The construction and deconstruction of educational policy documents

Abstract

This article begins with a critique of the traditional technical‐empiricist approach to policy analysis in which official documents issued by agencies of the state are interpreted as expressions of political intention, that is as proposed courses of action to be discussed by the public before being implemented as official policy. It is argued that this traditional approach to policy is based upon idealist assumptions about the nature of language itself which take it to be a transparent vehicle for the transmission of information, thoughts and values. An alternative approach to the analysis of policy documents is outlined based on theories of discourse that have been developed from within a materialist conception of language. It is suggested that some policy documents legitimate the power of the state and contribute fundamentally to the ‘engineering’ of consent. Such texts contain divergent meanings, contradictions and structured omissions, so that different effects are produced on different readers. An important task for policy analysis is to examine those effects and expose the ideological processes which lie behind the production of the text. Thus, it is suggested that the analysis of policy documents could be construed as a form of textual deconstruction.