ABSTRACT
This chapter examines one particular set of strategies and cultural assumptions which underlie staff decision-making in a middle school. One of the clearest and most lengthy instances of the use of contrastive rhetoric took the form of a discussion about Countesthorpe College, a well-known comprehensive school lying very much outside the mainstream of educational practice. Contrastive rhetoric is therefore a major part of their strategic repertoire; a crucial means by which they translate institutional power into interactional power and thus exercise control over the decision-making process. The hegemonic process is neither monolithic nor is it immune from forces of resistance and protest which contain the potential for the creation of counter-hegemony and for pushing out rather than drawing in the boundaries of existing practice. Extremist talk therefore consists of a critique of what is, whereas contrastive rhetoric amounts to a defence of what is by virtue of its unfavourable treatment of those things that threaten existing practice.
