HOW LISTS, BULLET POINTS AND TABLES RECONTEXTUALIZE SOCIAL PRACTICE

Abstract

In critical discourse analysis, we have learned much about the nature of the marketized language that now dominates public institutions such as universities, playing a role in changing their identities. But less is known about the processes whereby this language enters the everyday practices of these institutions through documents that are used to manage teaching and research. What is the role of language in the shift to the way these activities are internally organized, managed, run and evaluated in terms of productivity and market-based principles? In this paper we analyse a chain of documents taken from a wider corpus of management documents in Swedish universities to show how this language recontextualizes the practices of teaching and research. Our focus is on the important role played by lists, bullet points and tables and how these are central to decoupling language from work processes and so legitimizing this marketized discourse. The affordances of these multimodal structures allow complex processes and social relations to be abstracted, fragmented and treated as things. They are also important in allowing documents to form a complex self-referential information infrastructure.

KEYWORDS:

• manageralism
• neoliberalism
• critical discourse analysis
• multimodality
• affordance

Additional information

Per Ledin's research interests include critical and multimodal discourse studies, discourse analyses of educational settings and language planning. As for his research on multimodality and semiotics, his media historic research is widely acclaimed in Scandinavia, as is his research on writing instruction and assessment. His discourse studies have addressed the impact of commodification and privatization of the public sector and the writing development of the child.

David Machin (author to whom correspondence should be addressed) has published widely in the field of critical discourse analysis and multimodality. His latest books are The language of war monuments (2013) and Visual journalism (2015). He is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journals Social Semiotics and Journal of Language and Politics.