Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics

David Block, John Gray, Marnie Holborow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415592055
• eBook ISBN: 9781136466915
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This book explores neoliberalism – a view of the world that puts the market at its centre- from the perspective of applied linguistics.

Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics argues that while applied linguistics has become more interdisciplinary in orientation, it has ignored or downplayed the role of political economy, namely the way in which social, political and economic factors relate to one another within the context of a capitalist economy. The authors take the view that engagement with political economy is central to any fully rounded analysis of language and language-related issues in the world today and their collaboration in this volume represents an initial attempt to redress what they perceive to be an imbalance in the field.

The book begins with a discussion of neoliberalism and an analysis of the ways in which neoliberal ideology impacts on language. This is followed by a discussion of how globalization and identity have been conceptualised in applied linguistics in ways which have ignored the political centrality of class – a concept which the authors see as integral to their perspective. The book concludes with an analysis of the ways in which neoliberal ideology plays out in two key areas of applied linguistics - language teaching and language teacher education.

Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in applied linguistics.

1

Introduction

David Block, John Gray, and Marnie Holborow

During the process of writing a book, authors often have to respond to the question: ‘What is your book about?’. Depending on the source of the question, the response will vary. On the one hand, it might be very didactic, as when the author feels that he/she must explain several key ideas underlying the central argument of the book if the question asker is to walk away with any idea whatsoever about the content of the book. On the other hand, when talking to peers, the author might produce the most tautological of answers. In the case of this book, Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics, one of the authors (David Block) found himself answering this question by saying: ‘Well, it’s about neoliberalism and applied linguistics’. Interestingly enough, the question asker seemed happy with the response!

But such a response is clearly not very helpful and one way of improving it is to say what is meant by the two key terms in the title, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘applied linguistics’. Thus we begin this chapter with a discussion of applied linguistics and then follow it with a discussion of neoliberalism, showing along the way the overlap of the two. However, it should be noted that these discussions will necessarily be brief and partial. Applied linguistics is thus focused on through the prism of a key article published by Ben Rampton in 1997, in which he called for an interdisciplinary applied linguistics.¹ Rampton’s suggestion has certainly been taken up if we are to judge by applied linguistic conference papers and publications which have appeared over the past decade and half.

However, as we will note, one blind spot in the interdisciplinarianism of applied linguistics has been political economy and in particular a detailed critique of neoliberalism as the ideology driving the practice of economics by governments and international organisations today. Political economy was the term used at the time of Marx and was used by him in his critique of classical economics but today it is more widely used in human geography, social and political science, anthropology and cultural studies to emphasise the interrelatedness of political and economic processes. It tends to focus on aggregate economic activity, resource allocation, capital accumulation, income inequality, globalisation and imperial power (Harvey 2005, 2010a; Dunn 2009a; Callinicos 2009, 2010; Ritzer and Atalay 2010). It can be defined or understood in two ways: first, as an academic discipline drawing on methods from economics, politics and sociology, which deals with the relationship between the individual and society and between the market and the state; and second as a pathway to interdisciplinarity which combines branches of economics and politics in order to understand how social institutions, their activities and capitalism influence each other in various ways. From our perspective, it is the latter understanding of political economy which informs our work. In short, our concern to include the social and the economic in our book naturally leads us towards the terrain of political economy which, we believe, grounds neoliberalism in the wider economic and political developments of contemporary capitalism and provides the vital political and economic dimension to issues of social identity, language and language teaching.

As indicated above, we begin this chapter with discussions of the two key terms in the title of the book, applied linguistics and neoliberalism. These discussions will be followed by descriptions of the content of the five main chapters of the book, which will shed light on the logic of their inclusion and the logic of the order in which they appear. We close the chapter with a brief account of how we came to write this book.

Applied Linguistics as Backdrop

In a landmark paper calling for a ‘retuning’ of applied linguistics, Rampton (1997) made the point that the field was not just about language teaching, as many at that time seemed to think; rather, it was better seen as ‘[t]he theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is the central issue’ (Brumfit 1991: 46). For Rampton, adopting this definition meant that any linking of theories and research about language to day-to-day phenomena would have to be classified as applied linguistics. As a sociolinguist, Rampton proposed an applied linguistics associated with areas of research such as the microethnography of institutional settings, ethnographic studies of language socialisation, new literacies studies, genre theory, critical discourse analysis, speech accommodation and conversation analysis. Such an applied linguistics required a definitive move to what Hymes, writing a quarter of a decade earlier, termed a ‘socially constituted linguistics’. As Hymes (1974: 196) explained, a socially constituted linguistics is based on two interrelated notions: (1) ‘that social function gives form to the ways in which linguistic features are encountered in actual life’; and (2) that ‘an adequate approach must begin by identifying social functions and discover ways in which linguistic features are selected and grouped together to serve them’. Thus, as was already happening in sociolinguistics at the time that Rampton was writing, the starting point for applied linguistics should be the study of culture and social structures, followed by an examination of how language plays a part in the enactment of different forms of social action as well as the constitution of second order understandings of these actions. In this case, in ‘[t]he theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is the central issue’ (Brumfit 1991: 46), linguistics would come to serve social analysis, which means that linguistics would change from being, in Hymes’s words, ‘only a theory of grammar’, to being ‘concerned with social as well as referential meaning … with language as part of communicative conduct and social action’ (Hymes 1974: 196–7).

Rampton’s call for an interdisciplinary applied linguistics sitting at the crossroads of sociology, education, and other social science disciplines was the natural outgrowth of several tendencies which had developed amongst academics who called themselves ‘applied linguists’ over the decades preceding his article. Above all, there was the general tendency towards interdisciplinarity, which had begun to gain momentum in the social sciences from the 1970s onwards, clearly linked to suggestions that economic and social orders were undergoing dramatic changes (Bell 1973; Giddens 1973). Arising from the influence of structuralism, there developed at the same time the ‘discursive turn’, in which social science methodologies foregrounded the importance of discourse as constitutive of social being (Laclau and Mouffe 1985), an idea which came to resonate among some sections of applied linguistics. Interdisciplinarianism meant that social scientists were more likely to base their analyses of social phenomena on literature from other disciplines. In the case of applied linguistics, this led to a move away from an overwhelming allegiance to theoretical linguistics and to a tendency to draw on social theory and current thinking in anthropology and sociology. Thus over the 1990s, we see different and more sophisticated takes on language-related issues, including the following ones:

• The entry of postcolonial frames of analysis in the study of English in the world (e.g. Canagarajah 1999; Kachru 1986; Pennycook 1994)
• The rise of critical discourse analysis, which combines critical theory with discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough 1992, 1995; Hodge and Kress 1993)
• The rise in interest in ideology in language studies (e.g. Blommaert 1999; Joseph and Taylor 1990; Schieffelin et al. 1998)
• Challenges to linguistic and cognitive biases in mainstream second language learning research (e.g. Block 1996; Firth and Wagner 1997; van Lier 1994).

Rampton’s call for a retuning of applied linguistics has proven to be prescient as there is little doubt by now that many applied linguists work in an interdisciplinary manner. Clear evidence of this can be found in the kinds of discussions taking place in recent texts on applied linguistics (Cook 2003; Davies 2007), as well as collections of readings on applied linguistics (Davies and Elder 2005; Kaplan 2005; Li Wei 2011; Simpson 2011), where contributors bring to bear on their topics multiple frameworks taken from a range of disciplines. Nevertheless, the fact that many applied linguists today practise a form of interdisciplinarianism in their work does not mean that they have, in effect, covered all of the possible epistemological bases. It is our view that if there is one gaping hole in the work of many applied linguists today, it is in the way that so many either ignore the economic and material bases of human activity and social life, or only deal with and incorporate these bases into their work in the most cursory of manners. As a consequence, it is our aim in this book to reorient interdisciplinarianism in applied linguistics in such a way that these economic and material bases of human activity and social life not only get a look-in, but they become central to discussions of a range of language related issues. For applied linguistics to be truly socially constituted, it must take full account of the political economy of contemporary capitalism – a political economy which encompasses both social classes and their ideologies.

At the time of writing, the world is engulfed in what people of all ideological and political persuasions seem to agree is an economic crisis. However, the exact causes of this crisis are contested, with two contrasting orientations emerging. On the one hand, there are those who would agree with the following view, outlined by Slavoj Žižek (2009: 19):

the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations (overly lax legal regulations, the corruption of financial institutions, and so on).

On the other hand, there are those who reject the kind of thinking alluded to by Žižek, and who claim, following Marx, that such economic crises are not the result of excesses in the system but the inevitable outcome of its inner workings. Analyses which look only at the superficial workings of the economy fail to see the forces which drive the economy and therefore suggest solutions which only tinker with the model. Marx made numerous references in Capital to this approach to the study of economics as the purview of ‘vulgar economists’, that is, those ‘who in their shallowness, make it a principle to worship appearances only’ (Marx 1976: 679), or, in other words, those who could not see beyond the obvious and who manifested no interest whatsoever in moving backstage to pick apart the foundations and workings of capitalism. We are aware of the obvious fact that we cannot go the distance in carrying out an analytic dismantling of capitalism, but we do aim in this book to put such a project on the table, as we see it as a possible new direction for those applied linguists for whom Brumfit’s ‘real world problems’ are clearly linked to political economy and our material existence. And if one is to understand the workings of the economy today, it is necessary to engage with the other key term in the title of this book, ‘neoliberalism’.

Why Neoliberalism? Why now?

Neoliberalism has become a powerful point of reference in the world today. Eclectic, indeterminate, polemical, one thing that can be agreed upon is its capacity to position the speaker vis-à-vis what is being described. Neoliberal, in most cases, implies a critique of the rule of the ‘free’ market, a counter position to the social phenomenon being described.² This dualism at the heart of neoliberalism has been present since the term first came to prominence in the early 2000s. It gained currency, in Europe and South America particularly, within the ranks of the growing anti-capitalist movement at the time. Pierre Bourdieu (2005) has noted how economic liberalism, in the first instance a theory of economic practice, had burst out of its field to become an all-embracing utopian vision of a pure and perfect market, a way of thinking with its own logic, its own chain of constraints, and whose aim was the methodical destruction of collectives. Free-market thinking, which sang the praises of the dot.com bubble and the wild speculation of financialisation, became the hymn of advanced capitalism. Its precepts were simple: ‘human well-being could best be advanced by liberating individual, entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework of private property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey 2005: 2). As governments of all political hues (from the British Conservative Party, elected in 1979, to the Australian Labour Party, elected in 1983) converted to its creed, it became ‘rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense’ (Bourdieu 2005: 10; emphasis in the original).

More recently, Naomi Klein (2007) has added another dimension to the ‘free’-market orthodoxy: the terrorising fashion in which it was sometimes imposed. As Klein explains, neoliberalism has thundered its way across the globe with ‘shock and awe’, through wars waged for the benefit of corporate cartels and through aggressive exploitation of natural disasters to set in train even bigger market monopolies. This terrorising approach has been studied in considerable depth with regard to the experience of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. Stuckler, King and McKee (2009), writing in the medical journal The Lancet, argue convincingly that the rapid introduction of neoliberal policies and employment practices into the post-communist countries was a crucially determining factor in the rise of the mortality rate of working-age men – a phenomenon they relate, among other factors, to acute psychosocial stress. In the wake of the havoc wreaked by the shock tactics advocated by economists such as Jeffrey Sachs (1990) they conclude:

The policy implications are clear. Great caution should be taken when macroeconomic policies seek radically to overhaul the economy without considering potential effects on the population’s health. As variants of rapid reform policies are being debated in China, India, Egypt, and several other developing and middle-income countries – including Iraq – which are just beginning to privatise their large state-owned sectors, the lessons from the transitions from communism should be kept in mind.

(Stuckler et al. 2009: 406)

In 2008, the banking crisis and recession struck, first in the US and then, via contagion, the rest of the world. The fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 marked the dramatic impact that the explosion of the financial bubble would have on the global economy and on peoples’ lives. These events meant the final death knell for old industrial heartlands like Detroit in the US, as well as a dramatic rise in the number of foreclosures and poverty in general around the world on a scale not seen since the 1930s.The European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and individual state governments, desperate to avoid economic meltdown, injected huge sums of money into supporting their own banking systems. The result was the imposition of austerity programmes on the populations of Europe, the US and the Middle East, the effects of which will stretch into the future (Mason 2009; Stiglitz 2010; Callinicos 2010). These events represented a watershed for neoliberalism. Thirty years of expanding market reforms on a global scale gave way to a severe economic crisis, itself caused by spectacular market failure.

In the aftermath of these events, references to neoliberalism have multiplied, both at a popular level and across academic disciplines. Journalists railed against the tyranny of the corrupt mythology of the market and gave voice to the profound crisis of conviction which circulated, as neoliberal ideology stood exposed as a ‘collection of secrets, superstitions and non-sequiturs’ invented to justify the dominance of a ruling group (Mason 2009: 119). Bankers and politicians were the ‘ship of fools’ that had driven the system to disaster (O’Toole 2009). A sign posted on the docklands of Dublin during the maelstrom of the crash, reading ‘greed is the knife, and the scar runs deep’, spontaneously expressed the level of ideological disquiet in Ireland. In academic circles, economic and human geographers observed that the fault lines of neoliberalism had been so exposed that its own failed raison d’être would lead to its demise (Birch and Mykhnenko 2010). Others charted the resilience of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, its embeddedness in society, and its infinite capacity, even in crises, to reinvent itself and adapt (Peck 2010). Less categorical accounts have charted the fateful connection of neoliberalism to the booms and slumps of capitalism which, post-crash, became tainted as zombieconomics, a system unable to provide sustainable economic growth outside established centres of accumulation, let alone within the neoliberal heartlands themselves (Fine 2010; Harman 2009). Deeper anomalies in the ideology piled up as the crisis unfolded. Injections of huge amounts of state money into private banks, and the appropriation of private debt as sovereign debt, stretched to the limit belief in the hands-off state. The shifting of blame from private banking to the public sector set off an ideological debate that neoliberals still have not been able to win, highlighting the unresolved dilemma for a ruling orthodoxy that has been seen to fail (Callinicos 2010; Harvey 2010a; Žižek 2009). This ideological sprawl and turmoil, alongside dramatic economic events, forms the background for an examination of aspects of neoliberalism and applied linguistics.

Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics

In the broader field of education, the impact of neoliberalism on education has been foregrounded for some time (Hill and Kumar 2009). The shift from pedagogical to market values has been widely commented on as involving a fundamental shift in educational philosophy: the abandonment of the social and cooperative ethic in favour of individualist and competitive business models. In the US, educationalists wrote of the way in which ‘educational “reform”, embracing the twin legacies of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, had resulted in greater social inequality, more cumbersome bureaucratic measurement and greater power for the “evaluative state”‘ (Apple 2004).

Neoliberal discourses, through the channels of intergovernmental organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, have buttressed the drive towards global privatisation of educational services, particularly in higher education, and set the priority of education to be the provider of human capital and the engine for economic growth (Spring 2008). Capturing the educational arena was judged to be of particular significance for neoliberal thinking, since schooling was both a green field for corporate designs and also an important means of inculcating market values in future generations. Saltman (2009: 55–6) describes extent of the process as follows:

Neoliberalism appears in the now commonsense framing of education exclusively through presumed ideals of upward individual economic mobility and the social ideals of global economic competition … The ‘There is No Alternative’ has infected education thought as the only questions on reform agendas appear to be how to best enforce knowledge and curriculum conducive to national economic interest and the expansion of a corporately managed model of globalisation as perceived from the perspective of business.

In applied linguistics, by contrast, studies on neoliberalism have been few and far between. Phillipson (2008a) speaks of ‘the linguistic imperialism of neoliberal empire’ and ‘the role of language in corporate-driven globalisation’ but his account is more of a statement of fact than an analysis of the mechanisms by which language, language teaching and neoliberalism intersect (2008a). Critical discourse anal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1.Introduction
• 2.What is neoliberalism? Discourse, ideology and the real world
• 3.Neoliberal keywords and the contradictions of an ideology
• 4.Economising globalisation and identity in applied linguistics in neoliberal times
• 5.Neoliberalism, celebrity and ‘aspirational content’ in English language teaching textbooks for the global market
• 6.The marketisation of language teacher education and neoliberalism: characteristics, consequences and future prospects
• Notes
• References
• Index