Theorising literacy policy: Literacy at Work

Recent shifts in literacy policy have been paralleled by the resurgence of economic rationalism in shaping the educational policies of government (Smith 1993) and the return of a narrow positivism exemplified by the installation of a technico-instrumental model of education inimical to the traditional pursuits of education (Bernstein 1971). The question of how these issues may be critically examined by literacy practitioners come to the fore in analysis of the Australian Language and Literacy Council's document, 'Literacy at Work' (NBEET 1996) [available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 46.14]. This paper draws on a number of bodies of literature to review that document.

First, it seeks to locate the document within the developing debate about competency based training in Australia. Secondly, it seeks to consider the practices whereby the rationality and authoritativeness of accounts is constituted (Silverman and Jones 1976) and the way politically engaged agents accomplish organisational networks of antagonism and alliance to constitute agencies, interests, and structures of control (Callon 1986). Third, it will deploy ideas which direct attention to the way discourses and practices shape and render their objects as governable. It will be argued that the Council's document advances a truncated notion of literacy which detaches it from traditional humanist values and re-attaches it to a vision of a prosperous, competitive society and economy comprised of individuals and enterprises conceptualised as prudent and rational sites of calculation. In this way, the report acts to support the 'market citizenship' which underpins that neo-liberalism based on disembodied individuals linked to the labour market but unattached to the associational life of civil society.

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