Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 15, Issue 3, 2016

This journal’s editorial statement is clear that political discourse should be studied not only as regards parliamentary type politics. In this introduction we argue precisely for the need to pay increasing attention to the way that political ideologies are infused into culture more widely, in entertainments media, software, administrative processes, children’s apps, healthcare and even office furniture design. We point to the way that there have been massive shifts away from traditional state forms of politics to the rule of neoliberalism and the power of the corporation which, like the former regime of power, requires meanings and identities which can hold them in place. We explain the processes by which critical multimodal discourse analysis can best draw out this ideology as it is realized through different semiotics resources.

Software has become ubiquitous in higher education, especially often taken-for-granted Microsoft Word. Educational writing involves more than horizontal lines of text, but also multimodal representations. When students write in Word, the affordances of the program constrain what multimodal representations of knowledge they can and cannot make. Software such as Word is not neutral tool-kits, but also historical and semiotic constructs loaded with social values and ideologies. By taking a social semiotic approach to Word and SmartArt, this article shows how this software is pre-loaded with values and styles from office management. These values are then infused into education, in the case this article investigates, grammar models in language studies.

Recent changes in open plan office design are intended to facilitate flexible and collaborative work practices. Though promoted in terms of aesthetics and functionality, these changes in layout and furnishing communicate a great deal about how work and the workers that perform them are understood. Drawing upon the semiotics of framing and the chronotope, the open plan office is analyzed as a multimodal realization of neoliberal discourses on the flexibilization and deregulation of work. As such, the collaborative open plan office does more than represent or give expression to neoliberal ideologies, it normalizes and makes durable the work processes, identities and temporalities of neoliberalized labour.

Since its implementation, the British Government’s controversial 2013 Health and Social Care Act has had far-reaching effects on health care provision in England, not least the creation of 212 regional practitioner-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which are now responsible for much of the service provision across the country. Taking as an example the website of one of these new commissioning groups, this study shows that multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) can reveal how health and social care matters are being increasingly framed within a corporate and neoliberal set of ideas, values, identities and social relations. Despite government assurances that the Act preserves the (non-commercial) founding values of the NHS, our MCDA provides textual evidence of the influence of neoliberal and commercial discourses operating across this particular website, which appear to be just as much about promoting an appealing corporate identity as responding to the practical, day-to-day concerns of patients.

Drawing on tools from Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis this paper analyses the editing techniques in a Swedish docu-soap showing that humour is used to ridicule the working-class participants, representing them as slow, inflexible, undynamic and unstylish. The paper places this within broader discursive shifts in Sweden where the rise of neoliberalism requires a dismantling of the welfare state, legitimized partly though establishing the lower social economic groups as morally flawed and themselves responsible for their increasingly disadvantaged situation as social inequalities increase.

Strategic diagrams are becoming ubiquitous across all forms of social practices, used to map out core elements and processes in private and public institutions and also for more localized and individual activities – where, for example, so that it reads: where, for example, early years school children can manage attitudinal goals. These are easy to produce with cheap software providing templates and tools to do so. This paper shows how these diagrams must be placed in the ideological shift to neoliberal governance with its emphasis on the market, flexibility and competition. All things and processes, however intangible, are viewed as assets with simple cause-effect relations, to be converted into tangible outcomes and maximised outputs. Taking a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, we analyse two cases, from a university and an early-years school.

Goal-oriented learning seems to be a ubiquitous demand for almost all kind of play activities today. This demand, the article argues, is related to a specific neo-liberal discourse about the “superchild”. The article shows how this discourse is articulated multimodally in a number of media texts aimed at young children based around a trans-medial brand; Mike the Knight.

While stock photographs have come to saturate media and have been mocked for their clichéd nature, for example where women are pictured laughing alone with salad, a powerful corporation like Getty Images that disseminates commercial imagery globally has sought to challenge these stereotypes by making more politicized images. This article examines one such case, that is, Getty’s Genderblend visual trend, which claims to portray gender identities and relations in ways that are both more inclusive and diverse, harnessing feminist theory as part of its promotion. Taking a multimodal discourse and visual design approach, the article looks at how corporate imagery can be styled as political and, in turn, how a politics of difference itself is shaped in the interests of the ideologies of consumer capitalism.