A LITERARY APPROACH TO MANAGERIAL DISCOURSE AFTER THE NHS REFORMS

The 1990 NHS and Community Care Act can be seen as the culmination of the importation into the UK National Health Service of 'business' lang uage. This has entailed struggles between the values of new general ma nagers and the traditional professions and unprecedented attention to issues of 'measurement'. A recent study of NHS Trusts involved three y early rounds of interviews with managers and the administration of que stionnaires to the nursing workforce in the same areas. Although the m ain intentions of the research lay in gauging the job satisfaction of the workforce and describing the managers' approaches to organisationa l strategy, the way that each group used language soon emerged as an a rea of interest and as a pointer to the foundational values and episte mologies of each group. An approach to the texts of interviews and que stionnaire responses was informed partly by an analysis of discourse, elaborated by Foucault and others and partly by deconstruction, an app roach usually associated with literary texts. The approach to analysis is based on the realisation that language is structured in a way that reflects existing power relations and that attention to metaphor and other rhetorical devices can give insight into these discourses. After briefly introducing the policy context and a particular approach to l iterary texts, this paper offers analysis of how managers talked about measurement and financial constraints.