The ideal of non-coherence in the World Bank’s social capital reforms

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of a World Bank document representing a version of the new 'Social Capital' approach of International Financial Institutions (IFIs). This stance involves a rhetorical reorientation away from a much criticized unilateral approach to the poor indebted countries and to a more bi-lateral and participatory attitude. Analysis suggests that this 'post-ideological' posture is reflected in the text in the form of a copious rhetoric of 'complex differentiation'. This consists of characterizing the world in the abstract terms of multiple independent factors which work against any more coherent picture of the historical process and its contradictions. While such formal elements appear to be conditional on and anchored in concrete content, they are shown in fact to reflect the negation of such content (and thus coherence). In this way, an apparently limitless proliferation of free-floating isolated elements substitutes for faithful representation of the underlying social cleavages. The implications of the analysis for contrasting conceptualizations of abstraction in texts, as well as for the notion of utopian discourse, are critically discussed. 2Key words: gratuitous complexity, abstraction, utopian discourse, Social Capital, formIt is commonly noted of discursive form and content that whilst conceptually distinguishable, they are inseparable in practice. However, the exact nature of the situated form-content relationship, including its potentially varying and contradictory nature, is generally not explicitly focused on in critical textual analyses. What there has been however are detailed studies of how form obscures aspects of content as part of a discussion of the ideological operation of abstraction in texts. Generally speaking, abstraction can be understood in two different ways. Firstly, there is the process of thinking and of theoretical development whereby one must break down the world as it presents itself to us, into manageable parts. It is about making sense of our surroundings by 'separating out, focusing and putting emphasis' on only some aspects of one's world, and thus organizing it in sensible ways: 'In effect, a piece has been pulled from or taken out of the whole and is temporarily perceived as standing apart ' (Ollman, 1993: 24-25).The end-goal of this process then would be greater understanding of the concrete whole.In contrast to this to and fro movement between abstract and concrete, the second meaning of abstraction references a certain mismatch between abstract constructs and concrete reality which inhibits understanding of the latter. It references a 'suborder of particularly ill fitting…constructs' which, whether 'because they are too narrow, take in too little, focus too exclusively on appearances, or are otherwise badly composed…do not 3 allow an adequate grasp of their subject matter'. In this sense they stand for Ollman (1993: 26) as 'the basic unit of ideology'. The textual operation of abstraction in this second sense is illustrated in Fairclough's (20...

The new abolitionists? The World Bank and the ‘boldness’ of global school fee elimination reforms

“…However, there are multiple conditions on the SFAI that weaken the claim to boldness and thereby disarticulate, or 'un-cohere', the WB from its stance as a new abolitionist (see Weltman & Upchurch, 2010). Beginning with the first page of Six steps, the claim to boldness is tempered by the coordinating conjunction 'or' and the final prepositional phrase 'for the poor' in the description of SFAI: 'The bold strategy of SFAI is to provide practical and financial support to countries that have decided to eliminate school fees or provide targeted fee exemptions, subsidies, and incentives for the poor' (p. 1, emphasis added).…”

“…These texts make extensive use of modality, which, as Weltman and Upchurch (2010) note in their analysis of WB texts, leaves the degree of commitment open to interpretation. For example, the 1995 document contains declarative statements about the importance of primary education (first example below), but it is not as clear as to what constitutes 'free' education (second and third examples):…”