Peter Lunt:

The language of Regulation: analysing the policy documents of the financial
services authority, UK

Abstract

I am embarking on a new project in collaboration with Sonia Livingstone examining the public understanding of regulation. The project compares two sectors (Media regulation and financial services) both of which have been subject to substantial reform in the UK in recent years. In each case a sector that was regulated by a variety of specialist regulators with specific expertise and mainly operating as rule-book regulators have been replaced by super-regulatory bodies (OFCOM and FSA). These bodies are interesting for a variety of reasons. They are part of attempts at softer, more proactive regulatory practices linked to broader currents of public representation, engagement and education. They work on the principle that appropriate conditions can encourage self regulation with the benefits of tying key actors into policy processes whilst retaining sanctions where appropriate. The regulators are also interesting institutions which are multi-functional in that they create an interesting institutional framework for a quazi public sphere linking commercial interests, consumer/citizen representatives, research and education, policy directives and legal responsibilities. This is governance without government and regulation without law and as such these new arrangements are interesting examples of governmentality -- the operation of dispersed, discursively organized powers.

Our research project will examine the practices of the regulators (especially as they seek to represent, educate and understand the citizen/viewer/consumer) and the public understanding of this new mode of regulation. An important part of the empirical work for the project will be the analysis of policy and consultation documents that are generated in profusion by the regulators and related institutions -- the new regulators being contemporary institutions, operate with a considerable degree of documentary transparency. My paper will present my ideas about how this analytic task can be approached with some detailed examples of documentary material.

These documents are not examples of the kind of dialogue usually treated in the Broadcast Talk seminars. However, I will make the case that they have some of the features of mediated institutional discourse as it engages in public dialogue. They are mediated interactions of a certain kind and as the starting point of rhetorical and argument analysis will demonstrate they are interventions in a complex dialogue concerning power, rights and responsibility. In subsequent phases of the project we will be examine media representations of regulation and conducting qualitative studies of public understanding.