Policy Discourse Analysis Research Articles

Work-Integrated Learning Policy in Alberta: A Post-Structural Analysis

In late 2020 the Government of Alberta’s Ministry of Advanced Education sent a guidance document to Alberta post-secondary institutions to lay out how work-integrated learning was to be conducted. This document also informed the institutions that work-integrated learning should be included in all future program proposals. The guidelines were sent without the context or purpose stated. This paper applies Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to be” post-structural policy discourse analysis to the Ministry of Advanced Education guidelines. There is a broad consensus in work-integrated learning research that work-integrated learning is beneficial for participants beyond employment outcomes. However, this analysis shows the Ministry of Advanced Education’s representation of the problem displays an assumption that the purpose of work-integrated learning is to improve labour market outcomes. The analysis also spotlights that the likely effects of the policy have more to do with making work-integrated learning programs easier to assess than to improve student education. This paper proposes an alternative framework that would integrate the constructivist and humanistic origin of work-integrated learning and allow institutions to develop appropriate experiential learning components for their programs while still standardizing work-integrated learning components across and within institutions. This proposed framework can improve work-integrated learning programs in Canada by widening the focus beyond human capital theory.

“All schools are not created equal:” An analysis of public comments on school rezoning

Public opinion plays an important role in shaping the policy process. We examined public input in the form of written public comments to interrogate group expression and public values in school policymaking. Drawing on theoretical and methodological tenets of critical policy and critical discourse analysis, our study examined 3,339 written public comments across two school districts undergoing school rezoning, which is the process of drawing and redrawing school attendance boundaries. Our findings highlight the complexity of public opinion on rezoning policies related to 1) competing values and visions for school diversity, 2) racialized conceptualizations of community members’ sense of belonging, and 3) forms of boundary maintenance used to discursively resist boundary changes by excluding students and families of color from crucial resources. As more U.S. districts consider rezoning to balance the racial and/or economic composition of schools, this study contributes new insight into stakeholders’ implicit and explicit racial attitudes, motivations, and values in response to rezoning’s complex policy process.

Gender as an organising framework for international education policy and development

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, empowerment has been used as a ‘rallying cry’ for girls’ education and a necessary condition for gender equality. This article explores gender as an organising framework for international education policy and development during the Global Goals era (2000–2020). Using feminist policy discourse analysis as a coordinated conceptual and methodological approach, I show how gender organises the policy discourses by constructing target populations and constraining policy parameters. The data used in this article are sourced from policy documents published by UN Women and UNGEI from 2000–2020, and from semi-structured interview conversations with girls’ education policy workers during the MDG-SDG transition. The findings presented in this article show how dominant policy discourses are constructed over time, and how they evolve to reflect changing cultural expectations for education’s role in development.

Negotiating Stakeholder Relationships in a Regional Circular Economy: Discourse Analysis of Multi-scalar Policies and Company Statements from the North of England

Circular economy (CE) literature discusses the need for cooperation between different stakeholders to promote a CE; there is also an assumption regarding the benefits of loop closing on a local or regional scale. However, the potentially conflicting priorities, understandings, and expectations of the stakeholders involved have not been sufficiently addressed. Regional (or local) authorities have a responsibility to promote prosperity for stakeholders in their administrative region, within the constraints of national policy; conversely companies can have financial imperatives associated with stakeholders who may be globally distributed. Evidence of these conflicting priorities, the various positions stakeholder take, and their expectations of each other can be seen in the language choices regional actors make in their public-facing policy and report documents. The aim of the paper is to consider the challenges for creating a regional-scale CE that might arise from the differing priorities and values of companies and public agencies relating to specific places. It uses discourse analysis (including critical approaches) to examine how policy and business documents represent the stakeholders of the CE, their place in it, their priorities, and, importantly, the relationship between CE actors, focusing on the case of North Humberside on the North East coast of England. The plans set out in these reports are designed for external stakeholders and allow us to gain an insight into company and policy thinking in relation to CE developments in the coming years, including how they view each other’s roles. Findings indicate a shared motivation across scales and sectors for the CE as a means towards sustainable growth within which business plays a central role. However, there is a critical double disjuncture between different visions for implementation. First, between policy scales, a regional-scale CE is prioritised by regional policymakers, who have an interest in economic advantage being tied to a specific place and call for national scale support for their actions. Second, between regional policymakers and business, companies focus on their own internal operations and potential supply chain collaborations, with little attention given to the regional scale. This can be seen in the way organisations represent the actors of a nascent CE differently. In addition, a hegemonic business-focused growth discourse excludes other visions of the CE; the public are relegated to a passive role primarily as consumers and recipients of under-specified “opportunities” of wealth creation. CE theorisations need to incorporate and address these critical perspectives in order to support the development of strategies to overcome them.

Constructing Fatality Review: A Policy Analysis of the Emergence of Domestic Homicide Reviews in England and Wales.

In England and Wales, Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) examine domestic abuse-related deaths to identify lessons to be learned. However, their emergence as a policy initiative has been little considered. To address this gap, a thematic discourse analysis of policy documents to 2011 was undertaken, examining the justification for, and conceptualization of, DHRs before their implementation. It is argued that DHRs were constructed as a taken-for-granted good, through which multi-agency partners would generate learning while the (gendered) subject was silenced. Attending to aspirations, contradictions, and tensions in the emergence of DHRs has implications for their understanding and operationalization in the present.

A critique of the English national policy from a social determinants of health perspective using a realist and problem representation approach: the \u2018Childhood Obesity: a plan for action\u2019 (2016, 2018, 2019)

BackgroundThe UK government released Chapter 1 of the ‘Childhood Obesity: a plan for action’ (2016), followed by Chapter 2 (2018) and preliminary Chapter 3 was published for consultation in 2019 (hereon collectively ‘The Policy’). The stated policy aims were to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity in England, addressing disparities in health by reducing the gap (approximately two-fold) in childhood obesity between those from the most and least deprived areas.MethodsCombining a realist approach with an analysis of policy discourses, we analysed the policies using a social determinants of health (SDH) perspective (focusing on socio-economic inequalities). This novel approach reveals how the framing of policy ‘problems’ leads to particular approaches and interventions.ResultsWhile recognising a social gradient in relation to obesity measures, we critique obesity problem narratives. The Policy included some upstream, structural approaches (e.g. restrictions in food advertising and the soft-drinks industry levy). However, the focus on downstream individual-level behavioural approaches to reduce calorie intake and increase physical activity does not account for the SDH and the complexity and contestedness of ‘obesity’ and pays insufficient attention to how proposals will help to reduce inequalities. Our findings illustrate that individualising of responsibility to respond to what wider evidence shows is structural inequalities, can perpetuate damaging narratives and lead to ineffective interventions, providing caution to academics, practitioners and policy makers (local and national), of the power of problem representation. Our findings also show that the problem framing in The Policy risks reducing important public health aims to encourage healthy diets and increase opportunities for physical activity (and the physical and mental health benefits of both) for children to weight management with a focus on particular children.ConclusionsWe propose an alternative conceptualisation of the policy ‘problem’, that obesity rates are illustrative of inequality, arguing there needs to be policy focus on the structural and factors that maintain health inequalities, including poverty and food insecurity. We hope that our findings can be used to challenge and strengthen future policy development, leading to more effective action against health inequalities and intervention-generated inequalities in health.

Through Jean Anyon’s “Screen Door”: The Differentially Racialized Incursion of the Neoliberal State in Milwaukee and Detroit Schools

Background/Context: Research has documented educational neoliberalization as a disrupter of “failing” urban schools and a driver of the remaking of urban space for development interests, through the dislocation of low-income communities of color. Such research draws upon Jean Anyon’s work on cities, schools, race, and inequality, yet undertheorizes the nexus of race and political economy by positing their interplay as straightforward and unvariegated. Purpose/Objective: This article documents differential racialization in neoliberal education reform across two urban contexts—Milwaukee and Detroit—and therewith seeks to build theory aligned with Jean Anyon’s final wish to complicate her work in urban educational political economy with more rich accounts of the intersection of race and political economy. Research Design: This comparative study utilizes discourse analysis of key educational policy documents and ethnographic work with educational policy actors in both contexts. Findings/Results: Market-based educational reform agendas in the two cities’ school systems proceeded from differing assemblages of political actors and regional particularities, and had as primary demonstrative objective different neoliberal outcomes. While in Milwaukee neoliberals capitalized upon Black disaffection from public schools to demonstrate the political viability of diverting public educational funds to the private sector, the imposition of such reform in Detroit buttressed the spatial reorganization of a shrinking city for the purpose of accumulation by dispossession rooted in the real estate market. Conclusions/Recommendations: Drawing upon these findings, the study recommends a more refined critical racial lens to augment Jean Anyon’s political economy, arguing for a more nuanced and practicable understanding of racialized neoliberal urbanism and its contestation.

De jure but not de facto : pluricentric Portuguese in post-colonial Cabo Verde

Abstract In Cabo Verde, Portuguese is the official language, while Kriolu is the first language of virtually all the population. The schooling context clearly reflects this diglossic situation: while the vast majority of children speak Kriolu at home, Portuguese continues to be the exclusive language of instruction. Thus, Portuguese in Cabo Verde represents a post-colonial language that has maintained its de jure status but has not entered de facto domains of use. The research described in this article is based on discourse analysis of legislative and policy documents and extended semi-structured interviews with politicians, educators and language activists. Our results in this former colonial context invite us to reconsider traditional understandings of pluricentricity, as they suggest that Cabo Verdean Portuguese is not (yet) associated with local identity and has not (yet) been accepted by its speakers as a legitimate, standardised variety.

Sociological Analysis of the Language Policy Discourse during the First Pahlavi Period (Emphasizing the approvals of the Higher Education Council)

نوسازی در دولت رضاشاه، داشتن سیاست زبانی مشخص در حوزه‌های اداری و آموزش‌وپرورش را ضروری کرد. سیاست زبانی انتخابی در این دوره استفاده از زبان فارسی و به حاشیه راندن زبان‌های دیگر ایران بوده است. مقالۀ حاضر به این سؤال می‌پردازد که استراتژی گفتمانی جهت تثبیت سیاست زبان واحد در دورۀ پهلوی اول چه بوده است. برای تحلیل این مسئله، دیدگاه‌های نظری با ساختار مفهومی زیر بیان شد: دولت رضاشاه با «بحران در نظم اخلاقی جامعه»، «بسیج منابع» و «زنجیره‌های تعامل روشنفکران» درصدد بود گفتمان مدنظر را تثبیت کند. این تحقیق با روش تحلیل گفتمان انتقادی فرکلاف، مصوبات شورای عالی معارف را تحلیل کرده است. یافته‌های حاصل از تحلیل متن مصوبات نشان می‌دهد که نظم گفتمانی در موضوع سیاست زبانی، متمرکز و یکسان‌ساز بوده است و با توجه به بافت و شرایط اجتماعی در این دوره، ناسیونالیسم فرهنگی مبتنی‌بر زبان فارسی مسلط شده است. نتایج پژوهش بیانگر این واقعیت است که دولت اقتدارگرای رضاشاه با اجرای پروژۀ مدرنیزاسیون، شبکۀ تعامل روشنفکران را تقویت، منابع و امکانات موجود را بسیج و زمینۀ بی‌ثباتی در نظم اخلاقی و فرهنگی پیشین را ایجاد کرد و گفتمان سیاست زبانی یکسان‌ساز را تحکیم بخشید.

SAFE FROM “HARM”: THE GOVERNANCE OF VIOLENCE BY PLATFORMS

Platforms have long been under fire for how they create and enforce policies around hate speech, harmful content, and violence. In this study, we examine how three major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) conceptualize and implement policies around how they moderate “harm,” “violence,” and “danger” on their platforms. Through a feminist discourse analysis of public facing policy documents from official blogs and help pages, we found that platforms are often narrowly defining harm and violence in ways that perpetuate ideological hegemony around what violence is, how it manifests, and who it affects. Through this governance, they continue to control normative notions of harm and violence, denying their culpability, and effectively manage perceptions of their actions and directing users’ understanding of what is “harmful” versus what is not. Rather than changing the mechanisms of their design that enable harm, the platforms reconfigure intentionality and causality to try to stop users from being “harmful,” which, ironically, perpetuates harm.

Childcare by migrant nannies and migrant grannies: A critical discourse analysis of new policy solutions for securing reproductive labor in Australian households

AbstractMigrant nannies (au pairs) and migrant grannies (migrant grandparents) have emerged in Australian policy and public discourses as new “solutions” to the “problems” of unmet needs for reproductive labor in households and the under‐utilization of working‐aged Australian women in the workforce. Despite their similarities – both are pitched as sources of extended or fictive kin for the provision of childcare – these two classes of migrants are rarely thought about together. Using a critical discourse analysis of policy and media documents between 2013 and 2019, this article examines how debates concerning migrant nannies and migrant grannies are framed and explores the implications for the distribution of reproductive labor. Findings reveal new directions in the distribution of reproductive labor to fictive and extended migrant kin and highlight the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding the complex interactions not only between gender, class, migration status, and ethnicity but also age in new articulations of Australia's work‐care regime.

The nexus between language policy and lexicography in Zimbabwe

This article examines the nexus between language policy and lexicography in Zimbabwe. It makes clear the impact of past and present language policy developments on the growth and development of lexicography in Zimbabwe. It addresses the following key question: To what extent can past and present language policies account for the state of Zimbabwean lexicography? A critical discourse analysis of both past and present language policy documents reveals that there is a lack of an enabling language policy environment in Zimbabwe to stimulate and sustain the growth and development of lexicography. The trilingual language policy of Zimbabwe accounts for the biases towards English, Shona and isiNdebele in dictionary making. Findings of the study also show that the 2013 language policy developments are more likely to stimulate the growth and development of lexicography in Zimbabwe if the implementation measures and requisite resources are put in place. The results of the study also confirm that lexicography, language policy, translation, interpreting and editing have an intricate and symbiotic relationship. It emerged that a language policy which upholds multilingualism promotes the provision of translation, interpreting and editing, which in turn and inevitably stimulates the growth and development of lexicography. It was also observed that translation, interpreting, editing and lexicography are key mechanisms for implementing a language policy.

Digital abilities, between instrumentalization and empowerment: a discourse analysis of Chilean Secondary Technical and Vocational public policy documents

ABSTRACT It is argued that developing digital abilities is key for today’s knowledge society. They facilitate engaging with pervasive information communication technologies and manipulating information. Governments have invested vastly in formal education aimed at developing digital abilities. Policies and directives driving this venture need to be examined. Otherwise, their potential risks being thwarted. Grounded in concepts derived from Laclau and Mouffe, five public policy documents central to Chile's Secondary Vocational Education and Traning (S-TVET) system underwent a synchronic heuristic discourse analysis as understood under relational-ontology. Findings indicate that all analysed documents are articulated with a myth of an information society. Additionally, two prominent discourses were identified: an instrumentalization discourse and an empowerment discourse. When referencing S-TVET, however, the most salient discourse is that of instrumentalization. Instrumentalization discourses render digital abilities under a narrow corporate fixed set of decontextualised skills, and risk thwarting their potential.

Gatekeepers of toxicity: Reconceptualizing Twitter's abuse and hate speech policies

Twitter has become the platform of choice for journalists, politicians, and citizens because of the ways that it encourages expression, participation, and debate. In recent years, however, Twitter's “zeal for free speech” has turned the platform into a breeding ground for abuse, harassment, and hate speech. Through a discourse analysis of Twitter's policies, rules, and enforcement guidelines, this project asks (1) What role do Twitter's policies, rules, and terms of service play in instances where Twitter does not successfully address online abuse, hate speech, and harassment? and (2) What role does Twitter's technological architecture play in both propagating or preventing online hate speech and abuse? By invoking traditional and contemporary gatekeeping theories, theories of deterrence, and responsibilization, this paper will demonstrate that Twitter's policies perpetuate abuse and hateful conduct by splitting the gatekeeping role between the platform and its users. The study sheds light on the blind spots in Twitter's policies, such as their permissive free speech rhetoric and their nondeterrent enforcement options, to provide an empirical basis for how Twitter can detoxify user experience through revisions to the platform's policy framework.

Text and Its Context: The Critical Discourse Analysis of the Third Development Plan of Iran (1962-1967) According to Baldwin’s Monography

Although interest in the discourse analysis of national development policies and plans has been growing in recent years; however, little attention has been paid to the context in which these texts are articulated. This article, by supposing essential relationships between text and its context, aimed to interpret the third development plan of Iran and to analyze the social context of the plan according to Baldwin’s monography and the method of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The article identified “the order of discourse of planning and development” as a joint around which two dominant discourses including (i) “individually centralized planning discourse” and (ii) “growth-based development discourse” are articulated. In addition, “a participatory decentralized planning discourse” and “a distribution-based development discourse” have been identified as competing discourses in relation to the first two discourses. Finally, the article by analyzing the political and cultural context of the plan showed that the production of the plan as a text, instead of following a rational-scientific process, has mainly been influenced by ideological-discursive formulations seeking to maintain specific relation of power among key actors and geographical spaces through text.

How talent cultivation contributes to creating world-class universities in China: A policy discourse analysis

This study investigates how talent cultivation contributes to creating world-class universities in China from the perspectives of characteristics, problems, and choices. A policy discourse perspective is applied to examine the overall landscape of policy formulation and implementation, relatively. It explores the policy discourse analysis of talent cultivation and indicates that the task of talent cultivation is to train student to undertake the great task of national rejuvenation; the goal of talent cultivation is to guide students to grow and become talents; the mission of talent cultivation is to spread advanced culture and core values; the object of talent cultivation is to strengthen undergraduate and graduate education development; the theme of talent cultivation is to enhance innovation and entrepreneurship development. In addition, this study also points out that the assimilation of the objectives of talent training and regional imbalance of talent training are considered as two problems of implementing talent cultivation strategies. This study also suggests that we might reasonably adjust the hierarchical structure of students and control the scale of the school; create the characteristics of first-class talent training and promote the personalized development of talents and reasonably allocate higher education resources to promote the balanced distribution of talents.

Unheard vulnerability discourses from Tarai-Madhesh, Nepal

Climate change has produced new knowledge production systems, heavily dominated by global discourses, institutions and values. Scholars have long called for integrating local knowledge in the design and implementation of climate change adaptation policy responses. Yet integrating local knowledges requires addressing issues related with power and authority, and critically examining which knowledge counts and at which scale. In this regard, a relatively under-explored research area is to assess how local representations and experiences of vulnerability fit with or disrupt dominant policy discourses. This is the focus of our study, conducted in the Tarai-Madhesh region of Nepal. We relied on an original methodology, combining participatory video research with a discourse analysis of national policy documents and of the films produced by farmers. Our analysis shows that farmers’ discourses appear on the surface congruent with some features of national policy story-lines. Yet their underlying narratives seriously challenge several core assumptions of national and international climate change adaptation policies, rooted in ecological modernization, technocentrism and neoliberalism. This seeming contradiction indicates both knowledge co-production and performance, underlying the need to closely understand the context in which local knowledges on climate change vulnerability are produced. We conclude with a few promising research areas to explore strategies to increase the authority of local knowledge into political arenas across scales.

Transitions in environmental policy discourse, from ecologically and socially guided to profit-driven: what is the effect of the institutional policy-making process?

ABSTRACT This study is based on the analysis of discourse relevant to an environmental policy, named the Toronto Green Standard (TGS). The study found that while the TGS is dominated by economic-focused environmental discourse, the earliest stages of TGS creation were dominated by ‘transformative’ discourses that problematized development and sought ecological protections and social equity. And while the incompatibility of policy making with transformative discourse has been noted by environmental discourse scholars, along with the compatibility of economic-focused discourse, this study highlights precise mechanisms in the institutional policy making process, which have the effect of excluding transformative discourse and prioritizing economic-focused discourse. The process whereby this discursive exclusion and prioritization takes place is referred to in this study as ‘transformative exclusion’. Despite policy maker interests in transformation, transformative exclusion has the effect of reproducing economic-focused discourse, current power relations and inequalities through environmental policy. This study introduces a new thread of importance for discourse analysis of policy, in identifying precise mechanisms of transformative exclusion within institutional policy making processes. By first identifying them, ideally these mechanisms of discursive force will be challenged, so that institutional policy may one day be welcoming to discourses of transformation.

#workfromhome: how multi-level marketers enact and subvert federal language policy for profit.

This paper analyzes how multi-level marketing companies (MLMs), via direct selling through electronic commerce (e-commerce) and social media, enact and evade federal language policy to maximize profits. Here we describe the federal language policies that govern this type of e-commerce, and in particular, the language policies of the Federal Trade Commission, which dictate what can and cannot be communicated by MLM companies and their contractors. We then illustrate how these federal language policies are enacted, and at times subverted, for financial gain during the COVID-19 economic and health crisis which rendered many people vulnerable. We draw on the discourse analysis of public documents, MLM insider sources via the first author, and over 100,000 public Instagram posts published by MLM independent contractors collected with the third-party Instagram data extraction tool, Phantombuster. We find that MLM independent contractors, although varying widely with respect to their enactment of federal and corporate policy, frequently reference COVID-19 implicitly or explicitly, a practice prohibited by federal policy. We demonstrate that quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of language policies and practices of MLM social media provides a productive lens for understanding both the communication challenges of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This approach reveals the variable ways in which language policies are taken up and discourses recontextualized with new meanings and for new purposes across social media platforms.

Questioning policy representations of women’s alcohol consumption: Implications for social work

This study draws on Carol Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) framework, to deconstruct policy discourses of women’s alcohol consumption. It examines Australian policies such as in the National Alcohol Strategy (2019–2028) and Australian Guidelines to Reduce Health Risks from Drinking Alcohol ( NHMRC, 2009, 2020 ). It found that policy discourses particularly focus on the effects of women’s alcohol consumption as ‘harms’ to unborn children, by emphasising women’s assumed reproductive roles, such in pregnancy and when breastfeeding. Social policy tends to reproduce medicalising and normative gendered discourses about women’s alcohol consumption, with disempowering effects on women. This discourse analysis of drug and alcohol policies can contribute to broadening how social workers understand policy representations and the effects of policy discourses on women. The disciplinary power of the medicalisation and acceptable/unacceptable categorisation of women’s alcohol consumption means that women can internalise shame and stigma, which is often an obstacle for women attempting to seek assistance. More research is needed about how social workers can co-design policies and research projects with women of diverse sexualities and cultural backgrounds who have been subjugated by these policy discourses.