Nudge and the politics of wellbeing: bringing biopower into dialogue with critical discourse analysis

This paper investigates the textual processes of modern biopower by analysing the use of ‘nudge’ tactics in health policy. It brings the Foucauldian concept of ‘biopower’ into dialogue with critical discourse analysis to investigate the increasing use of insights from behavioural economics (or ‘nudge’) in UK health policy. The analysis shows how the surrounding order of discourse provides the conditions for individualistic, consumerist policy interventions. Aimed at children, the ‘Change4Life’ anti-obesity social marketing campaign simplifies and distorts expert obesity knowledge, while pathologising the lifestyles of the working classes. Through warnings of biomedical disease risk and commercially endorsed behaviour change slogans, children are inculcated into active, self-disciplinary citizenship. The increasing popularity of nudge among state actors lies in its comfortable fit with neoliberal ideology, privatising and individualising responsibility for welfare. I question its claims to ‘empower’ citizens by changing their lifestyle preferences and argue that instead its offers governments a way of ignoring socioeconomic inequality. The 2017 award of the Nobel prize to nudge theorist Richard Thaler signals the extent of its influence in contemporary governance. In this paper I offer a conceptual framework with which to critically engage with it.