ABSTRACTThis study investigates the multimodal strategies used in social marketing to emotionally manipulate and persuade children and their parents to adopt healthier lifestyles. The UK government's anti-obesity ‘Change4Life’ campaign is an example of the increasing reliance on ‘nudge’ tactics in public policy. This approach seeks to develop a range of intervention strategies, inspired by behavioural psychology, in order to change people's behaviours without them necessarily recognising this has happened. I argue it is a form of governmentality which uses subtle semiotic (...) techniques to secure voluntary compliance with policy goals. I bring the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality into dialogue with multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine how this is realised in a series of cartoon government adverts. Three intersecting strategies are identified: the representation of lifestyles as delinquent a discourse of risk and threat mobilised through emotional manipulation and a discourse of ‘smarter’ consumerism. The increasing popularity of nudge over the last decade coincides with a sustained programme of fiscal austerity which disproportionately penalises the poor, while food poverty and social inequality have increased. I argue that it helps legitimate and instantiate neoliberal political rationalities by privatising responsibility for public health care. Despite the importance it places on communication strategies, critical scholarship on nudge has not yet investigated the linguistic techniques it uses in practice. This paper addresses that omission with a detailed multimodal analysis of the UK's longest running policy nudge. (shrink)

What must the United States do to remain the global superpower and stop alienating the rest of the world? The author of the bestselling "The Paradox of American Power" has one clear answer: soft power.

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)