"The weight of uniform" : a discursive construction of civil servant policy in Hong Kong Government’s open letters to colleagues in 2020-2022

Abstract

Hong Kong has been facing an unprecedented challenge imposed by the social unrest and epidemic since 2020. To help the society grapple with the nadir and restore its prosperity, civil servants have been under the radar of both the government and the community to meet political and public expectations. Against this backdrop, this study adopted a text-informed policy analysis to unveil how the internal workplace communication of civil servant policy from 2020 to 2022 might have an interaction with the socio-political contexts. In particular, ‘Letter to Colleagues’, an inside top-down written communication which is also published online for free access, was examined with Hyland’s Model of Interaction to uncover its discursive style in presenting civil servant policy (Hyland, 2002). The linguistic devices identified were then investigated with Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach to understand its interplay with the external contexts (Fairclough, 1992). This dissertation found the prevalence of attitude markers, boosters, reader pronouns and appeals to shared knowledge was correlated to the political challenges caused by the social unrest, epidemic, exodus of civil servants and the Secretary for Civil Service’s political career setback in the letters. These linguistic stratagems minimise discursive room for discussion and draw on social values to accentuate the government’s ideology of absolute allegiance from public officers to promote internal and external political stability. Nevertheless, the imbalance between boosters and hedges as well as the lack of questions in the texts may demonstrate a rather asymmetric employer-employee relations which had discouraged bottom-up workplace communication. This dissertation has hence offered an original perspective to understand the rhetorical ways the polity communicated with its employees for the recent civil servant policy reform.