What has been termed the ‘linguistic turn’ (an emphasis on the significance of language), an intellectual current that has moved through the arts, humanities and social sciences has not left the field of policy analysis untouched. One clear consequence of this movement is a growing use of discourse analysis in the study of policy and policy texts. Discourse, from a mainstream social science
perspective, can be thought of as a body of ideas, concepts and beliefs that have become established as knowledge, or as an accepted way of looking at the world. Such discourses form a set of lenses that have a profound influence on understanding and action in the social world. Texts could be thought of as an aspect of establishing, embodying, symbolizing or expressing such discourses. A variety of approaches to the study of texts, across different disciplines, would understand and identify their techniques in terms of being discourse analysis. However, there is no common agreed definition of the idea of discourse or of the nature and scope of discourse analysis, this is an area marked by on going and complex theoretical debates (Gill, 2000). One common assumption underlying various approaches to discourse analysis is an intellectual commitment to understanding discourse as ‘constructing’ the social world, rejecting a realist perspective on language as a neutral medium that allows the describing and categorising of that world. Writing in relation to institutional and managerial control in an educational context, Cookson (1994) illustrates this assumption:
Decoding the power discourse requires a series of understandings about the nature of language as a verbal expression of social relations. Words do not exist in a disembodied form; they have meaning within a social context that is class bound, conflictual and power driven. Those who control this symbolic world are able to shape and manipulate the market- place of educational ideas. (Cookson, 1994:116)
Foucault’s work has been a major inspiration in the growth of interest and engagement with the idea of discourse across the humanities and social
sciences. The centrality of discourse in the work of Foucault is illustrated by its dominance in the intellectual manifesto he sets out in his inaugural lecture upon taking up his chair at the College de France:
Here is the hypothesis which I would like to put forward tonight in order to fix the terrain – or perhaps the very provisional theatre – of the work I am doing: that in every society the production of
discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its
powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality (Foucault, 1972:216). The ‘statement’ is a central constituent of Foucault’s analytics of discourse, statements or speech acts or elemental parts of texts are not of interest in terms of a detailed textual analysis, but in discerning the rules by which certain statements, or truth claims, as opposed to others, can emerge, operate, and come to comprise a discursive system: “ . . . the term discourse can be defined as the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation; thus I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse” (Foucault, 2002:121).
In the Foucauldian formulation, discourses are productive. An understanding of discourse from this perspective is reasonably straightforward in that it claims to describe or make clear how a category such as the insane or the criminal comes into view, is constituted, under the action of the discourses of psychiatry and penology. Foucault studied the discourse of madness, highlighting its changes over the centuries and its interplay with other discourses such as religious and medical discourses, and how these shifts affect how madness is perceived and reacted to by others. That is not to say that the behaviours that came to be understood as madness or crime did not exist before the emergence of the discourses of psychiatry and penology or their precursors. In contrast to the enlightenment tradition that sought to establish truth and secure knowledge, Foucault’s post-structuralism commits him to uncover how truths are
constructed, how current truths replaced older ones, what sustains them and what is their relationship to power. Importantly for Foucault, at a more abstract level, discourses are not just about language or linguistic theory. Foucault’s development and use of discourse theory must be understood against a
Foucault’s understanding is a commitment to a materialist conception of language; this goes beyond attention to signs and meaning in language to embrace its influence in the social world. Foucault refuses the neat separation of the material and the theoretical, the discursive and the non-discursive. Discourses emerge and form, shaped by a set of relations (a rule) between the discursive and the material or non-discursive. The material conditions (place, social organisation, technologies, practices and systems of classification)
condition the discursive and are in turn changed by it; the material context can be conceived as influencing contingency, allowing one particular statement to emerge rather than others (Olssen, 2006).
Moreover, such discourses go beyond language or texts; they are a conduit of power. For Foucault, power relations cannot be established, maintained,
extended, resisted or mobilised into action, or given material form, without the mediation of discourse. Statements may be patterned into discursive formations according to sets of rules, but such formations have a tangible, concrete effect in structuring practices, relations of power and subjectivity; hence the
materiality of language. Olssen (2004) points to Foucault’s formulation of discourse as functioning as an alternative conception to what is understand as ideology. This formulation of ideology operates, not in a Marxist sense of false consciousness, but with an understanding of discourse as creating forms of subjectivity, establishing social relations, as ordering, framing, making visible, providing ways of seeing and acting in the social order. Discourses act to establish and maintain the normalisation, the naturalization, of values,
assumptions and prescriptions for action shared by its adherents and sponsors. The relation of power, ideology and language as discourse combine to mark out a territory of significance and engagement for critical policy analysis.