Semiotic knowledge brokering: An additional language for understanding policy convergence in the European Education Policy Space

Abstract

This research explored the difficulties confronting educational policy convergence in the European Union (EU) and developed a working hypothesis on the basis of Luhmann’s (1995) and Lotman’s (1990) theory of social systems and cultural semiotics. It put forward the arguments that (1) policy convergence in education is a complex process of dialogue between multiply coded social semiotic systems, (2) any change in the functioning of social systems cannot disregard the semiotic substrata that underlie them and (3) locating and understanding semiotic areas of entropy in communication offer valuable insights into the ongoing challenges encountered in policy convergence.  

In service of the above-mentioned objectives, this study selected education policy documents of Italy, France and Greece for the period 2001 to 2017 as the corpus for analysis. We explored the semiosis of the dialogic process with EU policy documents of the same period, with focus on three parameters of Jacobson’s (1985) model of communication; (2) conducted a thematic qualitative text analysis of the documents using MAXQDA 18; and (3) created concept maps for the thematic category ‘goals and objectives of education’ via the Leximancer software.

The results revealed heretofore hidden areas of entropy at the semiotic level, confirmed the value of semiotics as complementary data to the accountability paradigm and repositioned semiotic knowledge brokering at the core of policy convergence.

Keywords: Policy convergence, education, semiotics, entropy, knowledge brokering.