Lifelong learning and the sultans of spin: policy as persuasion?

Abstract

This paper seeks to extend work previously published that points to the importance of rhetorical analysis to policy studies. It argues against the notion that policy can be dismissed as 'spin' and explores further the work of rhetoric within the UK government's policy texts of lifelong learning. For the authors, rhetorical analysis helps to point to the politics of discourse that is at play in policymaking processes. This paper points to some of the conceptual resources upon which one can draw in undertaking rhetorical deconstructions of policy texts and discourses, in this case, of lifelong learning, and one's own role, as analysts and sultans of spin.