Policy, politics, and social control: A systemic functional linguistic analysis of EU employment policy

In this article, I argue that EU employment policy is, in Bernstein’s sense, a form of pedagogic discourse, in which regulation or social control projects instruction. In terms of social control, policy functions to persuade others to do things. In terms of instruction, policy also transmits a neoliberal view of reality. Furthermore, through its regulative and instructional functions, policy depoliticizes by restricting the kinds of social actors that may participate in employment policy making and by restricting alternative construals of employment. For this article, I examine how language functions to realize the employment policy genre. More specifically, I use the resources of genre and register theory of systemic functional linguistics, in order to demonstrate how EU employment policy functions to control and instruct.