Philip W. Graham

Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism

In this article I identify specific historical trajectories that are directly contingent upon the deployment and use of new media, but that are actually hidden by a focus on the purely technological. They are: the increasingly abstract and alienated nature of economic value; the subsumption of all labour — material and intellectual — under systemic capital; and the convergence of formerly distinct spheres of analysis — the spheres of production, circulation and consumption. This article examines the implications of the knowledge economy from an historical materialist perspective. I synthesize the systemic views of Marx (1846 [1972], 1875 [1972], 1970, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1981), Adorno (1951 [1974], 1964 [1973], 1991), Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [1998]), Jarvis (1998) and Bourdieu (1991, 1998) to argue for a language-focused approach to new media research and suggest aspects of Marxist thought which might be useful in researching emergent socio-technical domains. I also identify specific categories in the Marxist tradition which may no longer be analytically useful for researching the effects of new media.In this article I identify specific historical trajectories that are directly contingent upon the deployment and use of new media, but that are actually hidden by a focus on the purely technological. They are: the increasingly abstract and alienated nature of economic value; the subsumption of all labour — material and intellectual — under systemic capital; and the convergence of formerly distinct spheres of analysis — the spheres of production, circulation and consumption. This article examines the implications of the knowledge economy from an historical materialist perspective. I synthesize the systemic views of Marx (1846 [1972], 1875 [1972], 1970, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1981), Adorno (1951 [1974], 1964 [1973], 1991), Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [1998]), Jarvis (1998) and Bourdieu (1991, 1998) to argue for a language-focused approach to new media research and suggest aspects of Marxist thought which might be useful in researching emergent socio-technical domains. I also identify specific categories in the M...

Technocratic discourse : A primer

This article describes the linguistic and semantic features of technocratic discourse using a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. The article goes further to assert that the function of technocratic discourse in public policy is to advocate and promulgate a highly contentious political and economic agenda under the guise of scientific objectivity and political impartiality. We provide strong evidence to support the linguistic description, and the claims of political advocacy, by analyzing a 900-word document about globalization produced by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

Critical Systems Theory A Political Economy of Language, Thought, and Technology

An emergent form of political economy, facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICTs), is widely propagated as the apotheosis of unmitigated social, economic, and technological progress. Meanwhile, throughout the world, social degradation and economic inequality are increasing logarithmically. Valued categories of thought are, axiomatically, the basic commodities of the knowledge economy. Language is its means of exchange. This article proposes a sociolinguistic method with which to critically engage the hyperbole of the Information Age. The method is grounded in a systemic social theory that synthesizes aspects of autopoiesis and Marxist political economy. A trade policy statement is analyzed to exemplify the sociolinguistically created aberrations that are today most often construed as social and political determinants.

Space: Irrealis Objects in Technology Policy and their Role in a New Political Economy

In this article, I show how new spaces are being prefigured for colonization in new economy policy discourses. Drawing on a corpus of 1.3 million words collected from legislatures throughout the world, I show the role of policy language in creating the foundations of an emergent form of political economy. The analysis is informed by principles from critical discourse analysis (CDA), classical political economy and critical media studies. It foregrounds a functional aspect of language called process metaphor to show how aspects of human activity are prefigured for mass commodification by the manipulation of realis and irrealis spaces. I also show how the fundamental element of any new political economy, the property element, is being largely ignored. Current moves to create a privately owned global space, which is as concrete as landed property - namely, the electromagnetic spectrum - has significant ramifications for the future of social relations in any global knowledge economy.

Critical Discourse Analysis and Political Economy of Communication: Understanding The New Corporate Order

This article uses critical discourse analysis to analyse material shifts in the political economy of communications. It examines texts of major corporations to describe four key changes in political economy: (1) the separation of ownership from control; (2) the separation of business from industry; (3) the separation of accountability from responsibility; and (4) the subjugation of ‘going concerns’ by overriding concerns. The authors argue that this amounts to a political economic shift from traditional concepts of ‘capitalism’ to a new ‘corporatism’ in which the relationships between public and private, state and individual interests have become redefined and obscured through new discourse strategies. They conclude that the present financial and regulatory ‘crisis’ cannot be adequately resolved without a new analytic framework for examining the relationships between corporation, discourse and political economy.

Critical discourse analysis and evaluative meaning: Interdisciplinarity as a critical turn

The perceived need to transcend disciplinary boundaries in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a contemporary imperative throughout most social sciences (Jessop and Sum, 2001). As such, it highlights the fragmenting trajectory social science has taken, most noticeably over the last 150 years. Critical scholarship has its raison d’etre in that fragmentation because the first imperative of any critical social science is to develop an historically grounded, comprehensive theory of social change — a ‘critical philosophy’ which sees humanity as an unbroken, historically embedded whole (Marx, 1843 [1972], p. 10). Prior to the emergence of social science disciplines in the mid-nineteenth century, social theory ‘was an integral part of philosophy’ which had underpinned ‘the pattern of all particular theories of social change’ throughout history (Marcuse and Neumann, 1942 [1998], p. 95). Consequently, from a critical perspective, ‘social change cannot be interpreted within a particular social science, but must be understood within the social and natural totality of human life’ (ibid.). Accordingly, the contemporary trend towards interdisciplinary, ‘transdisciplinary’ (Fairclough, 2000), or ‘post-disciplinary’ (Jessop and Sum, 2001) approaches to social analysis is, by definition, a critical turn.

Militarizing the Body Politic: New Mediations as Weapons of Mass Instruction

As militarization of bodies politic continues apace the world over, as military organizations again reveal themselves as primary political, economic and cultural forces in many societies, we argue that the emergent and potentially dominant form of political economic organization is a species of neo-feudal corporatism. Drawing upon Bourdieu, we theorize bodies politic as living habitus. Bodies politic are prepared for war and peace through new mediations, powerful means of public pedagogy. The process of militarization requires the generation of new, antagonistic evaluations of other bodies politic. Such evaluations are inculcated via these mediations, the movement of meanings across time and space, between formerly disparate histories, places, and cultures. New mediations touch new and different aspects of the body politic: its eyes, its ears, its organs, but they are consistently targeted at the formation of dispositions, the prime movers of action.

Political economy of communication: a critique

Purpose – This article aims to provide a critical understanding of contextual issues surrounding international business from a political economy of communication perspective.Design/methodology/approach – The approach is based in classical dialectics and proceeds from a Marxian perspective. It includes a literature review of major theorists in political economy of communication and an analysis of present institutional relationships that frame international business in the context of corporatism.Findings – The main argument is that current practices that dominate international business can no longer be considered as any kind of capitalism and that political economy of communication is necessary for comprehending this system. Current business practices are a form of corporatism in which ownership is separated from control, business is separated from industry, and the idea of a “going concern” is subject to “overriding concerns”. To understand the implications of these factors, political economy of communicat...

A theoretical and analytical synthesis of autopoiesis and sociolinguistics for the study of organisational communication

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a systemic view of communication based in autopoiesis, the theory of living systems formulated by Maturana & Varela (1980, 1987). Second, we show the links between the underpinning assumptions of autopoiesis and the sociolinguistic approaches of Halliday (1978), Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995) and Lemke (1995, 1994). Third, we propose a theoretical and analytical synthesis of autopoiesis and sociolinguistics for the study of organisational communication. In proposing a systemic theory for organisational communication, we argue that traditional approaches to communication, information, and the role of language in human organisations have, to date, been placed in teleological constraints because of an inverted focus on organisational purpose-the generally perceived role of an organisation within society-that obscure, rather than clarify, the role of language within human organisations. We argue that human social systems are, according to the criteria defined by Maturana and Varela, third-order, non-organismic living systems constituted in language. We further propose that sociolinguistics provides an appropriate analytical tool which is both compatible and penetrating in synthesis with the systemic framework provided by an autopoietic understanding of social organisation.

A sociolinguistic approach to applied epistemology: Examining technocratic values in global 'knowledge' policy

This special issue presents an excellent opportunity to study applied epistemology in public policy. This is an important task because the arena of public policy is the social domain in which macro conditions for ‘knowledge work’ and ‘knowledge industries’ are defined and created. We argue that knowledge-related public policy has become overly concerned with creating the politico-economic parameters for the commodification of knowledge. Our policy scope is broader than that of Fuller (1988), who emphasizes the need for a social epistemology of science policy. We extend our focus to a range of policy documents that include communications, science, education and innovation policy (collectively called knowledge-related public policy in acknowledgement of the fact that there is no defined policy silo called ‘knowledge policy’), all of which are central to policy concerned with the ‘knowledge economy’ (Rooney and Mandeville, 1998). However, what we will show here is that, as Fuller (1995) argues, ‘knowledge societies’ are not industrial societies permeated by knowledge, but that knowledge societies are permeated by industrial values. Our analysis is informed by an autopoietic perspective. Methodologically, we approach it from a sociolinguistic position that acknowledges the centrality of language to human societies (Graham, 2000). Here, what we call ‘knowledge’ is posited as a social and cognitive relationship between persons operating on and within multiple social and non-social (or, crudely, ‘physical’) environments. Moreover, knowing, we argue, is a sociolinguistically constituted process. Further, we emphasize that the evaluative dimension of language is most salient for analysing contemporary policy discourses about the commercialization of epistemology (Graham, in press). Finally, we provide a discourse analysis of a sample of exemplary texts drawn from a 1.3 million-word corpus of knowledge-related public policy documents that we compiled from local, state, national and supranational legislatures throughout the industrialized world. Our analysis exemplifies a propensity in policy for resorting to technocratic, instrumentalist and anti-intellectual views of knowledge in policy. We argue that what underpins these patterns is a commodity-based conceptualization of knowledge, which is underpinned by an axiology of narrowly economic imperatives at odds with the very nature of knowledge. The commodity view of knowledge, therefore, is flawed in its ignorance of the social systemic properties of ��knowing’.