Norman Fairclough (University of Lancaster)

Discursive hybridity and social change in critical discourse analysis

Discursive hybridity, interdiscursivity, the mixing of different discourses, genres and styles,
the disarticulation and rearticulation of relationships between different discourses, genres
and styles to list only some of the formulations which have been used have long been a
concern within critical discourse analysis, and especially so in certain versions of CDA,
including my own.
My work has been focused on the significance of discourse in social change, on
relations between discourse and other social elements or moments in processes of social
change, and on the contribution that CDA can make to developing trans-disciplinary critical
social research on processes of social change. For example, the commodification and
marketisation of public services like education, or various dimensions of globalization.
Interdiscursivity has been an important concept and category in developing this work, part of
a complex of interconnected categories including also discourse/genre/style, order of
discourse, and recontextualization.
The basic perspective has been that social changes are in part changes in discourse
and that changes in discourse are dialectically interconnected with changes in other nondiscursive social elements or moments. This involves changes in discourse being
operationalized (put into operation, put into practice) in social practices, relations,
identities and changes in the physical world. And of most immediate significance for our
present concerns changes in discourse are articulatory changes, changes in relations
between different discourses, different genres, different styles and between discourses and
genres and styles. Concretely in texts, these articulatory changes take the form of cases of
interdiscursivity texts that mix different discourses, genres and/or styles. At the more
abstract level of relatively durable social practices, these articulatory changes take the form of
changes in orders of discourse more durable changes in relations between discourses,
genres and styles at the level of relatively stable and durable social practices and institutions.
Furthermore, such changes in discourse may be recontextualized, as part of the dissemination
of social changes. Recontextualization can take place across structural boundaries (e.g.
boundaries between social fields for instance from business to politics or to education) and
scalar boundaries (e.g. the spread of certain discourses such as marketised educational
discourse from west to east in Europe after 1989).
Let me pull out some threads and examples from the course of my own publications
in CDA, beginning with Language and Power (1st edition 1989), chapters 7 (Creativity and
struggle in discourse: the discourse of Thatcherism) and Chapter 8 (Discourse in social
change). Language and Power included an analysis of the discourse of Thatcherism, the
political position associated with Margaret Thatcher, the leader of the British Conservative
Party who became Prime Minister in 1979. The point was to show that the political change
was in substantial part a change in discourse, drawing especially upon the famous analyses of
Thatcherism which appeared in the journal Marxism Today in the 1980s, especially under the
name of Stuart Hall. The move was what I would now call trans-disciplinary in intent: to
suggest how CDA might help to develop Halls line of political and cultural analysis by
giving more detailed attention to Thatchers discourse. Hall associated Thatcherism with an
exceptional form of the capitalist state which he called authoritarian populism, a
weakening of democratic forms and initiatives combined with active popular consent
(Hall/Jacques 1983). I tried to show that this novel articulation of political elements was
partly brought about in the novel rearticulations of Thatcherite discourse.

In doing so I introduced for instance the concept of synthetic personalization:

synthetic personalization simulates solidarity, politicians and others purport to relate to
members of their audience as individuals who share large areas of common ground.
Moreover, it functions as a strategy of containment [...] a veil of equality beneath which the
real equalities of capitalist society can carry on (Fairclough 1989:195). Synthetic
personalization, I suggested, was associated with the populist side of Thatcherism, and its
coexistence with the authoritarian side entailed discursive hybridity. I suggested that the
recipe for political leadership in Britain had changed after the Second World War from
keep your distance and assert your authority to claim solidarity but assert your authority.
or instance in a radio interview with Thatcher in 1985 which I discussed, certain linguistic
features are markedly claiming solidarity and are markers of synthetic personalization, such
as opting for a vocabulary which is more colloquial than that of her interviewer (e.g., the
people of Britain dont have to be told, dont like to be pushed around) or heavy use of you
as an indefinite pronoun, e.g., for referring to the activities of government (e.g., youve got
to be strong to your own people and other countries have got to know that you stand by your
word).
Other features are markedly asserting authority. For instance, Thatcher assumes the
authority to tell the British public what they are like, to speak for them (e.g. Many of the
things Ive said strike a chord in the hearts of ordinary people. Why? Because they are
British, because their character is independent, because they dont like to be shoved
around ...). Inclusive we, I suggested, is ambivalent: on the one hand it claims solidarity by
suggesting we are all in the same boat, on the other hand it is again associated with making
authoritative claims about what we are like (e.g. when part of Britain was invaded she is
referring to the Falkland or Malvinas islands of course we went, we believed in defence of
freedom, we were reliable). The term synthetic personalization did not last in my work.
The tendencies at issue were subsumed under what I called conversationalization of public
discourse.
In Discourse and Social Change (1992) the chapters of particular relevance are
Chapter 3, A Social Theory of Discourse, chapter 4, Intertextuality and chapter 7, Discourse
and Social Change in Contemporary Society I associated conversationalization with a
tendency towards democratization of discourse, e.g. public discourse between political and
other elites and the rest of us becoming apparently less marked by power asymmetries and
less distant. I also argued however that democratization of discourse was paradoxically it
would seem sometimes associated with commodification, the colonisation of other forms of
discourse by the discourse associated with commodity production, exchange and
consumption with markets, for short. I suggested that these tendencies associated with
contemporary orders of discourse and another one which I discussed, technologization of
discourse are in complex and contradictory relationships with each other. We might see this
in terms of a contradiction between oligarchic and democratic principles in modern
democratic societies, and ongoing strategic struggle and contestation associated with it. We
might also see it in terms of a tendency for the democratic openings of the nineteen sixties
and seventies to be assimilated into, or appropriated by, the transformations of capitalism
from the 1970s, including the neo-liberal tendency which was strongest in the USA and the
UK and the general extension of market models associated with it. This was thematised in a
paper I published with Eve Chiapello, co-author with Luc Boltanski of The New Spirit of
Capitalism which appeared in French in 1999. The paper, in Discourse & Society 2002,
attempted a trans-disciplinary synthesis of their new sociology of capitalism with CDA,
including a reworking of their data with the categories of interdiscursivity, order of discourse,
etc. (Chiapello/Fairclough 2002). In any case, discursive hybridity is a feature of these
tendencies for instance the commodification or marketization of the discourse of higher
2

education is a matter of the articulation of features of market discourse with features of the
discourse of higher education (Fairclough 1993). Other threads in this book included seeing
discursive change as rearticulation in both discursive events or texts and orders of
discourse, seeing (re)articulation as entailing disarticulation and linking these two
moments with theories of hegemony and hegemonic change, and associating interdiscursive
hybridity with contradictions and the management of contradictions, problematizations
and dilemmas and attempts to deal with them, creativity, transgressions, crossing
boundaries and social struggles.
In more recent work I have differentiated forms of discursive hybridity, or
interdiscursivity, for discourses, genres, styles. By discourses I mean ways of
construing/representing realities, e.g. construals of social ill-being (as opposed to wellbeing) in different political discourses discourses of poverty, disadvantage, social exclusion,
human flourishing, etc. By genres I mean ways of (inter)acting, e.g. genres of political
interview. By styles I mean ways of being or identities, e.g. political leadership styles. An
example of the mixing or interdiscursivity of discourses is the political discourse of the Third
Way of New Labour in the UK, which is I suggested in my book New Labour, New
Language? (2000) a mix of neoliberal (Thatcherite) and Labourite (social democratic)
discourses. This sort of mix is manifest for instance in some of Blairs early explanations of
what the Third Way is, for instance in a pamphlet in 1998: This is the third way. A belief in
social justice and economic dynamism, ambition and compassion, fairness and enterprise
going together (Blair 1998). Blair is asserting that elements of discourses which had been
previously viewed as incompatible are compatible within the Third Way economic
dynamism, ambition, enterprise in New Right political discourse, social justice, compassion,
fairness in old left political discourse. An example of the mixing or interdiscursivity of
genres is the mixing of democratic/dialogical and promotional/managerial genres in
governing which I discussed in the same book with respect to for instance public consultation
documents (e.g. Green Papers) under New Labour. An example of the mixing or
interdiscursivity of styles also discussed in that book is the various solutions to the tension
between loosely patrician and populist poles in the discourse of diverse British and
American political leaders including Macmillan, Thatcher, Blair, Reagan, Clinton, Obama.
I have discussed interdiscursive hybridity in relation to processes of social change in
various social fields and on different scales in the course of the past twenty years or so,
including:

Political discourse in Britain (Thatcherism, New Labour), which I have just been
referring to (Fairclough 1989, 2000)
Marketization of public discourse, especially universities (Fairclough 1993)
Shifts in media discourse e.g. the genres and styles of political television (Fairclough
1995)
Changes in the ideology or spirit of capitalism since the 1970s
(Chiapello/Fairclough 2002)
Globalization, and transition in Central and Eastern Europe (Fairclough 2006).

Let me just say a little about the marketization of public discourse, referring especially to my
paper on that theme in Discourse & Society 1993. Marketization is the extension of markets
or quasi-markets into areas of social life which were previously (largely) separated from
markets, e.g. most of education in Britain. Marketization is linked to other buzzwords of the
1970s and 1980s like commodification, promotional culture, consumer culture.
Marketization is in part marketization of discourse, and is often arguably discourse-led, i.e.
begins as changes in discourse which are then operationalized in changes in practices,
3

relations, identities, etc. I suggested for instance that the regular appraisal of academic and
administrative staff in British and other universities first appeared as a novel discourse about
professional practices and careers and was then operationalized as functioning appraisal
systems and practices. And, again, marketization produces hybrid discourse, for instance
educational discourse (genres, discourses, and styles) which is partly what we would
recognize as educational and partly market discourse. For example, I looked at changes in
advertisements for university posts in Britain, showing that at the time of writing
conventional Higher Education advertising forms co-existed with forms which were
appropriating features of commercial advertising, such as direct address of readers, and
combining them with conventional features to produce interdiscursively hybrid forms. I also
looked for instance at changes in university prospectuses, which later transmuted into the
emergence of university web-sites, focusing for instance on changes in authority relations in
these texts which produced tensions between the university as authority in relation to its
students and the authority of students as consumers in relation to the university. This
manifests itself for instance in the modality of texts, e.g. a tendency to avoid statements like
students must take three of the following courses.
Let me bring this up to date by referring to a contemporary case: the emergence of a
novel Conservative political discourse in Britain in the run-up to the 2010 General Election.
At the moment the Conservatives are generally expected to win that election. I want to refer
in particular to a recent lecture by the Conservative leader David Cameron, the Hugo Young
Memorial lecture in November 2009 (Cameron 2009). The title he gave to this lecture was:
The Big Society. The gist of what he said is that Big Government in the past decade of New
Labour government has failed to advance the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting
inequality, and increasing general well-being; for instance inequality has increased under
New Labour. And this is because Big Government has promoted not social solidarity, but
selfishness and individualism because it has discouraged responsibility and encouraged
irresponsibility. The progressive aims are, he claims, shared by all three major political
parties including the Conservatives, but it is the Conservatives that are offering a solution, a
move from state action to social action, from Big Government to Big Society, because
Big Government has undermined the once natural bonds that existed between people of
duty and responsibility, and to achieve the progressive aims these bonds must be rebuilt.
One striking omission from Camerons speech is the record of the Conservative
government of 1979-1997, and what has been widely perceived as the impact of Thatcherism
and neo-liberalism in cultivating the effects he attributes to Big Government, selfishness and
individualism. Cameron notably cites significant bodies of broadly leftwing analysis of the
negative effects of the New Labour Government on inequality and poverty from 1997 to the
present, but in fact these analyses generally blame New Labour for continuing with the
policies of their Conservative predecessors. Cameron however jumps from the late 1960s to
1997 without a word about what happened in between.
But what I want comment on is interdiscursive hybridity in Camerons speech. Lets
begin with the left analysis he cites. This includes research by Richard Wilkinson and Katie
Pickett published in their book The Spirit Level (2009). Camerons own conclusion from their
research appropriates their discourse: the best indicator of a countrys rank on [...] measures
of general well-being is not the difference in wealth between them, but the difference of
wealth within them. But he then goes on to condemn a system that keeps millions of people
at the bottom locked out of the success enjoyed by the mainstream, and from there to argue
that we shouldnt be fixated only on a mechanistic objective like [] closing the gap
between the top and the bottom, we should rather focus on closing the gap between the
bottom and the middle. Wilkinsons comment on this in the Guardian (in Bowcott/Butler
2009) indicates that Cameron is shifting away from a central claim of the Wilkinson-Pickett
4

analysis: Bringing down the top incomes is very important if the wealth gap is the
problem, you cant tackle the problem and yet leave top pay alone. Cameron is shifting and
hybridizing discourses, moving from the Wilkinson-Pickett discourse to what amounts to the
sort of discourse of social exclusion extensively drawn upon by New Labour in their early
years of government where the problem is the exclusion of a substantial minority from the
mainstream, not the gap between the bottom and the top.
This is one bit of interdiscursive hybridity, but there are more. Social action as an
alternative to state action is elaborated as follows as the Conservative alternative: Our
answer is twofold: first, making opportunity more equal [] and second, actively helping to
create a stronger, more responsible society. So: opportunity and responsibility. And in
another formulation: The first step is to redistribute power from the central state and its
agencies to individuals and local communities. That way, we can create the opportunity for
people to take responsibility. But the state continues to have a crucial role, a new role:
galvanising, catalysing, prompting, encouraging and agitating for community engagement
and social renewal. We must use the state to help stimulate social action. An influential
former Labour Minister Frank Field sees this as a challenge and danger to Labour Cameron
is seeking nothing less than to take over Labours historic claim to be the party of the poor.
He also comments that If you read the speech without knowing who had given it, most
people would conclude that it was a speech by Tony Blair, who had carefully blended in the
best of Labours leftwing thinking. There are certainly echoes of Blair both opportunity
and responsibility, though Camerons way of texturing them and collocating them as
equivalents is different from Blair, whose insistent message was rights and responsibilities.
And the new role Cameron advocates for the state is reminiscent of the enabling state
which was strongly thematized by Blair and New Labour helping, supporting, encouraging
people to help themselves. But there is also continuity with Thatcherism: Thatcherism also
advocated and practised using the powers of the state to shift powers away from the state,
though towards the market, not towards society, a concept that Thatcher had little time for.
And Camerons claim that Big Government has spawned multiple perverse incentives that
either discourage responsibility or actively encourage irresponsibility, taking away from
people more and more things that they should and could be doing for themselves, their
families and their neighbours, is pure Thatcher. So a major continuity with the previous
Conservative government is both the attack on the state and the strategy of using the state to
limit the state. But Thatcherism did not beat back Big Government, though it did transform
its role, and this points to a major incoherence or contradiction of the speech: if as Cameron
argues the state must not only give people opportunities but also help people take advantage
of them, does this not entail very Big Government indeed if, as Cameron claims, the big
society demands mass engagement: a broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and
obligation, and this crucial condition for its feasibility does not currently exist? How do we
bring this about? he asks, and he answers that Of course there are no easy answers, short
cuts, or simplistic levers we can pull. But his position is that we need the state to do it. But
does this not imply precisely the sort of perverse effects of Big Government that Cameron
claims to want to combat? Besides: how exactly would the sort of social action Cameron
envisages reverse the long-term trend to increasing inequality of income and wealth? Is this
credible without state action? The speech provides no answers.
So what we have in Camerons speech is a complex reworking of interdiscursive
relations which shows continuities with both New Labour and Thatcherism as well as
discontinuities (for instance the Thatcherite theme of responsibility was focused upon the
individual and the family, Camerons gives more emphasis to responsibility for ones fellow
citizens and calls for less selfishness and individualism).

But what are we to make of this piece of interdiscursive innovation? For instance, are
we to take it as a serious blueprint for government, and for a future elaboration of more
specific policies? Or is it just rhetoric, just one of many attempts to attract votes? One thing
to note is the exploratory or experimental character of a lot of political discourse trying out
possible lines and positions, particular political imaginaries as we might put. Quite a lot of
such programmatic political discourse comes and goes, does not endure. It would seem that
its the bits that seem to resonate, inside the party, with significant elites and groups, with the
general public, and which also seem to be consistent with material conditions and
possibilities, that tend to endure and be elaborated. We should also take into account the
pressure of events Cameron for instance was embarked on a discourse of mending broken
Britain which seemed to be derailed by the new circumstances and changed possibilities of
the financial and economic crisis which the dramatic events of autumn 2008 in particular
began to define. On the other hand, this speech is not isolated it fits into the current
Conservative pitch that Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott summed up as follows
(Elliott 2009):
the British state is too big, too expensive and too intrusive. While you, the individual
voter, are doing your utmost to live within your means, the government is
accumulating bigger and bigger debts. These big debts threaten the UKs reputation
with the credit ratings agencies, and action is needed now to prevent a downgrade on
Britains debt that would precipitate a run on the pound .... The Big State approach
has failed at every level.
Except, of course, as Elliott goes on to note, when it came to dealing with the crisis. The
flaw in the Conservative approach is that it was not the Big State but the deregulated market
that caused all the problems. And, one might add, without the massive interventions of the
Big State the effects of the crisis would probably be much worse; or more radically, without
intervention by states to control and transform markets more fundamentally than anything
they have done so far, the crisis will not be overcome.
Let me bring in part of the framework of a trans-disciplinary research paradigm I have
worked with, Cultural Political Economy (CPE). The presence of Cultural in its title marks
a commitment to the sort of view of dialectical relations between discourse and other social
elements that I referred to earlier, applied to political economy. To put it in a condensed way,
economies are to be regarded as operationalized discourses, economic imaginaries which
are put into practice, made real in economic orders, systems and practices. The question is:
which? There are many discourses around, many imaginaries. From their prolific variation,
especially in times of crisis, only a few get to be selected and retained. What sort of factors
come into this?
In Discourse and Social Change (1992: 102-3) I argued that in CDA we need to apply
the categories of intertextuality and interdiscursivity within the framing of a theory of
hegemony. The rich potential for semiotic innovation and creation which intertextuality and
interdiscursivity help conceptualize, thematize and analyze might otherwise blind us to the
fact that such productivity is not unbounded semiotic play, it is socially limited and
constrained, and conditional upon relations of power. But this is only part of the picture.
There are a range of factors and conditions governing the selection and retention of both
political and economic imaginaries and the interdiscursively innovative discourses which
constitute them Camerons, for example. Some of these factors are semiotic I referred
above to the resonance of interdiscursive innovation, whether it is felt to be in accord or in
harmony with the discourses, narratives, arguments and so forth which are salient within
various significant groups and constituencies, in the political party, in powerful and
influential elites and interest-groups (in business, government, the public sector, the general
public etc), whether it chimes with what people in various areas of political and social life are
6

thinking and saying. Others are broadly material, they have to do with economic, social and
political structures and processes, including in the present case the processes of financial and
economic crisis and recession. These various factors are often brought into public debate,
including debate around the political strategies, policies and imaginaries of the political
parties, including the Conservatives. For instance one widespread response to Camerons
attack on the Big State is the one Elliott referred to: without the massive interventions of the
Big State we would be facing an even graver crisis. Another is the Keynesian view that
moving immediately to cut government debt as Cameron has advocated would probably turn
the recession into a potentially deep and prolonged depression, that government stimulus
must be maintained until a recovery is clearly established. And one objection to Camerons
proposal for a shift of power from Big Government to the Big Society is also structural that
institutional structures are necessary for the sort of mass engagement in social action that
Camerons political imaginary entails, and they do not exist, and cannot be brought into
existence in any quick or simple way. Guardian commentator Madeleine Bunting (2009)
recalls an interview with Conservative Minister Kenneth Baker in 1988 in which he also
advocated pushing power back to the people, using the metaphor of a wheel, power
pushed from the hub to the rim. What about the spokes, she asked at the time, how can a
wheel hold together without them? For spokes, read institutions. These are criticisms of
Camerons political imaginary in terms of its material, structural conditions of possibility, or
lack of it. The general point I am making is that if, as discourse analysts, we are focusing
upon interdiscursive hybridity in researching social change, we should avoid a purely
discursive analysis which begs the key question of the dialectical relations between discourse
or semiosis and the material facets of social life which are crucial for whether a particular
discursive innovation is selected and retained.
Let me say a little about retention. This CPE category can be elucidated in terms of
the CDA categories of recontextualization, operationalization and order of discourse. The
retention of a political imaginary like Camerons implies its recontextualization within the
many and various contexts which would need to be drawn into a system of governance
corresponding to the Big Society local government, neighbourhood governance,
governance of public services such as health and education, and so forth. One feature of such
recontextualization that I have discussed for instance in the case of transition in Central and
Eastern Europe, especially Romania, e.g. in my book Language and Globalization (2006), is
that when innovative discourses are appropriated within diverse contexts they enter into
complex relations with existing discourses which tend to result in new hybrid discourses
which no orchestrating state, as in Camerons model, is likely to be able to predict, control or
manage. Retention also implies operationalization the discourse of social action being
dialectically enacted as practices and structures which, semiotically, include genres, for
instance genres of public deliberation and decision making. Of course such genres already
exist, but what shifting power from the Big State to the Big Society would mean, if it means
anything, is a new and highly complex apparatus of governance structures, practices and
genres. Operationalization also includes the discourse of social action being dialectically
inculcated in new ways of being, new identities, and, semiotically, new styles a cultural
transformation as Cameron indicates which involves ironically, one might say, in view of
critiques of the aspirations of totalitarian socialist states to produce the new man the state
encouraging people to think, act, interact and communicate differently. Cultural
governance, as it is sometimes called, governance through bringing about cultural changes,
which was also an aspiration of Thatcherism for producing a generation of entrepreneurs,
and of New Labour for effecting changes in the culture of the socially excluded. As I said
earlier, this raises doubts about whether Camerons political imaginary would eliminate the
Big State at all, or merely redirect it. Retention, then, implies the transformation of structures
7

and practices whose semiotic facet is the transformation of orders of discourse, more or less
stable and durable articulations of discourses, genres and styles.
Textual analysis in the version of CDA I have been working with includes both
interdiscursive analysis of the discourses, genres and styles drawn upon in a text, and the
mixtures/hybridities and articulations of them, and linguistic analysis of the text in an
inclusive sense, which might address according to the text and nature of the research object
analysis of grammatical, lexical, semantic, pragmatic, argumentative, narrative, metaphorical,
conversation-interactional and so forth features of the text. I have discussed textual analysis
especially in my book Analyzing discourse: textual analysis for social research (2003). In
these terms, we might say that analysis focused upon interdiscursive hybridity needs to look
also at how hybridities are realized linguistically, or how they are textured. In addition, as and
where appropriate analysis may need to be multi-modal, looking for instance at connections
between linguistic features and features of visual images. I have discussed for instance how
changes in interdiscursive relations are realized linguistically in changes in classification, and
in the texturing of classificatory relations in texts, drawing upon perspectives on
classification from the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein and the political
theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in textual analysis. For instance Laclau and
Mouffe (1985) theorize the political process and hegemony in terms of the simultaneous
working of two logics, a logic of difference which creates differences and divisions, and a
logic of equivalence which subverts existing differences and divisions. This can usefully be
extended to a general characterization of social processes of classification people in all
social practices are continuously dividing and combining, producing and subverting
differences and divisions. And this applies to the textual moment of social practices. Elements
(words, phrases, etc) are constantly being combined and divided in texts, prior combinations
and separations are being subverted, and new ones are being created. In my paper Discourse,
social theory and social research: the discourse of welfare reform (Fairclough 2000b) I
discussed in these terms a government press release on the occasion of the Labour Green
Paper on Welfare Reform of 1998. The headline and the two paragraphs I described as the
lead are as follows:
Frank Field Launches New Contract for Welfare
Frank Field, Minister for Welfare Reform, today unveiled the Governments Green Paper on Welfare Reform
New Ambitions for Our Country A New Contract for Welfare.
Mr Field said that the Governments programme for welfare reform would promote opportunity instead of
dependence, and would be based on work for those who can, and security for those who cant.

I suggested that this selects certain features of the vision of a reformed welfare system in the
Green Paper, and gives a particular spin to the Green Paper. The spin in the press release is
partly Frank Fields and partly Tony Blairs, and I suggested that they spin it in different
ways corresponding to their somewhat different political stances. The press release goes on to
include quotations from both of them. In the case of Field, the quotation begins:
This Green Paper has a central aim: work for those who can; security for those who cannot.
We want to replace a cycle of dependency and insecurity with an ethic for work and savings.
The second paragraph of the lead attributes to Field the formulation of two divisions which
are present in the Green Paper itself: opportunity instead of dependence (where the division
is textured with an adversative complex preposition instead of), and work for those who
can, and security for those who cant (where a double division between those who can
work and those who cant, and between work and security is textured with a conjunction
of two noun phrases incorporating respectively a positive and a negative relative clause). The
former realizes the interdiscursive articulation in the discourse of New Labour of a New
8

Right discourse of welfare dependency with a discourse of equality of opportunity. The

latter realizes a change in Labour welfare discourse from a primary division between those
who have work and those who do not to a primary division between those who can work and
those who cant, by implication restricting social security to those who cant work in
accordance with a refocusing of welfare policy on getting people off welfare and into work.
The quotation from Field repeats the second of these but also includes a division which is
not present in the Green Paper itself, and therefore has particular significance in terms of
Fields spin on welfare reform between a cycle of dependency and insecurity and an
ethic of work and savings, which is textured in the relationship between the direct and the
prepositionally mediated (with) complements of replace). This is again a double division:
dependency and insecurity as against work and savings, but also cycle as against ethic,
and it is combination as well as division dependency is co-classified with insecurity,
work with savings.
Some conclusions
In Discourse and Social Change (1992) and elsewhere I have argued that interdiscursive
analysis has a crucial mediating role in applications of CDA to social research and research
on social change. It mediates between analysis of texts as it has been developed in Linguistics
and allied fields, and various forms of social analysis. And the key categories in
interdiscursive analysis of discourse, genre and style might be regarded as mediating
categories: it is striking that they and especially discourse and genre appear as
categories in both linguistic text analysis and various forms of social and cultural analysis,
even when bringing the two together is not at issue. Statements about texts which go no
further than identifying discourses, genres, styles and their mixtures and articulations seem
incomplete if not somewhat nebulous. We are drawn to ask on the one hand how these
categories and their relations are realized linguistically in texts - or to put it differently, what
the (textual) evidence is; and on the other hand to ask what social processes or changes these
particular articulations of discourses, genres and styles may be the semiotic facet of or to
put it differently, what the point is, the so what? question. So one conclusion is about
putting analysis of interdiscursive hybridity in its place: it is an interface between linguistic
text analysis and whatever forms of social analysis are germane to the particular piece of
research, and it is incomplete without both. But the relationship between textual and social
analysis is not one way, just a matter of fleshing out the interdiscursive analysis socially. I
would argue that accounts of all sorts of social processes and changes think for instance of
changes in governance, e.g. the governance of education are incomplete without accounts
of their semiotic dimensions which include patterns of interdiscursivity. For instance in the
case of changes in governance, such accounts would certainly need to address changes in
genres and in genre chains, for particular configurations of genres and relations between
genres are constitutive features of particular forms of governance.
Let me conclude with a comment on how one justifies interdiscursive analysis. I said
earlier that textual analysis gives evidence for interdiscursive analyses. That is at best a halftruth. Clusters of linguistic features do not on their own provide evidence for the presence of,
say, a genre, or of a mixing of different genres. Particular genres cannot be understood as
merely particular configurations of linguistic features. Genres, discourses and styles are
socially significant entities as well as linguistically significant entities. A change in genre, for
instance, is a social change as well as a linguistic change. It is when one can reasonably posit
some correspondence between a significant change in linguistic patterns in texts and a
significant change in social practices that one can reasonably posit change in discourses,
genres and/or styles. Support for positing such change consists in social analysis as well as
9

analysis of linguistic patterns in texts. And claims for such change are no more than
reasonable conclusions on the basis of the material and analysis available, which are open to
question and correction. You can give right or wrong analyses of certain linguistic features of
texts, e.g. whether clauses are declarative or interrogative or imperative, others cannot be
quite so categorical e.g. whether they are questions or statements, and interdiscursive analysis
is I think even less so. Of course proposed analyses can be well supported, based upon
detailed comparisons of substantial bodies of texts and on interpretations and explanations
arising from thorough social research, or less well supported, but I dont think one can ever
reach a clear divide between right and wrong.

References
Blair, Tony. 1998. The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century. London: Fabian Society.
Bowcott, Owen. & Butler, Peter. 2009. Local good, big state bad: is David Cameron right?
Guardian 11 November 2009.
Bunting, Madeleine 2009. Its all the fault of teachers, nurses and street cleaners, Guardian
12 November 2009.
Cameron,
David.
2009.
Hugo
Young
Lecture
10
November
2009
http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2009/11/David_Cameron_The_Big_Society.a
spx.
Chiapello, Eve. / Fairclough, Norman. 2002 Understanding the new management ideology: a
transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and the new sociology of capitalism.
Discourse and Society 13.2: 185-208.

Elliott, Larry. 2009. Dont despair Gordon Brown may be on a winner, Guardian 23
November 2009.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Fairclough, Norman. 1993. Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: the
universities. Discourse & Society 4: 133-168.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995a Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995b. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995c. Ideology and identity change in political television. In Fairclough, N.
1995a, 167-181.
Fairclough, Norman. 1999. Democracy and the public sphere in critical research on discourseIn
Wodak, R. / Ludwig, C. (eds) Challenges in a Changing World. Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
Fairclough, Norman. 2000a. New Labour, New Language. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman. 2000b. Discourse, social theory and social research: the discourse of welfare
reform. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.2: 163-195..
Fairclough, Norman. 2000c. Dialogue in the public sphere. In Sarangi, S. / Coulthard, M. (eds.)
Discourse and Social Life. London: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman. 2003a. Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research. London:
Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman. 2003b. Political correctness: the politics of culture and language. Discourse
and Society 14(1): 17-28.
Fairclough, Norman. 2005. Critical Discourse Analysis. Marges Linguistiques 9: 76-94.
10

Fairclough, Norman. 2006. Language and Globalization. London: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. / Jacques, Martin. 1983. The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Laclau, Ernesto. / Mouffe, Chantal. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.
Wilkinson, Richard. / Pickett, Kate. 2010. The Spirit Level. London: Penguin.

11