The role of ‘social exclusion’ and other metaphors in contemporary British social policy: a cognitive critical approach

Abstract

This paper addresses the pivotal role played by the selective deployment of key metaphors in the construction of political positions within the arena of British social policy-making. Drawing on a corpus-based analysis of speeches and reports covering a 10-year period of the New Labour government, evidence is presented to show how metaphors are used to create an ideologically vested narrative of societal ills and policy solutions that stretches across different genres and over time. The effect is to place problematic groups discursively outside society (the ‘socially excluded’), pathologise their behaviour, specify their route back into the mainstream, and delineate society's obligation to those on the outside. A methodology known as critical metaphor analysis is adopted that combines corpus-based modes of analysis with the theoretical insights of conceptual metaphor theory in order to shed light on the workings of ideology in particular discursive contexts. Linguistic metaphors are identified and grouped into four superordinate metaphor domains: CONTAINMENT, MOVEMENT, DISEASE and CONTRACT. The analysis reveals the close conceptual interaction between these domains and explains the effects produced by their discursive instantiation as motivated by a process of ideological change within the Labour Party. In seeking to foreground the workings of ideology in discourse, the paper also aims to highlight the profoundly important role of key metaphors in facilitating the Labour Party's ideological transformation and therefore to argue for the importance of attention to language cognition in critical forms of political discourse analysis.