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Encoding information about the order in which words typically appear has been shown to improve the performance of high-dimensional semantic space models. This requires an encoding operation capable of binding together vectors in an order-sensitive way, and efficient enough to scale to large text corpora. Although both circular convolution and random permutations have been enlisted for this purpose in semantic models, these operations have never been systematically compared. In Experiment 1 we compare their storage capacity and probability of correct retrieval; in Experiments 2 and 3 we compare their performance on semantic tasks when integrated into existing models. We conclude that random permutations are a scalable alternative to circular convolution with several desirable properties.