This book targets a wide audience—all those influenced by the ways in which governing takes place; in other words, everyone! More specifically, it is directed to those involved in policy development, policy-making, and policy analysis, and those studying these topics. The poststructural perspective it offers encourages policy workers and policy analysts to ask novel and challenging questions about the roles they play in policy development and how they do their work. In this Introduction, the emphasis is on what a poststructural approach can bring to policy analysis. How is policy thought about differently through a poststructural lens? What is gained from a poststructural perspective in the policy domain?
Poststructuralism is not a singular theory. Still it is possible to identify some broad parameters of a poststructural approach. There is, in general, a questioning of Enlightenment assumptions concerning reason, emancipation, science and progress, and disquiet regarding connections between this thinking and social inequality. Attention is directed to the heterogeneous practices, in particular the knowledge practices, that produce hierarchical and inegalitarian forms of rule. By emphasizing a plurality of practices, it becomes possible to insist that the realities we live are contingent, open to challenge and change. Because things could be otherwise, the firming up of particular social arrangements is seen to involve politics, used here in an expansive sense to mean the active shaping or making of the taken for granted.
The emphasis on heterogeneity and contingency offers a refreshing skepticism about the full range of “things” usually associated with policy, including policy itself. Rather than essences, “things” are “done” or “made”, constituted, or brought into being. It follows that “things” commonly treated as entities (e.g., “organizations”, “institutions”, “the economy”, “nation-states”), can also be “undone” or “unmade”. Similarly, political “subjects” are understood to be emergent or in process, shaped in ongoing interactions with discourses and other practices, rather than founding or unchanging types of being who possess a fixed human essence or nature. Numerous concepts prove useful in making these arguments, though these can be drawn upon selectively: discourse, subjectification, practices, power-knowledge, governmentality, enactment, performativity, social construction, contestation, reflexivity, among others. Key concepts are introduced in Chapter 3.
While poststructuralism has been extremely influential across the humanities and social sciences, in the field of policy research and analysis it occupies a less well-articulated and more contested position. This gap, we suggest, needs to be addressed. This book aims to provide a succinct and accessible overview of what it means to analyze policy from a Foucault-influenced poststructural perspective, as elaborated in subsequent chapters. It presents a case for why it is important to undertake this form of critical analysis by showing the value of rethinking policy development through a poststructural lens.
A starting point for these reflections is that, as Wendy Brown (1998) suggests, we live in societies “saturated” with policy. From the moment we get up in the morning until we go bed—and even in bed—a panoply of legislative rules and regulations shape what we do and influence how we act. Going further, a poststructural perspective highlights how these rules and regulations bring into play a wide range of professional and “expert” knowledges that have a significant role in how we are governed and in producing the kinds of “subject” we are encouraged to become.
This use of knowledges in the plural signals the skepticism mentioned above—the premises and proposals associated with disciplines, including political science, psychology, epidemiology, social work, anthropology, and so on, are seen as contingent historical creations, human constructions, that need to be interrogated rather than enshrined as “truth”. This kind of approach can be unsettling. Seeing knowledges as constructed or “made” can dislodge some of the certainties and orthodoxies upon which conventional policy approaches are based. Consider, for example, Sophie Watson’s (2000: 73) interrogation of her own discipline, social policy: “in Foucauldian terms social policy is a highly normative discipline which constructs ideal models of society based on notions of social justice which disguise the concrete functioning of power”. Yet it is precisely this perspective that enables her to begin to see the complex and contradictory effects apparently benign policies may have. The skepticism poststructuralism brings to knowledges and other “things” is signaled through the use of what are called scare quotes, such as we have inserted. Indeed, wherever we fear that the contingency of a term is not immediately visible we will place it in quotation marks to make it so, e.g., “subjects”, “objects”, “places”, and “problems”.1
In a poststructural understanding, government involves more than conventional legislative institutions and political parties. It is broader even than civil society and social movements. It includes numerous sites, agencies, and “ways of knowing” that interrelate in important ways to shape social rules. Foucault proposed the term government be defined, in general, to mean the “conduct of conduct” (Gordon 1991: 2). In this broader understanding, government refers to any form of activity that aims to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of people. Government can concern how people monitor or regulate their own conduct, how interpersonal relations are guided and controlled, as well as the state-generated rules, regulations, provisions, and punishments we usually associate with the term. “Policy” in this view refers to how order is maintained through politics, understood as the heterogeneous strategic relations that shape lives and worlds.
An important part of this “order maintaining” activity involves categorization: of “objects” (e.g., “traffic”, “addiction”, “literacy”); of “subjects” (e.g., “citizens”, “low SES”, “asylum seekers”); and “places” (e.g., “the state”, “Europe”). Looking specifically at “subjects”, Shore and Wright (2003: 4) make the important point that “from the cradle to the grave, people are classified, shaped and ordered according to policies”. Thinking about such categories as the effects of policies rather than as necessary and natural ways of grouping people creates an opening to consider how they are produced and how they translate into diverse lived realities. Annemarie Mol (1999) introduces the concept of ontological politics to emphasize that such lived realities are created by, rather than reflected in, social practices, including policy and research practices.
With this broader canvas, policy workers are encouraged to reflect on the role they play in governing practices. How do the specific tasks they undertake contribute to shaping social order? What assumptions about people and the world underpin their activities and the policies to which they contribute? What sorts of effects follow from governing in a particular way, effects that are typically ignored in a focus on “measurable outcomes”?
These are some of the questions pursued in the book. To assist in this project we introduce a simple tool called “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” or the WPR approach to policy analysis. As is outlined in Chapter 2, this “how to” guide or “analytic strategy” brings together a sequence of questions that allows an opening up of policies to the kind of interrogation signaled above. An explicit challenge to the conventional view that policies address problems, it approaches policies as problematizations that produce “problems” as particular types of problems. By asking how “problems” are represented or constituted in policies, it becomes possible to probe underlying assumptions that render these representations intelligible and the implications that follow for how lives are imagined and lived.
Earlier we claimed that poststructuralism has occupied a less well-articulated and more contested position in the field of policy analysis than in some other areas of social research and practice. But there are well-developed pockets of policy research in the social sciences that have been shaped by, and have shaped, poststructural thinking. In the past 40 years, subfields or subdisciplines have emerged out of engagements with poststructuralism: “policy anthropology” is one, “policy sociology” another, as well as the field of “governmentality studies” that traverses many of the social and political sciences (including policy anthropology and policy sociology). These contributions and insights have shaped our own thinking about policy and policy analysis and have, in some cases, quite clearly contributed to the thinking of policy analysts who have deployed the analytic strategy which is the focus of this book: the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach.
Anthropologists influenced by Foucault, for example, have opened up new perspectives on the study of policy through a focus on policy as a cultural phenomenon. By seeing policy as cultural, it is possible to reflect on the way policy has become an increasingly central concept and instrument in the organization of contemporary societies. Similar to the concepts “family”, “society”, or “nation”, “policy” is a key way of conceptualizing and symbolizing social relations. As Shore and Wright (2011: 2) argue: “There are few, if any, populations today that are not in some way or another touched by the classificatory logics and regulatory powers of policy”. Shore (2012: 90; emphasis in original) distinguishes the anthropological approach from conventional policy analysis in this way:
Whereas most scholars tend to treat policy as a given, seldom questioning its meaning or ontological status as a category, an anthropology of policy starts from the premise that “policy” is itself a curious and problematic social and cultural construct that needs to be unpacked and contextualized if its meanings...