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Article published In:
Multimodality, Politics and Ideology
Edited by David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen
[Journal of Language and Politics 15:3] 2016
► pp. 322–336

Strategic diagrams and the technologization of culture

| Södertörn University
| Örebro University, Sweden
Strategic diagrams are becoming ubiquitous across all forms of social practices, used to map out core elements and processes in private and public institutions and also for more localized and individual activities – where, for example, so that it reads: where, for example, early years school children can manage attitudinal goals. These are easy to produce with cheap software providing templates and tools to do so. This paper shows how these diagrams must be placed in the ideological shift to neoliberal governance with its emphasis on the market, flexibility and competition. All things and processes, however intangible, are viewed as assets with simple cause-effect relations, to be converted into tangible outcomes and maximised outputs. Taking a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, we analyse two cases, from a university and an early-years school.
Keywords: New Public Management, marketization, discourse, multimodality, performance management
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Strategic diagrams and neoliberal ideology
  • 3.Theoretical framework
  • 4.Analysing strategic diagrams
    • 4.1A university strategic diagram
    • 4.2Primary school strategic diagram
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 4 August 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15.3.06led
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