Edited by Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 66] 2016
► pp. 297–322
In this chapter I analyse texts composed and exchanged within the New Zealand tertiary education domain in order to explore the “will to govern” (Miller and Rose 2008: 29) in its contemporary manifestation. Using intertextuality as the principle framework, the analysis is grounded in a detailed case study of the use of strategic planning as a technology of government. The investigation reveals the considerable extent to which governments can govern through textual means, notwithstanding a tightening of control over the period studied through changes in regimes of compliance. Notable also in the universities’ enforced adoption of strategic planning is the extent to which the discursive practices that characterise strategic planning in a complex, multi-levelled environment can enhance a liberal rationality of rule.