2001/11/01 by PHILIP GRAHAM, Philip Graham
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Globalization and Cultural Identity #Media, Communication, and Education #University-Industry-Government Innovation Models
paper · doi:10.1177/0957926501012006003
openalex publication_date 2001/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In this article, I show how new spaces are being prefigured for colonization in new economy policy discourses. Drawing on a corpus of 1.3 million words collected from legislatures throughout the world, I show the role of policy language in creating the foundations of an emergent form of political economy. The analysis is informed by principles from critical discourse analysis (CDA), classical political economy and critical media studies. It foregrounds a functional aspect of language called process metaphor to show how aspects of human activity are prefigured for mass commodification by the manipulation of realis and irrealis spaces. I also show how the fundamental element of any new political economy, the property element, is being largely ignored. Current moves to create a privately owned global space, which is as concrete as landed property - namely, the electromagnetic spectrum - has significant ramifications for the future of social relations in any global knowledge economy.