Abstract
The neoliberal turn has driven attempts to marketize education, but how does marketization occur? In this article I draw on ethnographic and linguistic-ethnographic methods to investigate marketization through a microanalytic lens. My investigation focuses on a team of educational professionals, who participated in a workshop led by an organizational consultant named Eric. During the workshop, Eric successfully encouraged the educators to adopt some key business terms that he imported from the high-tech sector. My findings indicate that the marketization of education was not straightforward. Rather, the process encountered some resistance and sowed confusion before a business discourse ultimately took hold. The process of marketization became entangled with the power dynamics shaped by group members’ positioning vis-à-vis one another; and furthermore, it required the group to negotiate the meaning of some key terms. Marketization was ultimately mediated by a cognitive device called the Business Model Canvas and it relied on some pre-existing neoliberal tendencies among the workshop’s participants.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 464-479 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Discourse |
Volume | 45 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Jan 2024 |
Keywords
- Marketization
- discourse
- linguistic-ethnography
- neoliberalism
- privatization
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Linguistics and Language