Never Mind the Buzzwords: Comparing Social Enterprise Policy-Making in the United Kingdom and Australia

Abstract

Comparative studies of social enterprise have shown that social enterprise exhibits distinctive characteristics across ‘world regions’. This article uses corpus analysis to empirically explore social enterprise policy in the United Kingdom and Australia. We explore convergence in both datasets by looking at semantic structure, comparing each country’s policy corpus against ‘everyday’ language. This allows a comparison of the convergences between the two datasets (policy discourses) compared to a control (everyday language). Although both are reflective of tropes associated with social policy, we also explore linguistic divergence to unpack the different ways that social enterprise is represe..