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  1. Nov 2022
    1. The “linguistic turn” in the social sciences focused on the socially constructed nature of “reality” (Berger & Luckmann 1979). With this turn, the focus was on the role of language as both describing and construing our understanding of what takes place in society. This means that we cannot assume that language (such as it is produced, for instance, in policy documents, legislation, parliamentary debates, interviews, etc.) merely describes reality; it also construes the ways in which we understand and conceptualise that (social) reality. Another implication of the linguistic turn in the social sciences is that policy texts cannot and should not be dismissed as “mere rhetoric”, with little to do with “real policy” (Saarinen 2008).