Language in the world: properties and powers
A social theoretical explanation
We would wish to stand by the claim that social theory is necessary for an adequate explanation of social action, and that there is good reason to defend linguists' epistemic authority: in other words, linguists know more about the nature of language than those who have not studied language. This does not make the linguist a better human being, or more intelligent, or better placed to make political decisions, but it is a stronger claim about his or her authority to speak about language and its properties - and, in the case of the applied linguist, how it may be taught and learned - than are the claims about alternative discourses. Policy about language in education is declared in language, carried out through language, and intended to operate on language. In no other discipline is the object of study - and of policy - also the medium through which it is discussed, by all parties. This can easily lead to the conflation of practice (being a language user) with different kinds of authority (being a politician, with constitutional authority, or a linguist, with epistemic authority). One of the ways in which a variegated social ontology helps to disambiguate concepts of different kinds, such as these, is by identifying the properties of 'culture' as well as those of 'structure' and of 'agency'. Language may be conceptualized as one element of the cultural stratum of the social world, a resource available to, but pre-existing, its speakers. Speakers are very adept at deploying its resources in pursuit of their interests, and in any actual interaction both the systematic, structural properties of language and the agential, creative properties of speakers continually combine to produce new meanings, new relationships and emergent linguistic products (in the form of new written texts, and genres of text, for example).
The events discussed here were outcomes of human agency. Specific individuals made decisions and acted upon them, and the kind of actors with whom we have been most concerned are those whose actions have an extensive impact. In 1987, the then Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, announced that he had been 'struck by a particular gap' in pupils' knowledge about the English language. It is conceivable that many private citizens (employers, teachers, parents, maybe pupils themselves) had already experienced a similar kind of concern, but a key difference between their reaction to any perceived shortcomings in school pupils' knowledge about the English language and Mr Baker's reaction is that he was enabled by his structural location to cause changes in policy to happen, whereas most people do not have this power.
Baker, of course, had his own individual history: a particular experience of education, certain literary tastes, relationships, ambitions, in short, his 'psychobiography'. These individual qualities and characteristics are likely to have influenced his political priorities, but it is his occupation of a role within particular social relations which made it possible for him to instigate a national enquiry into the teaching of English language. The office of Secretary of State existed before Baker assumed it, and continued to exist after he left the government. It is an office which has meaning only in relation to other components of the social structure of which it is itself one component. Members of 'governments' exist in relation to the populations they govern. Thus, one property of structures is their relational nature, and although the details of this relationship may change over time, it remains an enduring property of this analytically distinct kind of entity.
Government offices outlast the entire lifetime of any individual, despite the fact that they require living individuals to occupy them and to take actions from within those positions. In this sense, structures have a temporal priority over individuals, and different temporal modalities are relevant to structure and to agency. Within Baker's political career, his role as Secretary of State for Education lasted only a few years, but the projects he pursued as a member of Thatcher's cabinet were heavily influenced by a number of contextual factors operating on government in the UK in the 1980s, and arrangements that were set up during his time in office provide a context for subsequent holders of the office, including the current incumbent.
By 'contextual factors' we mean things like: existing legislation (e.g. the Education Acts of 1902, 1944 and 1962); the fact that many teachers were already organized as members of trade unions, which themselves had existing relationships (and disagreements) with other components of the trade union movement; popular views about 'good' grammar and its relationship to 'good' conduct, and the promulgation of such views in the press and other mass media, and so on. These factors provide a context for attempts to change practice in schools, and while some of them may have helped to pave the way for the kind of change Baker imagined, others provided significant resistance.
Among the properties of social structures, then, is their endurance beyond the actions or intentions of individuals. If we are parents, for example, in a country such as the UK, we are obliged to ensure that our children attend school, facing penalties if we fail to do so. We can seek to exert some degree of choice about which school the children will attend, and we can even decide to provide alternative schooling at home, but we cannot without fear of sanction ignore the institutions of our society which contribute to the context of our own actual experience of parenting. Archer (1995) alludes to people's routine recognition of this 'social fact':
An inescapable part of our inescapably social condition is to be aware of its constraints, sanctions and restrictions on our ambitions - be they for good or evil. Equally, we acknowledge certain social blessings such as medication, transportation and education: without their enablements our lives and hopes would both be vastly more circumscribed.
Whatever Baker's personal vision or individual charisma, he could act only within the social context obtaining at the time. As Archer continues:
... we delude one another by the pretence that society is simply what we choose to make it and make of it, now or in any generation, for generically 'society' is that which nobody wants in exactly the form they find it and yet it resists both individual and collective efforts at transformation - not necessarily by remaining unchanged but altering to become something else which still conforms to no one's ideal.
At the point at which Baker made his intervention, there already existed a range of perceptions about: the validity of current practice in the teaching of English; the desirability of different sorts of change to this practice; who was best placed to decide on and bring about such change; and, crucially, the nature of language and how it is learned. Baker did not create these conflicting views, but his actions sparked off a series of sociocultural interactions which themselves contributed to the context for the further reforms which followed. In this account, human agency is crucial, but people's actions are always contextualized by structural relations. The Education Secretary who took up office in the Labor government which then came to power a decade later did so in a context heavily shaped by the events in which Baker had been involved. The minister concerned was David Blunkett, who demonstrated his commitment to the National Literacy Strategy in 1998 by pledging to resign if 'targets' for pupils' test performance were missed. The course set for policy about written English under the Thatcher government changed in some respects but remained remarkably stable in others. (Blunkett subsequently became Home Secretary, and the subject of the English language resurfaced in this later stage of his career, as we shall see.)
The final topic is a consideration of the international social context for some debates about language varieties in which there are striking similarities with arguments put forward by protagonists reported here. In particular, we would point to a significant overlap between arguments - some of which were considered above and others which will be considered presently - that treat language policies as an aspect of social governance, and more radical arguments that are concerned with the preservation of languages from extinction or suppression. It is this congruence of views about the nature of languages, what languages themselves can achieve, and their relations to 'national' cultures.
