The purpose of this study is to investigate seven policy documents promulgated by the Queensland Department of Education between 1988 and 1993 on school community decision making to determine the integrity of their discourses and the validity of the assumptions made about contemporary society. Therefore, this study focuses on both the language of the documents and their social context. Interactive analysis, the methodology developed to investigate their language is a compilation of a number of existing approaches to document analysis with emphasis on the interactive nature of the features of language. The legitimacy of the assumptions made about their social context is tested against social conditions described by the oppositional tenets of modernism and postmodernism. The social democratic language of the discourses is often vague and imprecise and has been corrupted by the impact of economic rationalism and corporate managerialism of recent political incursions into the educational domain. The social framework has been manipulated to legitimise the hegemonic centralism concealed in the policy documents and is partly revealed from a modernist position and is exposed in full from a postmodernist position. The study suggests that policy analysts should be alert to the need to review concomitant policy pronouncements and must address the assumptions made about society in the documents and the social context of those documents with greater rigour. The limited implementation of these policies would seem to be attributable to both the corruption of their language and the manipulation of their social framework.