) notion of social capital. This refers to the reciprocal obligations and connections the holder gains access to and is inducted into though membership of groups such as families, unions, groups in the arts, professions or other sources of ‘collectively-owned capital’. The important point here


is that the existence of such groups depends on the possibility of mutual commitment among members based on shared social values and interests. Bourdieu has argued that the economic order implemented by the policies which neoliberal discourse legitimizes is antithetical to such groups because it entails the ‘structural violence of unemployment, of insecure employment, and of the fear provoked by the threat of losing employment’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 98). Those subjected to this violence are thereby isolated not only from their own pasts and futures, but from each other by the need to compete for the little security that is available. In attempting to improve their conditions, people therefore cannot unite to exert their group interests, but succumb to the need to survive by complying with and aspiring to the dominant discourses, a process which further enhances the freedom of the market to determine and reduce their conditions, and further raises the ‘prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant class enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production’ (Gramsci, 1988, p. 307). It is because of this capacity to fragment collectives which may hinder its operations that Bourdieu (1998, p. 95) has called neoliberalism ‘a programme of methodological destruction of collectives’. Pushing this process to the maximum of efficiency are the methods of manipulation associated with consumer culture, including marketing and advertising. As we saw in the analysis of the brochures, it is by these means that consumption is constructed as advancing the life chances of consumers. This process mirrors the revaluation of the habitus of professionals, but instead of the market-driven construction of their practices, the consumers’ habitus is valued, like the students in the study, only in so far as it leads them to choose and consume products. This nexus between the destruction of collectives and the operations of promotional discourse is important for considering the broader significance of the discourse of commercialization. Understood within the ecology of the organization, the discourse of commercialization can be seen as the means by which discourses associated with promotion orient the lives of those within them towards the community of consumption and in doing so reduce their capacity to consider themselves as collectives: as professionals, or in the case of lay people, as students, patients or recipients of other particular professional services rather than as consumers. It might therefore be expected that sites comparable to those in the study would also foreground the reduction of professional status and the promotion of products, exemplified in the study by the conflict between professional and institutional orders of discourse noted by Sarangi and Roberts, and Fairclough’s work on


191

the colonization of professional and public orders of discourse by the discourse of advertising. Candidate sites for comparison include the university sector, in which, as noted previously, Fairclough (1993, 1996) has identified this convergence. More recent examples include Askehave (2007) who has found that university promotional materials increasingly construct students in ways that reduce the academic authority of the university in relation to their authority as prospective clients, and Scarino et al. (2007) have identified the construction of teaching and learning as ‘delivery’ in the discourse of international education, a trend described more generally by Grant (2009, p. vii) as a reduction of teaching to the delivery of ‘externally preset activities’ in which ‘the learning process becomes almost entirely instrumental’. At the same time, the loss of professional standing among academic staff in conjunction with the marketization of the sector has been widely documented (Deem et al., 2007; McCowan, 2009; Morrow, 2006; Naidoo and Jamieson, 2006), Marginson et al. (2010) have highlighted the vulnerability of international students, and Giroux (2009, p. 37) has argued that within this environment students as learners are systematically disadvantaged, becoming neither a resource of social investment nor a referent for society’s obligation for the future. Instead, they become customers, clients and a source of revenue. Similarly, in the school sector the pressure on schools to promote their educational services in order to attract funding, programmes and students is increasing while the professional status and influence of teaching has fallen (Ball, 2006, 2007; Hargreaves, 2006; Molnar, 2005; Wrigley, 2009) and students have become identified with their potential as consumers and as ‘human capital’ (Apple, 2000) rather than as ‘persons-in-themselves who are co-participants in the joint activity better described as “learning and teaching” ’. (Kemmis, 2010, p. 145) Beyond education, examples are wide ranging. In relation to social work, for example, Ferguson (2007) has identified how the promotion of ‘personalized services’ to clients has the potential to exacerbate rather than reduce the deprofessionalizing of social workers, and Kessl (2009, p. 311) has warned of the risks posed to the profession by the marketization of welfare services because its construction of welfare recipients as free to


design and plan their own lives ‘corresponds symbiotically to a growing lack of public responsibility’, and Holloway and Lymbery (2007, p. 378) have warned that the balance between freedom and choice, and risk and protection, becomes ever more fragile as services seek to privilege the autonomy of the service user in discharging their responsibilities. Similar concerns have been voiced in the health sector. For example, in relation to aged care King (2007) has observed that the current emphasis on funding based on competition between organizations to attract residents has led to pressure towards a pragmatic, instrumental approach to care which deprofessionalizes care staff, is not in the best interests of residents and is unsustainable in the longer term. And in medicine an ongoing theme in the literature is the potential for conflict between professional ethics and market-based approaches to provision which emphasize competition for patients and involve corporate investment and promotion on a vast scale (Day, 2008; Relman, 2007). At the heart of these concerns is the compromising of professional integrity, an ethical stance whose significance, as social capital, for the professions and society as a whole has been identified by Sullivan (2007), who has explained that the capacity of professionalism to inspire and guide individuals and professional groups depends upon its influence in shaping imagination and perception, in shaping the basic habits of professional life. But normal sources become most effective when they function within ongoing institutions that echo and embody these moral meanings. These institutions and their personnel become in a sociological sense carriers of the moral sources which they articulate. While concerns in different professional domains reflect the convergence of the market-based pressure to promote and the erosion of social capital, it is important to recognize that the nature of the linguistic and social ecology will differ between professional domains and between sites. This was evident within the study, in which teachers, managers and students were not homogeneous groups but differed both intra- and interpersonally, in their interpretations of their own experience, of the groups to which they aligned themselves, of how they interacted with others and in their explanations of these interactions within the particular organizations. At the same time, the lives of the


193

three groups were intertwined through the different risks they posed for each other and their competing efforts to reduce them. Similarly, for other professions, such differences will inevitably turn on complex interdependencies between the micro and the macro, between how people manage the habitus they bring, the histories of individuals, organizations and the sector as whole, the differential influence of organizations in the market, the interplay between legislation, regulation, training and the broader political and economic contexts, and in the interdiscursive relations between the discourses that reproduce these particular institutional orders and that regulate professional practice within them. Further differences in how the discourse of commercialization will be realized across professional domains will be reflected in the different themes that may become the focus of struggle. As this study has shown, in education it is the meanings of teaching and learning that are contested and at stake. In other professional domains and sites, other themes and thematic combinations, such as ‘risk’ and ‘protection’ identified above by Holloway and Lymbery (2007) in relation to social work, will come to the fore as foci of concern for the profession and those whom it serves. Further examples of these focal themes could include ‘empathy’ and ‘rapport’ in medicine (Candlin and O’Grady, 2007) and, in nursing, ‘trust’ (Gilbert, 2005), ‘personhood’ and ‘care’ (McCormack and Heath, 2010). Of course, such themes will not be unique to particular professions but variously relevant across them. Indeed, as Candlin and Crichton (2010) show in relation to the theme of ‘deficit’, within a multi-perspectived approach to discourse such themes can be seen as a conceptual network through which issues of concern in different professional domains can be identified and inform inter-disciplinary and inter-professional research into their discursive realization at particular sites.

Issues of policy, practice and change The message underscored though this book is that if policy for change at any level is to be based on claims about the work of the professions and those they serve, this needs to be warranted in the way foregrounded by Cicourel’s (1992, 2007) notion of ecological validity. Following Candlin (1997, 2006) and Sarangi (2007), I have argued that this includes but both problematizes and goes beyond the need to acknowledge and develop a shared understanding with participants, and that at the same time it raises important ontological and methodological questions about the nature of discourse.


While the approach is potentially daunting to employ, the value of seeking understanding in this way is captured by Bourdieu (1999, p. 629), who has written of knowledge of social origins and causes that what the social world has done, it can, armed with this knowledge, undo. In any event, what is certain is that nothing is less innocent than non-interference. The question immediately arises as to how intervention is possible. The study has highlighted the way in which the fates of those concerned are mutually interdependent, and how the interpretive resources of each group, with variations, are inevitable shaped by their particular histories and interests. What is required in the first instance is the incentive for change for those whose interests dominate. This may not be as utopian as it sounds. To start with there is the issue of sustainability that has been highlighted in this chapter, and echoed in the works cited on other professions. If the logic of the market leads, through the discourse of commercialization, to the erosion of the autonomy and expertise of professionals then the product, however it may be promoted, is lost. This may suggest an argument intended to appeal to common and prudential interests in the face of overriding pressures to compete. However, it also signals the need for common ground, for organizational policy in education and other professional domains to be informed by and alert to the dangers of developing policy without reference to the ecology of the organization. As a first step, this will require those involved in policy and practice to adopt a concerted and ongoing stance that foregrounds understanding of the particular organizational ecology in which they work, the interdependent lifeworlds of those who sustain it, and the discourses that regulate their practices, not only with a view to understanding how these practices occur but why. As the findings of the study illustrate, this stance is essential if change is to lead to and not subvert sustainable organizational development and improvement in professional practice. On a larger scale, the study has shown how the discursive construction of quality and expertise in legislation, regulation and training can come to reflect chiefly commercial interests and thereby contribute to deprofessionalization. Indeed, we saw how these constructions subordinate the social to the economic in ways that align closely with the predications made for neoliberal discourse by Bourdieu. That such constructions are important in shaping local understandings and priorities is evident not only from this study but in education and the professions


195

more generally. This again underscores the importance of professional associations, unions, and student, patient, family, community and other advocacy groups countering these constructions, and the corresponding need for these groups to recognize that they and their values are set precisely at risk in the commercialization of professional practice. The need is to advocate for constructions of quality, expertise and the focal themes associated with particular professions that promote the sustainability of the professions, and in doing so to reflect the fundamental point that professional relationships are based on mutual trust in the expertise of the professional and in the value of this relationship for those they serve. Dependent on the ethical integrity of the practitioner, it is this relationship that references her autonomy in making judgements in the interests of the other and reproduces these values through and for society as a whole. As this book has emphasized, the point is fundamentally about the meaning of these values and how it is interpreted and reproduced through the multiple perspectives that constitute organizational ecology.

Appendix 1: Diary Coding System

Accounts of teachers, managers, students and absent participants Themes

Codes

The role of the teacher

Contradictory pressures Teachers differ Teachers fear redundancy: sub-codes: Inexperienced teachers fear most Teachers are employed for cost/looks

13/6 4/1 14/7

Managers prioritize commerce over teaching Profit or status drives managers

20/5

Students make little effort: sub-code: Some students do want to study Students have financial authority Culture affects learning

4/3

Agents Teacher training Unions The education industry Regulatory authority Federal government

7/6 6/4 3/3 3/3 1/1 1/1

Managers’ priorities Students as learners

Absent participants

Occurrences/ diarists

196

6/4 3/1

4/1

4/3 5/2 7/4

197

Evaluation and appraisal Themes

Codes

Students evaluate/ appraise teachers

Students’ opinions drive management

Managers evaluate/ appraise teachers

Managers equates ‘happy’ students with good teaching

11/5

Managers appraise teacher’s ‘attitude’ sub-code: Managers priorities not explicit

1/1

Teachers evaluate/ appraise managers

Pressure to be silent Teachers’ opinions are ignored/reinterpreted

Students evaluate/ appraise managers

Teachers support students against managers

Teachers evaluate/ appraise students

Pressure to ease assessment: sub-code: Students resist teachers’ assessments Pressure to improve attendance

Occurrences/ diarists 8/4

3/2

9/5 11/7 4/3 10/5 4/3 1/1

Implications for other practices Themes

Codes

Classroom teaching

Class composition: sub-codes: Students are wrongly placed Too many students in classes Students enrol continuously Students are hard to control Managers control teaching materials Pressure to standardize teaching

Occurrences/ diarists

11/5 5/3 4/2 4/2 4/2 2/1

Professional development

PD is inadequate PD has commercial purposes

6/4 5/3

Beyond the college

Excursions must be fun Socializing is compromising

1/1 1/1

Appendix 2: Brochure Coding System

Products and attractions as participants Themes

Codes

Sub-codes

1) Products as participants exclude others

1) Nominalized products

1) ‘Study’ 1) ‘Courses’ 2) ‘Classroom teaching’ 3) ‘Learning environment’ 4) ‘Assessment’ 2) ‘Student services’ 1) ‘Social activities’ 2) ‘Accommodation’ 3) ‘Further study placement’ 4) ‘Student welfare’ 5) ‘Orientation’ 6) ‘Airport pick-up’

2) Products as actors 3) Agentless passives 2) Attractions as participants exclude others

1) Nominalized attractions 2) Attractions as actors

Occurrences/ brochures 1/1 73/6 25/6 20/6 19/6 3/2 26/6 18/6 15/6 11/6 6/6 6/6 31/6 35/6

1) ‘International’ lifestyle

84/6 5/4

198

199

College as producer in key agent roles Themes

Sub-themes

Codes

1) College displaces other agents

1) College as actor

2) Possesses/ controls participants and processes

1) Personal system

3) Provides/ assures satisfaction

Sub-codes

30/6

1) ‘Our’ 2) ‘We’ 3) ‘Us’

2) Modifiers 3) Circumstantial elements 4) Possessive attributive clauses 1) College as the expert

2) Staff as qualified

1) Nominals 2) College/ managers as actors 1) Nominals 2) Non-finite hypotactic enhancement

Occurrences/ brochures

32/6 28/5 4/2 28/6 18/4 4/3

17/6 3/1

1) Cause: purpose

24/6 4/1

3) Product provision and satisfaction: 1) Product provision

1) Modalization: probability

1) ‘will’ 2) ‘can/ may’

16/6 4/2

1) ‘can’

14/5

2) Consumer satisfaction

2) Modulation: ability 1) Modalization: probability

1) ‘will’

17/3

200

College as producer in key agent roles Themes

Sub-themes

4) Supporting voices/agents

1) Letter from director: 1) Personalization 2) Responsibility qualified 3) Products extolled 4) ‘hard work’ 2) Students’ testimonials: 1) Personalization 2) Products extolled

3) Guarantors

Codes


1) Personal system 1) Mental processes 1) Modification 1) Nominals

12/1 2/1

1) Personal system 1) Nominals 2) Modification 3) Mental processes 1) Nominals 2) As actors

11/1 5/1 6/1 3/1

4/2 1/1

13/3 8/3

201

Students/readers as consumers Themes

Sub-themes

Codes

1) Students/ readers as beneficiaries

1) Students/ readers as aspirations/ needs/skills 2) Possession and product selection

1) Nominals

56/6

1) Personal system: ‘their/your’ 2) Modulation: ability 3) Hypotactic verb group: projection 4) Hypotactic enhancement: condition: positive

29/6

2) Consumption processes

1) Producing consumption

2) Providing consumption 3) Automating consumption

1) Hypotactic verbal group: causative 2) Hypotactic enhancement: cause: purpose 3) Consumer as goal 1) Beneficiary position 1) Ergative perspective

Sub-codes

1) ‘can’


16/6 13/5

10/4

38/6

15/3

6/2 40/6 17/6

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Index

Abercrombie, N., 61, 66, 74–5, 110, 158 accountability, 26, 28, 35, 47, 56, 178 actor role, see promotional brochures acquiescence to authority, 67 advertising centrality in social life, 110 colonization of orders of discourse by, 43, 191 and the desirability of products, 126 discourse of, 43, 109–12 Alexander, J. C., 21 analyst’s paradox, 14–15, 27 analyst’s perspective, see multi-perspectived approach Andrew, J., 6 Antonio, R. J., 5 Apple, M. W., 5, 191 Asia, 9, 51, 163, 167 Askehave, I., 43, 191 assessment devaluation of, 94–6 impact of globalization on, 8 impact on students’ proficiency, 94 minimizing risks and obligations posed by, 123 positive construction, 124–5 potential imposition posed by, 144 pressure to reduce standards of, 94 pressures on teachers to ease, 138 as product, 114, 121 promotional brochures on, 124 struggles over, 96–7, 98, 100 student resistance to, 148 Australia economic interests, 162, 165 international students ratio, 7 marketing to international students, 10, 101 National Code of Practice, 168–9

racism debate, 166–7 relative cost of studying in, 163 value of the ELT sector, 10 backstage, see frontstage/backstage regions Bakhtin, M. M., 30, 37 Ball, S. J., 191 Bargiela-Chiappini, F., 12 beneficiary role, see promotional brochures Block, D., 175 Blumer, H., 36 Bourdieu, P., 2, 6, 11–12, 18–19, 42, 59, 63–7, 80, 87, 90, 94, 101, 106–7, 124–5, 149–51, 153–7, 162, 164–9, 173–4, 178–80, 184–6, 189–90, 194 Bourdieu’s theory of practice, 63, 65–6, 87, 94, 150, 155, 185 Brahm, E., 152 Brecher, J., 152 Brockmeier, J., 37 Brookfield, S. D., 8 Brown, G., 20–1, 26 Bullen, E., 4 Burbules, N. C., 171 Conversational Analysis (CA), 24 Canada, 163 Candlin, C. N., 2, 4, 12–17, 21, 27, 29, 33, 35–7, 48–9, 162, 183, 187, 193 Candlin, S., 187 capital cultural, see cultural capital devaluation of learning and teaching, 66, 101, 150, 155, 158, 180 economic, see economic capital four notions of, 63–4 human, 191

214

Index and life chances, 64 social, see social capital symbolic, see symbolic capital Capra, F., 181 Carbaugh, D., 37 Carter, B., 13 casualization, 57, 59, 66, 75, 104, 154, 171, 173–4, 180 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 23–4 CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) global acceptance, 174 influence, 46, 161, 173–5 and standardization, 178 and the subordination of the social, 172–3 and teaching methodology, 86 cheating, 100 Chew, P. G.-L., 7 Chilton, P., 23 Chouliaraki, L., 23, 39 Cicourel, A. V., 15–16, 20, 24–6, 28, 35, 47–8, 181, 193 circumstantial elements, see promotional brochures Clandinin, D. J., 37 class, Bourdieu on the manipulation of, 64–5, 67, 159 class sizes, 56–7, 99, 170 coercion/consent, 63, 66–7, 78, 80, 85, 87, 89–92, 95, 99–101, 104–5, 107, 149, 185, 187 colonization, 2, 43, 61, 89, 101, 106, 110, 184, 191 commercial pressures, 6, 9, 43, 72–3, 75–7, 84, 101–2, 104, 107, 138 commercial priorities, 11, 79, 84, 86, 89, 91–3, 95–7, 101–3, 107, 184 commodification, 43, 61, 102, 106, 154, 188 commodified ontology, 117, 149 communicative practices, 13 community of consumption characteristics, 187 community of practice comparison, 185–6

215

construction of consumers, 142 construction of students, 139 exclusion of teachers as agents, 122 measure of ‘quality’ in, 169 in neoliberal discourse, 156, 158, 179 promotional brochures’ construction, 113–17 strategic construction as desirable, 149–50 teachers’ place in, 149, 171, 184 community of practice, 185 complaints procedures, 55 conflict, intra-personal, 44, 73–4, 78, 97, 106, 187 conservative restoration, 5 consumer culture, 61, 109–10, 151–2, 157, 190 Bourdieu’s critique, 155–6 consumer satisfaction, 88–97, 98–103, 107, 111–12, 115–16, 127–8, 131–8 context(s) interpenetrating, 16 the problem of, 13, 20 significance for CDA and CA, 23–4 contradictory interpellation, 8, 11, 73, 91, 100, 106 contradictory pressures, 73, 84, 196 Cook, G., 43, 109 Costello, T., 152 Coulter, J., 21 Coulthard, M., 35 Coupland, N., 13–14, 21–2 Crichton, J., 193 consumption processes, 115–17, 118, 139, 148, 150, 159, 169–70, 173, 176, 179, 184 cultural capital, 64, 150, 155–6 culture of insecurity, 65, 150 data analysis, Miles and Huberman’s approach, 47 Dawe, A., 21–2 Day, L., 192 Deem, R., 191 deprofessionalization, 60, 107, 194 destruction of collectives, 189–90

216 Index diary analysis classroom teaching, 98–102 coding system, 69–70, 196–7 evaluation/appraisal practices, 93–4 on excursions and socializing with students, 102–4 participants, 68–9 professional development, 104–5 redundancy fears, 75–6 on the role of the teacher, 73 teacher/manager/student relations, 70–2 discourse of commercialization, 3, 68, 109, 118, 139, 147–50, 151, 156–61, 165, 167, 169–71, 175–80, 183–8, 190, 193, 194 neoliberal, see neoliberal discourse origins of the term, 13 regulatory, 185, 187 role in maintenance of social order, 11 technologization of, 60–3, 91 discourse analysis Cicourel’s call for accountability in, 47 implications of Cicourel’s challenge, 16 mediated, 27 macro-micro relationship, 21, 25 relationship between language and context in, 20 and the researcher, 12, 15 discourse practices, standardization of, 101 discourse techniques, context-free, 101 discursive practice, 29–31 divided habitus, 157, 179–80 du Gay, P., 2 Duranti, A., 13, 16, 20, 38 dynamic hybridity, 17 EAP (English for Academic Purposes), 121, 125 ecological validity, 15–16, 30, 35, 48, 181, 193

economic capital, 63–6, 156–9, 162, 164, 173–5, 178 education commercialization of, 4–9 drivers of the international demand for, 7 economics versus, 74 globalization of markets in, 59 pressure to privatize, 8 ELT (English Language Teaching) sector capital revaluation, 66 and the growth of export education, 9–10 value to the Australian economy, 10 employment security, 11, 87, 152, 154, 157, 171–2, 183 enterprise culture, 5 ergativity, see promotional brochures Erickson, F., 14 ESOS (Education Services for Overseas Students), 167 ethics, 189, 192 ethnomethodology, 22, 39–41 evaluation/appraisal practices, 70, 72, 75, 78, 86–97, 101, 105–7, 138, 150 Fairclough, N., 2, 8, 11–13, 17–19, 23–4, 29–31, 33, 38–9, 43–5, 60–2, 66, 73, 89, 91, 100–2, 106, 109–10, 112, 115, 118, 121, 125, 128, 136, 147, 184–5, 190–1 Fairhurst, G., 14 Falk, P. H., 111 fear of redundancy, 73, 75–6, 78, 107, 127, 156, 196 fear of unemployment, 150, 154, 184 Featherstone, M., 61, 110 Ferguson, I., 191 Fischman, G., 5, 8 flexploitation, 154, 156 Foucault, M., 30, 42 France, 7 free market, 6, 152, 154, 164 Friedman, M., 6 friendliness, fabricated, 62 frontstage/backstage regions, 50–8, 74, 103, 107 Fusfeld, D. R., 5

Index Gabe, J., 11 Garfinkel, H., 38, 40, 46, 50 Gee, J., 186 Georgakopoulou, A., 37 George, S., 153 Germany, 7 Giddens, A., 11, 32, 40, 42, 107 Gilbert, T. P., 193 Giroux, H. A., 8, 182, 191 Glaser, B. G., 47, 70, 113 globalization Bourdieu’s critique, 154 CELTA’s contribution, 174 consequences of, 5, 152–3 education as a means of, 7 impact on student assessment, 8 of markets in education, 5–7, 59 Goffman, E., 40–1, 50, 107 Goodwin, C., 13, 16, 20, 38 Goutsos, D., 37 grammatical metaphor, see promotional brochures Gramsci, A., 18, 63, 66–7, 78, 80, 87, 91, 95, 101, 107, 149, 185, 190 Grant, D., 14 Grant, N., 191 Gray, J., 174 grounded theory, 47 Grubb, W. N., 5 Habermas, J., 42 habit of pleasing, 100–1, 148 habitus, 59, 63–6, 94, 101, 106–7, 138, 149–50, 153–9, 172, 178–80, 182, 185–7, 189–90, 193 Hak, T., 27, 38 Hall, C., 50 Halliday, M. A. K., 18, 38–9, 45, 109, 112, 118–20, 123, 128, 132–4, 136, 141–3, 145–6, 177 Hammersley, M., 13, 23 Handley, K., 187 Hanson, P., 79, 101, 164–6 Hargreaves, A., 191 Harmer, J., 161, 176–7 Harvey, D., 1, 5–6, 189 Hayek, F., 6 health sector, 192 Heath, H., 193

217

hegemony, and coercion/consent, 66–7 Held, D., 5 Heritage, J., 40 Hill, D., 4 Holloway, M., 192–3 Holmes, J., 12 Hong Kong, 162 house style, 55, 62 Huberman, A. M., 45, 47, 69, 113 hypotaxis, see promotional brochures ideology, 23 Iedema, R., 12, 14 inexperienced teachers, vulnerability of, 77 insecurity, 11, 58, 65, 73, 107, 150, 154, 156, 173 culture of, 65, 150 interdiscursive relations, 43–4, 127–8, 138–9, 147–50, 160, 183–4, 193, see also promotional brochures interdiscursivity, see multi-perspectived approach international lifestyle, 116, 120, 127, 132, 137, 157–8, 174, 198 international student enrolments, 7 interpellation, contradictory, 8, 11, 73, 91, 100, 106 interpenetrating contexts, 16, 26 intersubjectivity, 37, 40 intertextuality, 30–1 intra-personal conflict, 44, 73–4, 78, 97, 106, 187 Jamieson, I., 191 Japan, 164 Jaworski, A., 13–14 Jewitt, C., 39 Jhally, S., 114 Keat, R., 5, 11, 91 Kemmis, S., 11 Kenway, J., 4, 6 Kessl, F., 191 Keynesian economics, resurgent interest in, 6 King, D., 192 Kline, S., 114

218 Index Knorr-Cetina, K. D., 22 Kress, G., 39, 113–14 Kristeva, J., 30 Kumar, R., 4 language bias towards the investigation of recordable, 27 centrality in social life, 42 instrumental approaches to, 38–9 Lave, J., 185 Layder, D., 17, 25, 31–4, 36, 41–2, 63 Lazerson, M., 5 learning capital, reduction of, 158 Lee, S., 6 legitimate competence, 154, 156, 159, 178, 186 Leiss, W., 18, 110–12, 114, 126, 152 lifestyles attaining through consumption, 156 Bourdieu’s account, 155, 157 and CELTA, 174 Featherstone on, 61 and promotional brochures, 111, 114, 116–17, 119, 125–7, 130–2, 137 Linell, P., 14, 39 Littlejohn, A., 175 Lymbery, M., 192–3 Lynch, M., 24 macro-actors, the influence of, 159–62 macro-micro relationship and context, 24 Dawe’s explanation, 21–2 Fairclough’s framework, 23, 31 Layder’s explanation, 32 and the problem of control, 22 and the problem of order, 21 Malaysia, 162 Marginson, S., 4, 7, 191 marketing function, in the teaching role, 74–5 marketing, prioritization of, 93 marketization, 61, 110, 188, 191 Matthiessen, C. M. I. M., 18, 38, 45, 109, 112, 118, 128, 134 Mattingly, C., 37

McBride, S., 6 McCommunication, 175 McCormack, B., 193 McCowan, T., 191 McGrew, A., 5, 151 McNamara, T., 8 Meadmore, D., 43 Meadmore, P., 43 mental processes, see promotional brochures methodology, see multi-perspectived approach Meyer, M., 14, 23–5 micro-relations, explaining meso- and, 156–9 Miles, M. B., 45, 47, 69, 113 modalization, see promotional brochures modulation, see promotional brochures Molnar, A., 191 moments of crisis, 12, 44–5, 62, 67, 106 Morrow, R. A., 191 motivational relevancies, 27–9, 33, 35, 44, 48–9, 63 motivation, erosion of teachers’, 156 Mouzelis, N., 21, 41, 151, 160 multi-perspectived approach analyst’s perspective, 28, 29, 33, 35–6, 47, 67 chief ontological requirement, 25–6 and Fairclough’s framework, 29–31 interdiscursivity, 29–31, 47 and Layder’s approach to social research, 31–3 methodology, relationship between ontology and, 26–7 ontology outline, 34 participants’ perspective, 36–8, 45, 108 reflexivity, 25–9 requirements, 29 semiotic resource perspective, 34, 38–9, 42, 45–6, 150 social/institutional perspective, 41–2, 46, 49, 68, 159, 162, 165, 180

Index social practice perspective, 39, 46, 50 starting point, 15, 29 multi-perspectived study data selection and analysis, 45–8 design, 42–4 outline, 44 Mutch, A., 186–7 Naidoo, R., 191 narrative, 36–8, 49–50 NEAS (National ELT Accreditation Scheme), 10, 57, 167, 170–2 Nelson, B., 10 neoliberal economic policies, emergence of, 5–6 neoliberal discourse, 65, 150, 153–5, 159–62, 165–9, 173, 179 neoliberalism Bourdieu’s critique, 6, 65, 153–9, 167, 190 and the destruction of collectives, 190 influence of, 1, 5–8, 65, 156, 161, 165, 182, 189–90, 194 as political, 6, 164 nominal groups, 118, 119–21, 125, 128, 131–2, 139, 163, see also promotional brochures nominalization, 113, 118–23, 126, 128–9, 135, 138, 144, 165–6, see also promotional brochures non-finite hypotactic clauses, see promotional brochures official language, 149–50 O’Grady, C., 193 Olssen, M., 6 O’Neill, H., 152 ontological assumptions, 26, 28 ontology, see multi-perspectived approach participants’ perspective, see multi-perspectived approach passive voice, see promotional brochures performance, rankings as measures of, 7

219

personal pronouns, see promotional brochures Phillipson, R., 7 physical attractiveness, employment of teachers for, 77–8 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), 8 Pope, D., 111 Popkewitz, T. S., 152 Posner, R. A., 6 possessive forms, see promotional brochures power relations, 31, 42, 63 PPP (presentation-practiceproduction), 175, 179 practical relevance, 28–9, 33, 35, 44, 48–9 promotional brochures actor role, 119, 120, 122, 128, 130, 132–3, 135, 138, 141, 143, 145, 146 beneficiary role, 114, 116, 118, 120, 123, 139, 142, 144–5 circumstantial elements, 128, 132 coding system, and Systemic Functional Linguistics, 112–13, 198–201 the college as producer, 128–38 and community of consumption, 113–17 consumption processes, 115–17, 118, 139, 148, 150 ergativity, 113, 141, 146 grammatical metaphor, 118 hypotaxis, 143 interdiscursive relations, 127–8, 138–9, 147–50 mental processes, 136–8, 141 modalization, 119, 134–5 modulation, 119, 134–5 nominal groups, 118, 119–21, 125, 128, 131–2, 139 nominalization, 113, 118–23, 126, 128–9, 135, 138, 144 non-finite hypotactic clauses, 133 passive voice, 122–3 personal pronouns, 128–30 possessive forms, 128–30 product construction, 118–27

220 Index promotional brochures – continued projection, 141–2 students and readers as consumers, 139–47 and study design, 113 teachers as excluded, 119–25, 127–9, 132, 141, 143 teaching and learning as products, 114 testimonials, 136–7 transitivity, 112–13, 114, 119, 146 value to the study, 42–3 prior theory, 14, 24–5 professional development NEAS criteria, 170–1 tension between performance appraisal and, 105 professional insecurity, 73 professional practice, devaluation of, 156 professional standards, 11, 52–4, 70, 73–4, 80, 86–7, 129, 133, 180 pressure to compromise to maintain ‘happiness’ of students, 88–95, 98–103, 107, 127–8, 156, 178 professional workplace, as a site of struggle, 59–60 progressive obsolescence, 153, 156 projection, see promotional brochures public sector, negative comparisons, 7 Putnam, L., 14 Quiggin, J., 6 racism debate, 166–7 radical heterogeneity, 13 Reagan, R., 6 recruitment, 43 redundancy, fear of, 73, 75–6, 78, 107, 127, 156, 196 Reed, M., 14 reflexive practices, 107 relationships, macro-micro, 21, 25, 29, 31–3 Relman, A. S., 192 Ricoeur, P., 37 Riessman, C. K., 37, 50 risk culture, 11

Ritzer, G., 151 Roberts, C., 11, 13, 17, 28, 33, 35, 48–50, 59–60, 63, 90, 103, 107, 148, 185, 187, 190 Roberts, J., 186 Robertson, R., 152 Sacks, H., 24 Salaman, G., 2 Sarangi, S., 11, 13–15, 17, 21, 27–8, 33, 35–7, 48–50, 59–60, 63, 90, 103, 107, 148, 162, 185, 187, 190, 193 Scarino, A., 191 Schegloff, E. A., 24 Schiffrin, D., 13 school sector, 191 schools, impact of competition on, 4–5 Scollon, R., 27, 38, 185 Scollon, S. W., 38 Sealey, A., 13–14 Sears, A., 6 semiotic resource perspective, see multi-perspectived approach semiotic resources, 16, 33, 40, 182–3 Sharrock, W., 24 Shohamy, E., 124 Silverman, D., 25, 38 Silverstein, M., 14 Singapore, 162 Skehan, P. A., 176, 178 Smith, A., 6 Smith, Y., 6 social capital, 63–4, 66, 90, 156, 162, 169, 171–3, 175, 178–9, 185, 187, 189, 192 social class, and capital, 64 social control and hegemony, 66–7 locating the source of, 22 social identity, insecurity about, 107 social/institutional perspective, see multi-perspectived approach social practice, and discursive events, 29 social practice perspective, see multi-perspectived approach

Index social production, processes of reproduction and, 63–7 social relations, insecurity and risk in, 11 social status, 155 social-theoretical resources, 41–2, 49, 59, 106 social theory connecting language, context and, 20–9 and contemporary society, 41–2 social work, 191–2 standardization aim of, 55–6 CELTA’s influence, 175, 178 management initiatives, 55 pressure towards, 98, 101–2 of students, 115 standardization policies, 55–6 standards national, 5, 57 NEAS, 160, 167, 170, 172 teaching, see professional standards Stiglitz, J. E., 6 strategically motivated discourse, 110 strategically motivated simulation, 62, 100 Strauss, A. L., 47, 70, 113 Stromquist, N. P., 4, 7 student assessment impact of globalization on, 8 NEAS criteria, 171 student control, and loss of professional authority, 100 student enrolments, international, 7 student mobility, international, 7 students construction as consumers, 157 identification as a homogeneous group, 71 pressure to maintain ‘happiness’ of, 88–95, 98–103, 107, 127–8, 156, 177–8 students’ performance, international comparisons of, 8 student visas, 163, 165, 167 subordination of the social, 165–9, 172–3, 179–80

221

Sulkunen, P., 131 Sullivan, W. M., 192 sustainability, 181, 194–5 symbolic capital, 64 symbolic interactionism, 22, 39, 41 symbolic power, 64–5, 124, 149 symbolic violence, 65, 149, 154, 156–7, 185 symbolized commodities, 111–12, 114–15, 119, 126–7 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), 38–9, 112–13, see also promotional brochures Taiwan, 68, 164–7 teachers exclusion of, see promotional brochures management pressures on, 52 teaching capital, reduction of, 158 teaching expertise, devaluation through evaluation/appraisal practices, 107 teaching materials, managers’ control of, 98, 101 teaching role, inclusion of a marketing function, 74–5 teaching standards, see professional standards technologization characteristics, 61–2 and colonization, 89, 101–2, 106 deprofessionalizing effects of, 62 of discourse, 60–3, 91 and the revaluation of teaching capital, 66 testing, promotional brochures on, 123–5 Thatcher, M., 6 theory grounded, 47 prior, 14, 24–5 social, see social theory theory of practice, Bourdieu’s, 63, 65–6, 87, 94, 150, 155, 185 Thompson, J. B., 65 Tollefson, J. W., 7 topic/resource dilemma, 35 Torrance, H., 7

222 Index Torres, C. A., 171 tourism, 10, 58, 126, 164 trade unions, disincentive to join, 157 transitivity, see promotional brochures unemployment, fear of, 150, 154, 184 unification of the market, 65, 150, 153, 180, 189 United Kingdom, 7, 68, 163 United States, 7, 10, 163 universities, global rankings, 7 university sector, 191 van der Wende, M., 7 van Dijk, T. A., 13 Van Leeuwen, T., 39, 113 vulnerability of inexperienced teachers, 77

of international students, 191 of teachers to commercial pressures, 106 vulnerable groups and devaluation of capital, 155 and neoliberal discourse, 153 Wacquant, L. J. D., 63–4, 157, 179 Wenger, E., 185–6 Wenger, E. C., 185–6 Wernick, A., 110–12, 114–15, 117, 119, 126–7, 139, 147, 149 White, K. E., 152 Widdowson, H., 23 Wodak, R., 23 workplace conditions, 171 Wrigley, T., 6, 191 Young, R., 39 Yule, G., 20–1, 26

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