The State of the Nation: "Businification" of Political and Rhetoric in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Via the idea of businification - a neologism describing the infiltration of business ideology into political and media texts - this book traces the shift towards neo-liberalism in post-apartheid South Africa through the rhetorical gestures of the country's political narrators. In an application of Critical Discourse and Content Analysis, it examines linguistic changes within the corpus of the annually recurring State-of-the-Nation-Address from 1994 to 2012. This analysis is a contribution to research on business language from a non-Western perspective. Its interdisciplinary approach is of interest to researchers of South African political history, African Studies, Media Studies, and Sociolinguistics. Irina Turner holds a M.A. degree in Media Theory and Practice from the University of Cape Town, South Africa and is a qualified Arts Manager (Diplom FH, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, Germany).