The increasing significance of ‘managerialism’ in contemporary forms of governance has been widely observed. This article demonstrates how this operates at the level of language. Specifically, the analysis postulates a new sociosemantic category of ‘Managing Actions’, encoding varying degrees of coerciveness. The paper discusses their salient role in texturing the ‘soft power’ of contemporary governance, constructing a form of ‘managed autonomy’ for the governed subject and helping to manage the complex networks of dispersed power through an indirect form of agency. (...) The analysis combines a corpus-based approach to critical discourse analysis with a political economic theory of transformations in the capitalist state. Drawing evidence from a corpus of UK education policy discourse, the analysis illustrates the managerialist form that governance takes under New Labour, while at the same time highlighting the subtle hegemony underlying this new ‘enabling’ technique of governance, which works by assuming, rather than winning, compliance. In terms of sociologically informed theories of language, this analysis goes some way towards formulating a possible ‘grammar of governance’. (shrink)

The purpose of this analysis was to understand how organizational logics of a fundamentally local institution – the US community college – change with shifts in sociospatial scalar relations. Data included a 3.26-million word, diachronic corpus consisting of 165 issues of the Community College Journal from 1960 to 2011. Textual prominence, collocation analysis, and concordance analysis suggest that the community college shifted from a commitment to local democracy to an emphasis on competitiveness in a global economy. Rank order correlations and (...) log-likelihood statistics identify significant trends. (shrink)