The power of “small business” as pending narrative: an ideograph in UK politics 2004–2013

Abstract

This paper explores utilisation of the term small business in contemporary politics in the United Kingdom. First, the policy and practice implications of the term small business are examined, through the lens of political rhetoric. Use of the term over the period from 2004 to 2013 is examined, drawing upon the DataArt Guardian NewsTraces platform as both a method of initially visualising an overall pattern of the term’s use during the 10-year period, and a medium for facilitating data collection for analysis. The research question is: how is the term “small business” used in political rhetoric in the UK, in the identification of policy problems and solutions, and the creation of pending narrative? It is determined that the term small business is an ideograph with different and often competing meanings for various interest groups, and suffers from serious imprecision despite policy efforts which strive for legitimacy. Even with spikes in use reflecting election cycles and periods of economic stress, the term’s power is in its mutable but appealing vagueness, and its enduring quality as pending narrative. This leaves open obvious questions of both policy efficacy and the sufficiency of ideographic-laced rhetoric as a substitute for meaningful policy.

Keywords:

• small business
• public policy
• ideographs
• pending narrative
• DataArt Guardian NewsTraces
• political rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Christopher L. Atkinson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9574-9695

Notes

1. In the interest of transparency and replicability, I will make the corpus used and the resultant MaxQDA analysis file available to reviewers upon request.