The first step under Fairclough’s (1992) CDA guidelines is to define the scope of the research, its focus and limits. Having a clear and defined scope is essential for identifying texts. The scope of this research is the period of the Fifth National Government from 2008 to the end of 2016, used to provide a clear timeframe to gather texts. To analyse the political discourse of the Fifth National Government, this research identified ministerial press releases and speeches relating to the contracting out of social services to the non-profit sector and purchasing outcomes initiatives as source material for this study. This research is focused on political discourse of contracting and builds on media discourse64 analysis to identify discourse used by the Government to influence public perceptions. Ministerial press releases and speeches provide access to this type of discourse. The selected ministerial portfolios are social development, the community and volunteer sector and finance. As introduced in chapter one, these portfolios incorporate the key agencies involved in direction and policy setting for contracting out to the non-profit sector This research recognises that by focusing on Government texts it is unlikely to identify any discourses of resistance against the state’s contracting approach. By utilising documents published under the community and voluntary sector portfolio, some insights into the frames used within the wider social sector were identified, providing some contrast. This research is focused on discourses the Government uses publicly to support and direct contracting out, therefore focusing on Government alone is justifiable. This scope provided a range of source material incorporating key government perspectives on the contracting out of social services.
The next step was to determine the range of texts to be considered, which Fairclough (1992) calls the research archive of discursive practice. The following criteria for text identification were developed and applied:
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Published under the ministerial portfolio of social development, community and volunteer sector or finance.
Be a press release or speech published on the Beehive website.
Published between 19 November 2008 following the election of the Fifth National Government, and the end of 2016 (31 December).
Relate to either social service contracting (specifically purchasing outcomes where identified) or social service delivery by non-profits more broadly.
To identify the texts (the specific ministerial press release or speech) a key word search on the Beehive news website was conducted, filtered by the three ministerial portfolios of focus.65 An initial search was undertaken for terms such as “contracting social services” and “purchasing outcomes”. This was then widened to include “social service outcomes”, “investment approach”, “high trust contracting”, “non-profits”, and “NGO’s”. From this search 44 texts were identified for the initial document archive.66
Fairclough recommends that a small ‘sample’ of documents from the corpus be selected for full analysis. 20 texts were selected for closer analysis, chosen to ensure the diversity of practice from the archive was represented, with a mix of the document types (press releases or speeches) and topics found from an initial review of all texts. These sample texts were then reviewed and coded. The coding system designed distinguished texts from the social development portfolio with a 1 at the start of the code, community and voluntary sector texts with a 2, and finance texts with a 3. The number following, for example 1.1., refers to the specific text within that portfolio, ordered ascending by date. This correlates to texts detailed provided in Appendix A.
Of the 20 texts in the sample, 14 were from the social development portfolio, 5 from the community and voluntary sector portfolio, and 1 from the finance portfolio. This was representative of the mix of documents in the wider archive, indicating that the majority of texts published in relation to contracting social services came from the social development portfolio. That only one document from the finance portfolio was identified, indicated that this portfolio rarely published any media releases or speeches related to contracting out social services in the period of focus. This was acknowledged as a limitation of the study, outlined later in this section. Initial analysis of the sample also identified an interesting distribution of texts across the time periods. The majority of texts
65 Outlined in chapter one page 6 as social development, community and voluntary sector and finance. 66
76 were published in the first half of the focus period (2009 to 2011), with limited texts identified during the second half of the period (2012 – 2016). As will be explored in the next chapter, this distribution aligns with the GFC,67 with a number of the earlier texts responding to this context.
Following the collation of the sample texts, as per Fairclough’s guidelines, the documents were reviewed to identify at a high level the discourses presented. For this research, initial analysis was conducted by reviewing the texts and identifying the key themes and where and in what texts these were evident. A second more in-depth analysis of the themes was undertaken by ordered key sections of the texts by the themes identified, and reviewing to identify trends and patterns for interpreting.