The language of ‘nudge’ in health policy: pre-empting working class obesity through ‘biopedagogy’

Focusing on a long-running health campaign, this paper examines the UK government’s use of a policy technique known as ‘nudge’, which draws on behavioural economics in order to shape civic behaviours towards more desirable ends. Public health campaigns tend to be immune to critique because of assumptions that their goals are laudable and that they are ‘unproblematically’ educational. Here I argue that the use of ‘nudge’ tactics helps legitimate a narrowing of the sphere of governmental responsibility for this complex and classed social problem by pathologising working class lifestyles as inherently ‘irrational’. I use critical discourse analysis to explore the textual strategies through which a corpus of TV cartoon adverts enacts a ‘biopedagogic’ discourse and shapes ‘self-disciplinary’ subjectivities, targeting children in particular. Through subtle semiotic markers (register and regional accent) these adverts target a northern English, working class demographic, and shift responsibility onto certain individuals while glossing over the deeply entrenched and escalating forms of social inequality which lie behind the problem. In light of the increasing prominence of ‘soft’ governance techniques like nudge, I argue for a close dialogue between detailed linguistic analytical methods and a Foucauldian analytics of power.