Per Ledin

How lists, bullet points and tables recontextualize social practice : A multimodal study of management language in Swedish universities

In critical discourse analysis, we have learned much about the nature of the marketized language that now dominates public institutions such as universities, playing a role in changing their identities. But less is known about the processes whereby this language enters the everyday practices of these institutions through documents that are used to manage teaching and research. What is the role of language in the shift to the way these activities are internally organized, managed, run and evaluated in terms of productivity and market-based principles? In this paper we analyse a chain of documents taken from a wider corpus of management documents in Swedish universities to show how this language recontextualizes the practices of teaching and research. Our focus is on the important role played by lists, bullet points and tables and how these are central to decoupling language from work processes and so legitimizing this marketized discourse. The affordances of these multimodal structures allow complex processes and social relations to be abstracted, fragmented and treated as things. They are also important in allowing documents to form a complex self-referential information infrastructure.

Play and Imitation: Multimodal Interaction and Second-Language Development in Preschool

ABSTRACT This article targets the multimodal character of children’s play and its potential for scaffolding second-language development. We follow children who are newcomers to a Swedish preschool and analyze their interactions. Play is, we argue, based on rules or tacit agreements between children, originating in the human capacity of imitation, and creates an opportunity to test out cultural patterns. Despite their limited language abilities, the children naturally engage in bodily play interactions where different objects are deployed. This can potentially underpin second-language development, not least when a child or teacher with better Swedish language proficiency participates.

A discourse-design approach to multimodality : the visual communication of neoliberal management discourse

ABSTRACT This paper takes a discourse–design approach to communication, providing a framework as to how this should be done. Design here is how individuals and institutions realize their interests in the world. We show how it is fruitful to link design more closely to the way discourse has been used in critical studies which draws attention to the motivated use of design, for thinking about design in terms of socio-political context. Due to their affordances, semiotic modes such as photography, graphics, layout, colour, numbers and writing will be deployed and co-articulated. The aim, using a discourse–design approach, is to show how we can best identify the very different affordances of such modes and how they rely on the principled design of a discourse. We illustrate this using examples from management documents at a university which draw on these different affordances in different ways to communicate the same discourse. Through this analysis we see how a neoliberal discourse based on a general design principle of coordination enters everyday practices and become very difficult to challenge.

Forty years of IKEA kitchens and the rise of a neoliberal control of domestic space

This article uses a social semiotic approach to look at the representations and designs of kitchens in the IKEA catalogue from 1975 until 2016. The authors find a shift from function to lifestyle of the order observed by scholars of advertising. But using Fairclough’s concepts of ‘technologization’ in Discourse and Social Change (1992) and Van Leeuwen’s New Writing (2006) concept, they are able to dig deeper to show that there are four stages of kitchen that become, they argue, more and more codified, with increasing prescription over the meaning of space and also regarding what takes place there. Such coding aligns with the ideas, values and identities of neoliberalism: ‘flexible’, ‘dynamic’, ‘creative’, ‘solutions’ and ‘self-management’. The authors show how the features of New Writing allow a suppression of actual causalities and context, and permit symbolic and indexical meanings to take over. Domestic life itself becomes technologized, coded and stripped down to a number of symbols and indexical meanings which assemble easily into the requirements of the neoliberal order.

Doing critical discourse studies with multimodality : From metafunctions to materiality

ABSTRACT In Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and in other linguistics oriented scholarly journals we now see more research which draws upon multimodality as part of carrying out analyses of how texts make meaning, in order to draw out the ideologies which they carry. However, much of multimodality is itself based closely on one theory of language called Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). And despite calls from some scholars there has been no real interrogation of the concepts and models drawn from this theory as regards how suitable they are both for analyzing different forms of communication and for answering concrete research questions of the nature asked in CDS. In this paper we assess the core principles, taken from SFL into multimodality. Using examples we consider which are more or less suitable for the kinds of work we do in CDS. We make a case that SFL has a narrow notion of ‘texts’ and a weak notion of context. We show how we can address such problems to deal with what we call the ‘materiality’ of multimodal communication.

The neoliberal definition of “elite space” in IKEA kitchens

ABSTRACT This paper carries out a social semiotic analysis of an IKEA commercial to show how their contemporary kitchens, despite being market for those on a more modest budget, present an aspirational form of elite space, constructed on the basis of ideas, values and priorities favored by a neoliberal ideology. Using the notions of new writing and technologization, and carrying out an analysis of form, texture and color, we show how the kitchen, its occupants and their actions are designed and represented as a tightly coded and functional whole into which the ideas and values of neoliberalism can be realized. The designs erase personal difference and actual context and in the commercial allow performances which mark aspirational values according to neoliberalism. Here the kitchen space itself, as is usual across IKEA commercials, allows the protagonist to be “creative,” improve his performance, be “dynamic” and “flexible.” Yet these, like the objects and textures in the kitchen, are merely symbolic components which appear reasonable in the context of the tightly coded system.

Performance management discourse and the shift to an administrative logic of operation : a multimodal critical discourse analytical approach

Abstract This paper, using multimodal critical discourse analysis, explores a chain of performance management documents in a university which aim to meet the goal of increasing output and excellence. A system of performance management developed by Kaplan and Norton in the 1990s, which enables both tangible and also “intangible assets” such as “quality” and “excellence” to be monitored and measured, is now used fairly universally to structure the running of public institutions. Looking in detail at one case, we show that the result is an abstraction and de-contextualization of processes and agents, through a series of interlocking texts, lists and tables that follows an administrative, rather than task led, logic of operation. We show how the discourse is legitimized on the one hand by the very impenetrable nature of the resulting interlocking documents and by the Web of Science database on the other. We give reasons why the database itself is highly problematic and also show the abstract ways in which it is communicated and how it leads to research in all subject areas being codified and standardized in a “one-size-fits-all” way. This, we argue, serves the purposes of naturalizing and justifying notions of “quality,” “excellence” and “value for money” that have been promoted in service of neoliberal politics.