An exploration of the ideology in economic and management sciences textbooks : a critical discourse analysis.
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Date
2012
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Abstract
Pupils acquire skills, knowledge, values and attitudes through the important institution of
education. An essential tool used in the transmission of these socially approved attitudes and
values is the textbook. Because teacher content knowledge is an ongoing challenge in South
Africa, school textbooks are being viewed as an important source of content knowledge.
Textbooks used in the apartheid era in South Africa were subjects of numerous studies which
found that textbooks were capable of transmitting the dominant ideology of the then
apartheid government. Given the important role that textbooks are expected to play in postapartheid
South African classroom, it becomes crucial to examine the ideologies being
reflected and transmitted through this medium of instruction in the post-apartheid era. This
study therefore set out to explore the ideologies that are manifest in Economic and
Management Sciences (EMS) textbooks.
This study adopted a qualitative research approach and engaged the tenets of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its methodological framework. The use of CDA revealed how
the content of the selected EMS textbooks represent particular ideologically orientations. The
dominant discourses that emerged from the analysis were the stereotypical positioning of
gender roles (a subjugation of women; contingency of women‟s success on male support);
entrepreneurship leads to wealth creation; the advocacy of a free-market system;
reinforcement of the hegemonic positioning of business; deficient service provisioning as a
normality; business and production‟s precedence over the environment and finally that
globalisation is natural and unproblematic. These discourses disclose that the textbooks under
study have profound strains of neoliberal ideology. The content of the textbooks legitimates
the values of the free market system and neoliberalism as it reinforces and reifies the
normality of personal wealth accumulation and individual endeavour. EMS textbooks were
thus found to have potential as hegemonic tools capable of influencing pupils toward
assimilating and accepting the ideology of neo-liberalism as being natural, ethical, moral and
acceptable.
Description
Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.
Keywords
Economics--South Africa--Textbooks., Management--South Africa--Textbooks., Effective teaching--South Africa., Theses--Education.