Language and the Market Society

Critical Reflections on Discourse and Dominance

Gerlinde Mautner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135147044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

In education, politics and religion, there are strong indications that discourse is becoming marketized. Around the world, government ministries have re-defined themselves as "service providers, " universities draw up "market-driven" curricula, job seekers are asked to "package themselves" more effectively, and there are advertising agencies specializing in "the Christian marketplace." And it is not only word choice that is effected; higher-level linguistic patterns, such as genres and discursive practices (such as the text and talk connected with performance measurement and public relations), are also drawn into the orbit of market forces. Through an intricate dialectic, such patterns of linguistic choices, in turn, reinforce the social structures that shape them, further consolidating the marketization process. In a related development, language within the business domain itself is increasingly shaped by strategic planning and control, for example in branding, message design, and the promulgation of management buzzwords. Marketization thus emerges as a globally unfolding process in which language holds a key position as both cause and effect, and as both subject and object. The book examines these phenomena from a linguistic and critical perspective, drawing on critical discourse analysis, sociological treatises of market society, and critical management studies.

1
Digging Up the World

Introduction

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

(Yehuda Amichai, “The Place Where We Are Right”)

This is a book about both language and society. It examines a linguistic phenomenon, the transfer of business discourse to other domains, and it does so on the basis of a dialectic view of the relationship between discourse and its social environment. The market society—in which market exchange is no longer simply a process, but an all-encompassing social principle—leaves its imprint in language. Conversely, language plays a central role in the continuous support of the market society. Business discourse can follow the spread of business practices, but it can also prepare the ground for them. Because discourse is implicated in creating marketisation, it is also a crucial lever for curbing it. Talking differently about the world invariably contributes to changing it.

Rooted in a critical tradition, the present treatise raises doubts about the assumption, now taken for granted so widely, that market forces should be allowed to determine social structures and relationships not only in the realm of commercial production and exchange, but in society generally. The book is thus concerned on the one hand with examining the social and discursive territory that has been taken over by market principles, and on the other with ways in which this territory may be reclaimed.

AIMS OF THE BOOK AND GENERAL ORIENTATION

Let me begin by explaining the unique selling proposition of the book, pointing out how the information in it is packaged, making a personal brand value statement and expressing the hope that customers will buy into its main arguments. Did any of these expressions jar and seem out of place? Hazarding a guess I would say that the “brand value statement” probably did, but what about the rest? The language of the market is now so fully integrated into everyday text and talk that it can easily go unnoticed, even by linguistically sensitive readers and listeners. In other words, to use the vocabulary of critical theory, this type of discourse has been “naturalised”. In a wide variety of social domains, from politics to education, and from health care to religion, such language is simply what people expect and what they themselves often use. It has become natural in the sense that in very many cases it is no longer perceived as marked. Expressions imported from the domain of monetarised exchange now blend in easily almost everywhere, often without the slightest indication that their meanings might be contested, or their connotations misleading, or the implications of using them detrimental to cultural values that used to be constitutive of the domain adopting the imported expression. More importantly still, what naturalisation has done is to make alternative, non-marketised views almost unsayable and, crucially, unthinkable. “That’s just the way it is”, “you’ve got to move with the times”, or “we call our students customers because that’s what they are” is the kind of stereotypical response that forestalls further debate. Such “discursive closure” (Deetz 1992a, 186ff.) and the conceptual closure it sustains “quickly [lead] to overfamiliarity and then unquestioned certainty and finally to ideological dogmatism” (Chia and Morgan 1996, 56). Closure is a perfect shield, and thus the enemy of social change.

The personalised metaphor of the enemy may be misleading. In fact, the book is an indictment without a scapegoat, a trial without a defendant. There isn’t any one social actor—no single institution, let alone any individual—who can be blamed for the “managerial assault” on the lifeworld (Hancock and Tyler 2008, 39). Instead, a post-modern view of what Hardy and Palmer (1999, 386) call “spiderless webs of power relationships” seems more appropriate; these are webs, they explain, that “are not single-mindedly constructed to achieve control; rather, they are webs that grow out of a past, change in response to accidental events, and emerge to entrap the very people who are advantaged by them”. Because there is no “spider” to be found, a critical analysis needs to tackle the much more difficult task of unravelling the webs of power which are both intricate and elusive.

Stated in very general terms, the book’s analytical aim is to discover what impact the rise of the market society has had on language, and to relate the linguistic evidence to its socio-political background. The analysis is grounded in a critical and socially constructivist stance, underpinned by the idea that “language is central to the process of constructing social reality—it is productive, formative and creative—it makes things happen” (Musson, Cohen, and Tietze 2007, 46). The normative aim of the book, on the other hand, is to promote resistance against both the unquestioned spill-over and pro-active adoption of marketised language in social domains other than business. This aim, too, is rooted broadly in the tradition of Critical Theory, and specifically, in the idea of praxis, which “implies a combination of the awareness gained from ideological critique with reflective strategies for social change, thus transforming critical theory into an inspiring and constructive springboard for action” (Prasad and Caproni 1997, 288).

The critical and normative aims of the book are closely connected because critical awareness is a prerequisite for resistance: You need to see what is going on even to realise that you would want to do something about it. This is not to say, of course, that everyone who has become aware of marketised discourse will automatically be convinced that it is not a good thing. Some are quite keen to promote it—usually from positions of dominance—precisely because they are very conscious of the power of such language to transform social structures and relationships both inside institutions and in society at large. While I would not agree with such a viewpoint, I would certainly have to respect it; in this sense, too, I am prepared to be inspired by the poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The book is committed to its aims, but not zealously so. What strikes me as crucial, though, is to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, endorsing marketised discourse because one is aware of how it works and, on the other hand, simply being engulfed by it unknowingly, naively, and powerlessly. The book thus sees itself in the tradition of emancipatory research which does not aim at telling people what to think but does believe in uncovering a broader range of options so that people can make their own informed choices.

The overall position I am adopting is neatly captured by what Meyerson and Scully (1995) call “tempered radicalism”. The tempered radical, they argue, is radical in that he or she challenges the status quo, and tempered in that he or she seeks moderation in doing so. Tempered radicals also have a temper, that is, “they are angered by the incongruities between their own values and beliefs about social justice and the values and beliefs they see enacted in their organizations” (1995, 586). In their professional environments, tempered radicals engage in a balancing act between fitting in and playing the game while preserving personal identities for which sceptical distance and critique are crucial (1995, 587); they are used to enduring ambivalence (1995, 588) and being criticised by both conservatives and radicals (1995, 589). For the former they go too far, for the latter not far enough; both may accuse the tempered radical of being hypocritical (1995, 590). I myself am no stranger to such charges. I critique the market society from the comfortable position of a tenured professorship, and get paid by a “University of Economics and Business” which is proud to see its graduates populate the boardrooms of both Austrian and international companies, and which explicitly brands itself as “entrepreneurial”.¹ Like many scholars in the critical tradition, I can afford to be both loyal to my institutional home and, at the same time, not have any qualms about occasionally biting the hand that feeds me. In truly post-modern fashion, the tempered radical juggles multiple identities.

Given the general thrust of the book, the bias I am most likely to be accused of is being hostile to business. However, such a charge would be missing the point. The case I will be making is not “anti-business” but “pro-boundaries”, a plea, in other words, not to allow the conceptual structures, value systems and discourses of commercial domains to spill over into other lifeworlds and eventually re-create them in the image of business. Thus, and probably to the chagrin of many a left-wing colleague, I do not fundamentally challenge the social and discursive structures native to the capitalist economy. The point is, rather, that these structures can now be found on so many sites where, I would argue, they do not belong. Saying that something is not right in a particular place is quite different from saying it should not exist at all. Water flowing in a riverbed is useful, life-giving and relaxing to look at; the same water flooding the cellar of your house is unwanted and threatens to make its foundations crumble.

RATIONALE AND RELEVANCE

Marketisation has been identified and critiqued by scholars with various disciplinary orientations, most notably by sociologists and those working in a framework informed by Critical Management Studies (see Section 3.2). Alvesson and Willmott (1996, 21), for example, talk about “the creeping commercialisation and commodification of everyday life”. Similarly, Hancock and Tyler (2008, 39), noting “the managerial assault on the symbolic and linguistic domain of the lifeworld”, then go on to argue that

what has been increasingly noticeable over the last 20 years or so has been the almost direct transference of the imperatives, logics and values associated with management expertise, exemplified via the work of management consultants and various associated gurus, into the realm of “everyday managing”. (Hancock and Tyler 2008, 39)

Hancock and Tyler’s specific focus on expert cultures will be picked up again in Chapter 7, but the general point they make, about the “managerial assault on the lifeworld” is an ongoing theme throughout the present book.

The corresponding task of the linguist is to identify the traces that this “assault” is leaving in discourse—traces which, in turn, make further assaults easier, less marked and more natural. Marketisation is a societal mega-trend showing in almost archetypical fashion how “at any particular point in time, certain patterns of meaning become more entrenched than others and take on the appearance of objective reality” (Prasad and Caproni 1997, 286). Seminal work by Fairclough, from his 1991 and 1993 papers on, has laid the conceptual groundwork. But to date, no bird’s eye view of the phenomenon, combining a broad overview of several social domains with detailed textual analyses, has been attempted. This is the contribution this book wishes to make. While rooted in linguistics, it adopts a broader orientation, not only tapping into other disciplines’ knowledges as and when appropriate but, it is hoped, also offering them insights that they can fruitfully re-integrate into their own scholarly endeavours.

Even at the outset it is worth noting that criticism against marketisation is not restricted to academic debate in learned journals and research monographs, but is clearly of considerable general interest: enough to add further relevance and urgency to research in this area, but not enough, it seems, to gain the kind of momentum that would be needed to generate sustained and widespread resistance. However, popular books such as Naomi Klein’s book No Logo, with its plea for “unbranded space” (2000, 105), obviously fell on enough fertile ground to become a bestseller. In the daily press, too, comments such as the following show how concerns about marketisation are also raised outside academia:

There has been the relentless spread of the market into every part of society. The marketisation of everything has made society, and each of us, more competitive. The logic of the market has now become universal, the ideology not just of neoliberals, but of us all, the criterion we use not just about our job or when shopping, but about our innermost selves, and our most intimate relationships. The prophets who announced the market revolution saw it in contestation with the state: in fact, it proved far more insidious than that, eroding the very notion of what it means to be human. The credo of self, inextricably entwined with the gospel of the market, has hijacked the fabric of our lives. We live in an ego-market society. (Jacques 2004)

The zeitgeist this commentator picks up on is also amply borne out by anecdotal evidence from a variety of social domains. The gospel of the market is not short of disciples. A local parish newsletter was dropped through my door a few years ago which referred to the church as a “service provider”; the flyer announcing a conference organised by Compass, an “independent democratic left pressure group”,² adopted the language of neo-liberal “deliverology” (see Chapter 4) when it asked, “How do we deliver equality in the 21st century?”; an article archived online in the Times Educational Supplement said that “schools in Wales are still not producing pupils who are ‘job ready’”;³ Austrian students protesting against new higher education legislation were recently reported to have carried placards that said “Wir sind kein Humankapital” (We are not human capital) and “Nein zur Ökonomisierung der Bildung” (Against the economisation of education) (Müller 2009, 4); an Austrian Olympic swimmer, Markus Rogan, appeared on the TV sports news⁴ with the logo of a sponsor attached to his bare chest, indicating that body advertising (see Section 7.1) has moved from the somewhat eccentric fringes to the mainstream. The image also signalled that the human body can be functionalised in an even more immediate and fundamental way than is already the case with the usual display of sponsors’ logos on clothes and sports equipment (a common practice placing those athletes at a serious disadvantage who are involved in a sport that is normally practised half-naked). Examples could be multiplied, and many more are indeed included in the Data Panorama sections opening each empirical chapter in Part II.

Informal chats with friends, acquaintances and colleagues also confirm that marketisation is an issue that strikes a chord, even among people who, unlike academics, are not professional doubters in the business of perennial questioning, de-constructing and de-naturalising. It clearly does not take a grounding in critical theory to appreciate that something is happening to society, and that language is both a mirror and a driver of that change. Of course, such popular appeal is not the only justification for tackling a particular research question (although “critters” of the more radical persuasion would probably say that it is). Motivation for and relevance of research usually derives from more than one source, and may be intra-disciplinary, theoretical and introspective as well as interdisciplinary, applied and driven by a spirit of outreach. However, it is entirely in keeping with the emancipatory intentions of both Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Management Studies (CMS) to accept that a general perception of relevance is, at the very least, an important added bonus. You know you are “on to something” when people ask you, “and this book you are writing, what is it abo...

Table of contents

• Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Digging Up the World
• Part I Conceptual Groundwork
• Part II Applications
• Part III Perspectives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index