ABSTRACT
I shall begin with an example which points to a number of features of social life in contemporary (‘late modern’) society which demand a critical awareness of discourse. Most accounts of change in contemporary social life give a more or less central place to change in the economic system: the change from ‘Fordism’ to ‘flexible accumulation’, as Harvey (1990) puts it. Fordism is the ‘mass production’ form of capitalism (named after the car magnate Henry Ford) which dominated the earlier part of this century. Flexible accumulation is a more complex concept but it basically means greater flexibility at various levels – in production (the production process can be quickly shifted to produce small batches of different products), in
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analysts see ‘flexibility’ as no more than a new discourse which is ideologically motivated – if working people can be persuaded that ‘flexibility’ is an unavoidable feature of contemporary economies, they are more likely to be ‘flexible’ about their jobs disappearing, the need to retrain, deteriorating pay and conditions of work, and so forth. Harvey disagrees. Flexibility is a real feature of contemporary economies for which there is ample scientific evidence – though that does not mean that ‘flexible accumulation’ has totally displaced ‘Fordism’, the reality is rather a mix of old and new regimes. Nor does it mean that the discourse of flexibility is irrelevant to the reality of flexible accumulation. Far from it: the discourse is an irreducible part of the reality. The change from Fordism to flexible accumulation is inconceivable without the change in economic discourse. Why? Because the emerging global economy is the site of a struggle between the old and the new, and the discourse of flexibility is a vital symbolic weapon in that struggle. It is as Bourdieu (1998) has put it a ‘strong discourse’, that is a discourse which is backed by the strength of all the economic and social forces (the banks, the multinational companies, politicians, and so on) who are trying to make flexibility – the new global capitalism – even more of a reality than it already is. Neoliberal discourse contributes its own particular, symbolic, form of strength to the strength of these social forces.
