The provision of information is generally not a technical activity, but rather a contextualized social action. This paper addresses that omission with a detailed multimodal analysis of the UK's longest running policy nudge. Despite the importance it places on communication strategies, critical scholarship on nudge has not yet investigated the linguistic techniques it uses in practice. I argue that it helps legitimate and instantiate neoliberal political rationalities by privatising (both structurally and morally) responsibility for public health care. The increasing popularity of nudge over the last decade coincides with a sustained programme of fiscal austerity which disproportionately penalises the poor, while food poverty and social inequality have increased. Three intersecting strategies are identified: (1) the representation of (northern, working class) lifestyles as delinquent (2) a discourse of risk and threat mobilised through emotional manipulation and (3) a discourse of ‘smarter’ consumerism.
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I bring the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality into dialogue with multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine how this is realised in a series of cartoon government adverts. I argue it is a form of governmentality which uses subtle semiotic techniques to secure voluntary compliance with policy goals. This approach seeks to develop a range of intervention strategies, inspired by behavioural psychology, in order to change people's behaviours without them necessarily recognising this has happened. The UK government's anti-obesity ‘Change4Life’ campaign is an example of the increasing reliance on ‘nudge’ tactics in public policy.
This study investigates the multimodal strategies used in social marketing to emotionally manipulate and persuade children and their parents to adopt healthier lifestyles. Our findings raise concerns about the moral legitimacy of using fear-inducing and commercial strategies in order to (effectively) raise public awareness of and responses to Type 2 diabetes, strategies which do little to address the environmental factors which are associated with increasing rates of the disease. Specifically, we describe, in multi-semiotic detail, three discursive techniques deployed in the campaign to achieve these ends: (1) the depiction of grief and amplification of diabetes-related danger, (2) the promotion of diabetes risk and localisation of individuals' responsibility for their health and (3) the commercial branding and framing of the Diabetes UK/Tesco partnership – including the promotion of goods and services – as a means of diabetes prevention and management. We subject a series of six campaign images (including their layout and accompanying text) to a multimodal discourse analysis, identifying the presence of a range of fear-inducing, stigmatising and commercial strategies, through which the campaign emphasises the dangers of diabetes and advocates personal responsibility for assessing both individual and others' risk of the disease. In this study, we critically examine the ways in which a nationwide health promotion campaign – the 2013 Diabetes UK/Tesco diabetes campaign, the largest of its kind in the UK – seeks to raise the general public's awareness of Type 2 diabetes.
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