No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Beyond National Policymaking: Conceptions of Myth in Interpretive Policy Analysis and Their Value for IR
Abstract
The ‘interpretive turn’ in policy analysis highlights how language and discourse shape our knowledge of the social world and influence policymaking. In challenging the traditional assumption that problems are part of a pre-given neutral reality to which policymaking responds, authors have started to pay attention to argumentation and persuasion and to elements such as narratives and myths that structure discourse. With the umbrella term interpretive policy analysis uniting interpretive-hermeneutic and poststructuralist approaches, advocates of this kind of research have been very prolific in developing conceptions of myths. As policymaking need not be restricted by national boundaries, this chapter takes stock of the contribution of interpretive policy analysis to the study of myth and how this could be compatible with questions in International Relations.
... This handbook sets out to fill this lacuna by asking a set of questions mainstream approaches tend to neglect, the most basic being: how do ideas, arguments or discourses shape policies in the specific institutional context of the European Union as a multi-level polity? It is the handbook's objective to offer theoretically grounded answers to this question and thereby open a conversation between critical policy studies and European integration theory (for a similar endeavour, see Münch 2016b). ...
... This handbook sets out to fill this lacuna by asking a set of questions mainstream approaches tend to neglect, the most basic being: how do ideas, arguments or discourses shape policies in the specific institutional context of the European Union as a multi-level polity? It is the handbook's objective to offer theoretically grounded answers to this question and thereby open a conversation between critical policy studies and European integration theory (for a similar endeavour, see Münch 2016b). ...
Hubert Heinelt and Sybille Münch (eds.): Handbook of European Policies: Interpretive approaches to the EU, Handbooks of Research on Public Policy series, Series editor: Frank Fischer, Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar 2018
There is a plethora of handbooks addressing the European Union and European integration in general and a number of publications focusing on European policies. However, the field has so far fallen short of an interpretive perspective on European policy-making and the development of EU policies. This handbook sets out to fill this lacuna by asking a set of questions, mainstream approaches tend to neglect, the most basic being: how do ideas, arguments or discourses shape policies in the specific institutional context of the European Union as a multi-level polity?
The book consists of a more general, conceptual part (with contributions, for example, by Claudio M. Radaelli, Sabine Saurugger and Vivien A. Schmidt) and a second part covering individual EU policies. The third part tackles empirically topics cutting across different EU policy areas, such as the role of expertise.
Free author copy: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1e-1y3Qu6ubov9
Imaginaries are understood to be both discursive and cognitive constructs that shape behaviour, policies, and institutions – but how do longstanding imaginaries evolve in new circumstances, and how do they interact with existing power structures in changed circumstances? Drawing on conceptions of discursive power, this paper investigates the interplay of power with both new and old imaginaries in the case of Afghanistan, specifically regarding alternative energy futures. Employing an interpretive approach, we draw on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with elite stakeholders and policy observers, to provide an account of the relations between alternative energy futures imaginaries and political power. We demonstrate, how certain discursive practices are made possible, authorised and articulated through imaginative geographies. Critically, the government-advocated imaginary of Afghanistan as an energy corridor and hence an energy importer both represents the views of several powerful interests and concurs with the long-held idea of Afghanistan as a buffer state. In this way, political path dependencies are reinforced through a supportive imaginary, just as the dominant imaginary is itself reinforced by the main stakeholders. While in line with our interpretive epistemology we do not make claims for the specific configuration of imaginaries being generalisable elsewhere, we do find the general theoretical approach useful for understanding discursive aspects of conflict zone politics, particularly vis-`a-vis energy system trajectories.
Calls for a more “global” international relations (IR) based on theories grounded in world rather than Western histories have highlighted the Eurocentrism of history within the discipline. Global IR literature, however, neglects the role of tempocentrism in fostering that Eurocentrism. Tempocentric IR portrays the past as an extrapolation of the (Eurocentric) present, suggesting an inevitability and normality to Western dominance of international relations and obscuring non-Western significance. It also deprives IR theory-building of a broader pool of examples to inform existing theories. This article locates those centrisms in the textbooks of the discipline, while drawing on interdisciplinary research to reveal the disproportionate influence of the first years of higher education on students’ future worldviews. It is here that students are exposed to a historical grand narrative that establishes the boundaries of their inquiries and outlines what is, and what is not, significant. For a more “global” IR, therefore, it is suggested that textbook historical narratives require reconstructing in two ways. First, textbook history should be presented through connections and relations rather than substances. Second, historical chapters should reveal the multiple layers of time, including the deeper past, that have been instrumental in constituting the international relations of today.
The narratives of IR theory constitute the language of the discipline’s ontological scope. Attentiveness to metaphors and other discursive elements of IR theory is part of an interpretive move, which demands that attention be paid to how theoretical endeavors are constructed. This chapter reflects on the lessons of the book and argues that future of research in IR requires being aware of the role of metaphors in creating concepts, interrogating these metaphors to determine their conceptual utility, acknowledging the empirical categories that are suggested by conceptual metaphors, deciding which categories correspond to observed facts, and collecting empirical data in ways that further a better understanding of world affairs so as not simply to reinforce existing metaphorical frames.
Eine Hinwendung zur Erzählung lässt sich sowohl in der politischen Öffentlichkeit als auch in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschungspraxis beobachten. Die zentrale Bedeutung von Narrativen in der Sinnvermittlung menschlicher Kommunikation wird kaum noch bestritten. Jedoch ist noch nicht geklärt, welche Implikationen und forschungspraktischen Konsequenzen sich aus dieser Einsicht für die Politikwissenschaft ergeben. Welche Funktion nehmen Narrative in der gesellschaftlichen Verständigung ein? Worin liegt die prägende Kraft von Narrativen für die Politik? Was ist das Politische am Erzählen? Welche erzählerischen Techniken und Praktiken lassen sich besonders bei politischen Akteuren beobachten? Wie unterscheidet sich solch eine Forschungsperspektive von Ansätzen, die Argumente oder Diskurse in den Mittelpunkt stellen? Der vorliegende Beitrag will sich diesen Fragen konzeptionell nähern und so grundlegende Probleme einer politikwissenschaftlichen Narrativanalyse beleuchten. Als vorläufiges Ergebnis wird eine offene Heuristik vorgeschlagen, die den Fokus auf das Narrative für die Politikwissenschaft fruchtbar machen möchte.
Could policymaking be constitutive of politics? Conventionally, policymaking is conceived of as the result of politics. In this view classical-modernist political institutions seek to involve people in politics via a choice of elected officials who are subsequently supposed to represent the interests of their voters, initiate policy and oversee its implementation. But what if people do not always have clear-cut identities or preferences? What if they regard ‘party politics’ with a certain cynicism, and are much more ‘spectators’ than participants (cf. Manin 1997)? Is that the end of politics? This chapter argues that this is not necessarily true. Citizens could also be seen as political activists on ‘stand by’ who often need to be ignited in order to become politically involved. This creates a new role for policymaking. In many cases it is a public policy initiative that triggers people to reflect on what they really value, and that motivates them to voice their concerns or wishes and become politically active themselves. Public policy, in other words, often creates a public domain, as a space in which people of various origins deliberate on their future as well as on their mutual interrelationships and their relationship to the government. The idea of a network society only adds to this. Nowadays policymaking often takes place in a context where fixed political identities and stable communities always be assumed.
The purpose of this paper is to introduce and elaborate the varied meanings of problematization in contemporary policy theory. The primary focus is on the different meanings and uses of the term in interpretivism and in Foucault-influenced poststructuralism. The paper argues that interpre- tive/argumentative adaptations direct attention primarily to how policy makers/workers develop problematizations (ways of understanding a problem) while Foucault-influenced poststructural- ists critically scrutinize problematizations (the ways in which “problems” are produced and repre- sented) in governmental policies and practices. It concludes that Foucault-influenced adaptations provide a more substantive critique of extant social arrangements than interpretive approaches, which tend to be reformist in design and inclination.
In this chapter, we first provide a brief 'story' – how it all began; then we pre-sent an overview of some important research agendas in CDA and discuss new challenges for CDA research. Secondly, we discuss the various theoretical and methodological approaches assembled in this volume from a sociological and epistemological perspective. 2 There, we focus mostly on three central and con-stitutive concepts: power, ideology and critique. We also, of course, summarize some of the salient principles which are constitutive of all approaches in CDA. In addition, we mention some important criticism which CDA has been con-fronted with in the past years (see Billig, 2003, 2008; Chilton, 2007; Chilton and Wodak, 2007;Wodak and Cillia, 2006 for an extensive discussion of this issue). The terms Critical Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) are often used interchangeably. In fact, recently, the term CDA seems to have been preferred and is being used to denote the theory formerly identified as CL.Therefore, we will continue to use CDA exclusively here (see Anthonissen, 2001; Chilton and Wodak, 2007 for an extensive discussion of these terms and their history). The manifold roots of CDA lie in Rhetoric, Text linguistics, Anthropology, Philosophy, Socio-Psychology, Cognitive Science, Literary Studies and Sociolinguistics, as well as in Applied Linguistics and Pragmatics. Wodak-3795-Ch-01:Wodak-3795-Ch-01.QXP 9/29/2008 4:29 PM Page 1 Nowadays, some scholars prefer the term Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). For example,Teun van Dijk provides us with a broad overview of the field of (C)DS, where one can identify the following developments: between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, new, closely related disciplines emerged in the humanities and the social sciences. Despite their different disciplinary backgrounds and a great diver-sity of methods and objects of investigation, some parts of the new fields/paradigms/linguistic sub-disciplines of semiotics, pragmatics, psycho-and sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis and discourse studies all deal with discourse and have at least seven dimensions in common (see Van Dijk, 2007a;Wodak, 2008a): • an interest in the properties of 'naturally occurring' language use by real language users (instead of a study of abstract language systems and invented examples) • a focus on larger units than isolated words and sentences and, hence, new basic units of analysis: texts, discourses, conversations, speech acts, or communicative events • the extension of linguistics beyond sentence grammar towards a study of action and interaction • the extension to non-verbal (semiotic, multimodal, visual) aspects of interaction and communication: gestures, images, film, the internet, and multimedia • a focus on dynamic (socio)-cognitive or interactional moves and strategies • the study of the functions of (social, cultural, situative and cognitive) contexts of language use • an analysis of a vast number of phenomena of text grammar and language use: coher-ence, anaphora, topics, macrostructures, speech acts, interactions, turn-taking, signs, politeness, argumentation, rhetoric, mental models, and many other aspects of text and discourse.
Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this muted response to the crisis in terms of a ‘cooling out’ process (Goffman) underpinned by a restorative fantasmatic narrative. The ‘enjoyment’ derived from scapegoating individual bankers has narrowed the debate and stifled political imagination and mobilization. By investigating a range of media and policy responses to the meltdown, we conclude that the pre-credit crunch ideology of ‘no more boom and bust’ has been replaced by an equally ideological narrative that promises a re-normalization of processes of financialization. This allows for the preservation of key elements of neo-liberal capitalism as well as the marginalization of alternative projects. The paper shows how, exemplified by the establishment and operation of United Kingdom Financial Investments Ltd, the post-crisis ideology continues to shield financial markets from public scrutiny and intervention.
Large-scale social and political changes have revolutionized policy-making. Traditionally, policy analysis has been state-centered, based on the assumption that central government is self-evidently the locus of government. However, policy-making is often carried out today in loosely organized networks of public authorities, citizen associations and private enterprises. The contributors to this book argue that democratic governance now calls for a new deliberatively-oriented policy analysis. They provide examples from around the world to demonstrate how this would work in practice.
The fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi and fascist movements in the first half of the twentieth century sent out tremors that were to shake the very foundations of democratic thought. As a simple act of faith, democratic theorists had assumed that the common man had both the right and the ability to participate in his own governance. If given the opportunity, the overwhelming majority of people in any polity would presumedly be reasonable, relatively rational, and responsible political actors. Hitler's rise to political power in a constitutional system that had been scrupulously constructed to be a showpiece of democracy, coupled with the historically unparalleled rise of mass movements throughout the world, called this traditional democratic faith and trust in the common man seriously into question.
Bridgman and Davis have responded to criticism of their widely-used model of the policy process as a cycle, ‘a series of interlocking steps’ by describing it as ‘pragmatic’, a ‘toolkit’, ‘not a theory’. This article asks what makes for ‘practical knowledge’ of the policy process. It identifies the theoretical basis for the ‘policy cycle’ model, and asks how this model relates to research on policy and to policy practitioners' own knowledge. It argues that we need to recognise the way that underlying theory about policy forms part of policy practice, and to give more attention to the relationship between research, experiential knowledge, and formal maps like the ‘policy cycle’.
Postmodern inquiry into the discursive construction of identity has the potential to make a distinctive, democratizing contribution to public policy analysis. More so than conventional approaches, a postmodern policy analysis offers the opportunity to interrogate assumptions about identity embedded in the analysis and making of public policy, thereby enabling us to rethink and resist questionable distinctions that privilege some identities at the expense of others. Public policy analysis can benefit from postmodernism's emphasis on how discourse constructs identity. A review of postmodernism and postmodern approaches to interrogating identity is followed by an exercise in postmodern policy analysis. Social welfare policy in contemporary postindustrial America is shown to participate in the construction and maintenance of identity in ways that affect not just the allocation of public benefits, but also economic opportunities outside of the state. Mired in old, invidious distinctions (e.g., independent/dependent, contract/charity, family/promiscuity), welfare policy discourse today helps to recreate the problems of yesterday, particularly as a critical factor in reproducing women's poverty.
The EU, as is commonly held, is a different form of political rule: a polity based on rationality and functional interests, not emotional appeals. Without reference to the narrative of the nation or the state, the question emerges as to whether the European Union needs or has myths? If it does, what are they and how successful have they been? The aim of this article - indeed of the special issue - is to explore the role of political myth in creating normative and cognitive foundations for governing in the EU and to examine whether these are applicable to the case of the European Union. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Welche Funktion erfüllt Kulturpolitik in historischer sowie in gegenwärtiger, internationaler Perspektive? Der Band spannt einen Bogen über 220 Jahre Ideengeschichte von Kulturpolitik(en) in nationaler und internationaler Perspektive. Rund fünfzig Beiträge zu Kulturpolitik und Kulturpolitikforschung aus und zu verschiedenen Nationen, aber auch zu supranationalen Einrichtungen wie der EU und der UNESCO geben Wissenschaftlern, Studierenden und Praktikern erstmalig einen umfassenden Überblick über Diskurse und Methoden der Kulturpolitik(-forschung). Mit Texten von Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Matthew Arnold, John Dewey, Hermann Glaser und Karl Heinz Stahl, Paul DiMaggio und Michael Useem, Alfred K. Treml, Dirk Baecker, Edward C. Banfield, Norbert Lammert, John Maynard Keynes, Xi Jinping, Theodor Heuss, Constance DeVereaux und Martin Griffin, Dan Eugen Ratiu, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Kiran Klaus Patel, Margaret J. Wyszomirski, Jörg Rössel und Sebastian Weingartner, Bruno S. Frey, Michael Hutter, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Beuys, Jacques Rancière, Boris Groys sowie Kazimir Malevich u.v.a.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Dieser Beitrag zeigt, wie durch Narratalogie und durch den Einsatz mythischer Narrative in Wahlkampfreden kollektive Identitäten geschaffen werden. In einer theoretischen Einführung werden die Begriffe Wirklichkeitserzählung, Kollektiverzählung und politischer Mythos erläutert. Daraufhin wird das kollektive, identitätsstiftende Wirkungspotenzial von Mythen analysiert und eine Typologie politischer Mythen entworfen. Diese Typologie wird abschließend auf Reden der Spitzenkandidaten Angela Merkel und Peer Steinbrück im Bundestagswahlkampf 2013 angewandt. Es wird erläutert, auf welche Typen von Mythen sich die beiden Politiker beziehen, um ein kollektives Wir-Gefühl zu schaffen. Die kritische Textanalyse und der Vergleich zeigen abschießend, dass es keine qualitativen oder quantitativen Unterschiede in der Narratologie beider Kandidaten gibt.
During the last decade there has been mounting interest in various kinds of discourse theory and discourse analysis within what we can broadly define as the social sciences. This is evidenced by the growing number of publications, workshops, conference panels, university courses, and dissertations that draw on the intellectual resources of discourse theory. Some countries and subdisciplines have been more susceptible than others to the influence of the new theories of discourse. In some places, discourse theory has almost become the dominant paradigm, while in other places it has remained marginal. However, very few areas of research have been able to withstand the impact of its new ideas.
Kühn provides a concise application of Hans Blumenberg’s work on myth to analyse western interpretations of Afghanistan. In portraying historical ‘facts’ as myth, he shows how these are not false or correct but in a productive way shape our understanding by selecting what can be considered relevant and what is dismissed. Following Blumenberg, Kühn demonstrates how myths’ relative indeterminacy allows integrating incongruences, tying together historical analogies and selected real-world experiences. Myth helps structure knowledge, which Kühn illustrates by looking at the myth of Afghanistan as ‘graveyard of empires’, as ‘safe haven’ for terrorists, and fame for Afghan ‘fierce fighters’. Explaining how these myths intersect to create an image of Afghanistan taken for real, he shows how Blumenberg’s ideas can be applied to analyse contemporary politics.
In diesem Beitrag1 möchte ich die methodische Vorgehensweise der narrativen Diskursanalyse holzschnittartig anhand eines Themenfeldes erläutern, das ich an anderer Stelle eingehender untersucht habe: das Feld des globalen Klimawandels (Viehöver 1997). Aufgrund der hier gebotenen Kürze kann der theoretische Bezug auf die narrative Diskursanalyse als kultur- und praxistheoretisches Erklärungsprogramm nur ansatzweise aufgegriffen werden. Im Hinblick auf allgemeinere diskursanalytische Fragestellungen möchte ich zeigen, dass das methodologische und methodische Inventar der narrativen Diskursanalyse nicht nur geeignet ist die Genese neuer Weltbezüge zu untersuchen. Überdies könnte, so meine ich, ein soziologisch gewendeter Strukturalismus erklären helfen, warum manche ‘Diskurse’ aufgrund ihrer inneren Struktur institutionell folgenreicher sind als andere. Um es noch einmal zu sagen, es geht hier nicht vorrangig um die Ergebnisse der Studie, sondern darum, den Bogen zwischen den theoretischen Grundlagen, soziologischen Fragestellungen, den methodischen Umsetzungen und den möglichen Ergebnissen einer narrativen Diskursanalyse zu spannen. Am Beginn einer Diskursanalyse steht in der Regel eine Frage und eine These.
This article presents an overview of Ernesto Laclau's theory of hegemony from his first work as co-author with Chantal Mouffe of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) to his last work On Populist Reason (2005). To that end, this corpus is analyzed with theoretical tools from Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to locate the implicit postulates in Laclau's work and to organize his work into three main stages. We propose an interpretation of such theory from a psychoanalytic perspective through three key concepts: antagonism, dislocation, and heterogeneity.
Interpreting International Politics addresses each of the major, "traditional" subfields in International Relations: International Law and Organization, International Security, and International Political Economy. But how are interpretivist methods and concerns brought to bear on these topics? In this slim volume Cecelia Lynch focuses on the philosophy of science and conceptual issues that make work in international relations distinctly interpretive. This work both legitimizes and demonstrates the necessity of post- and non-positivist scholarship.
Public policy-making, as technocratically conceived, appears as a rational process of solving known problems. Political problems are then regarded as part of a pre-given ‘neutral’ reality to which public policy simply responds. In contrast, our contribution develops a critical approach in that it traces three different (at times overlapping) perspectives. Firstly, we introduce approaches that criticize the top-down and linear conceptualizations of policy-making as problem-solving and instead study agenda-building as a complex process of turning issues into political problems. Secondly, we present a more fundamental epistemological challenge as constituted by post-positivist approaches and their focus on the struggle over the definition of problems at various stages of the policy process. Lastly, we introduce approaches that emphasize the role of power and political manipulation in problem definition and agenda-setting. Taken together, these strands provide the basis for a critical perspective which conceptualizes problem definition as a basic discursive process – part of the construction of a political world – and agenda-setting as a specific type of problem definition that attributes responsibility to a political actor or institution. From this perspective, problem definition and agenda-setting are not regarded as distinct phases but as constructions of reality that can be identified within the larger policy-making process.
In recent years a set of new postempiricist approaches to public policy, drawing on discursive analysis and participatory deliberative practices, have come to challenge the dominant technocratic, empiricist models in policy analysis. In this book, Frank Fischer brings together this work for the first time and critically examines its implications for the field of public policy studies. He describes the theoretical, methodological and political dimensions of this emerging approach to policy research. The book includes a discussion of the social construction of policy problems, the role of interpretation and narrative analysis in policy inquiry, the dialectics of policy argumentation, and the uses of participatory policy analysis. After an introductory chapter, ten further chapters are arranged in four parts: Part I, Public Policy and the Discursive Construction of Reality (two chapters), introduces the re-emergence of interest in ideas and discourse. It then turns to the postempiricist or constructionist view of social reality, presenting public policy as a discursive construct that turns on multiple interpretations. Part II, Public Policy as Discursive Politics (two chapters), examines more specifically the nature of discursive politics and discourse theory and illustrates through a particular disciplinary debate the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of such a conceptual reframing of policy inquiry. Part III, Discursive Policy Inquiry: Resituating Empirical Analysis (four chapters), offers a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores specific methodological perspectives pertinent to such an orientation, in particular the role of interpretation in policy analysis, narrative policy analysis, and the dialectics of policy argumentation. Part IV, Deliberative Governance (two chapters), discusses the participatory implications of such a method and the role of the policy analyst as facilitator of citizen deliberation .
This book introduces an approach to policy analysis called 'what's the problem represented to be?' It argues that policies contain implicit representations of the 'problems' they purport to address and that these 'problem representations' need to be subjected to critical scrutiny. The book targets the way in which 'women's inequality' is represented as a 'problem' by examining key policy initiatives in the areas of education, pay equity, abortion, sexual harassment, domestic violence and equality policy.
Underlying Assumptions of an Interpretive Approach The Importance of Local Knowledge Accessing Local Knowledge Identifying Interpretive Communities and Policy Artifacts Symbolic Language Symbolic Objects Symbolic Acts Moving from Fieldwork and Deskwork to Textwork and Beyond
In der vergleichenden Sozialstaatsforschung, die in der Politikwissenschaft seit den 1990er Jahren einen starken Aufschwung
erfahren hat, ist von einer Hinwendung zur Foucaultschen Diskursanalyse bislang wenig zu spüren. Der Schwerpunkt der Mainstream-Politikwissenschaft
in der Auseinandersetzung mit Sozialstaatlichkeit liegt nach wie vor auf einer stark aggregierten, makropolitischen Ebene,
die den Vergleich von Systemen oder nationalstaatlichen Politiken in den Vordergrund stellt. Gefragt wird dabei in der Regel
nach Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschieden, nach Kontinuitäten und Wandel von Sozialstaaten und zunehmend häufiger auch nach „Best
Practice“.
Sociologists have erred in locating social problems in objective conditions. Instead, social problems have their being in a process of collective definition. This process determines whether social problems will arise, whether they become legitimated, how they are shaped in discussion, how they come to be addressed in official policy, and how they, are reconstituted in putting planned action into effect. Sociological theory and study must respect this process.
This article presents illustrative findings from case study research investigating the function and effects of competing discourses in the policy change process. The specific field of research is the development and implementation of public housing policy in Queensland, Australia. Critical discourse analysis is used to explore discursive constructions of the policy problem and power relations within the policy community. It is argued that positivist approaches to policy analysis have failed to address the way in which policy language constructs welfare identities, legitimates policy interventions and functions as an important site of ideological struggle over the meaning of human services within the welfare state. These themes are discussed using semi-structured interview data and key policy documents collected during the course of research.
The European Union (EU) is a novel political entity in many respects. For example, instead of the monolithic political structure of nation-states, it features a layered structure and a 'variable geometry'. This institutional complexity has been interpreted as an indicator of the EU being a post-modern political system. This article inquires whether the EU's institutional post-modernness is accompanied by a post-modern identity. I argue that an investigation of collective identity requires a reconstruction of how a community is imagined. As metaphors are the principal linguistic means of our imagination, I reconstruct the imaginations of the European community by analyzing its metaphorizations. How do the metaphors of EU enlargement construct European identity? It can be shown that in the German EU-enlargement discourse of the 1990s, European identity was hardly constructed in a post-national/post-modern way. Rather, European identity was imagined much like a modern national identity. Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion, too. Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us and the world will be as one (John Lennon, 'Imagine', 1972).
This essay contributes to the growing critique of poky science's dominant neopositivist methodologies. Not only is neopositivist policy science seen to have failed in its effort to develop a usable body of predictive generalizations, it has been unable to supply effective solutions to social problems. An important part of this failure is traced to outmoded epistemological assumptions. Drawing on developments in both science and the sociology of science, in particular the recognition that the “hard” sciences themselves no longer rest on traditional concepts of objectivity and proof, the discussion outlines a post positivist conception of policy science designed to address the multidimensional complexity of social reality. As a discursive orientation grounded in practical reason, the post positivist approach situates empirical inquiry in a broader interpretive framework. More then just an epistemological alternative, the approach is offered as a better description of what social science actually do in practice the essay closes with a brief discussion of the implications of u post positivist approach for both a socially relevant policy curriculum and a democratic practice of policy inquiry.
Interpretations of reality are an important, sometimes even decisive, dimension of the policy process. This essay seeks to demonstrate this point in the field of technology policy. Empirical research shows that government support for technology transfer in Germany is based on a concept of technology that is shared by neither companies nor academic researchers. These different concepts become reified interpretations of what technology means. They are referred to here as implicit theories. Interviews with academic researchers and business people demonstrate how inquiries into the realm of policy theories can be carried out.
A partir de l'analyse des travaux d'Ernesto Laclau et de Chantal Mouffe, l'A. s'interroge sur les consequences de l'emergence des nouveaux mouvements sociaux (mouvement ecologique, femininisme, antiracisme, mouvement gay, etc.) pour la conceptualisation d'une nouvelle unite des mouvements sociaux, ainsi que pour la definition des relations entre ces nouveaux mouvements et le role traditionnel du mouvement ouvrier et de la Gauche, dans l'objectif d'une transformation sociale radicale. Selon l'A. la reconfiguration des mouvements sociaux renvoie aux processus d'articulation hegemonique discutes par Laclau et Mouffe a partir de leur examen critique des themes soreliens, l'articulation impliquant une reconfiguration relationnelle des identites politiques reciproques, et donc une attention particuliere aux formes particulieres de constitution des volontes collectives a travers les mythes sociaux. Selon l'A., le decentrement et l'autonomie des differents discours, la multiplication des antagonismes et la construction d'une pluralite d'espaces de luttes, sont les conditions sine qua non de la possibilite de realisation des differentes composantes de l'ideal classique du socialisme.
This paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on interpretive policy inquiry. As such, its specific focus is the presentation of the interpretive approach as a corrective for the shortcomings inherent in the standard view. Following an outline of the problems facing the received view, a systematic, philosophically grounded, statement of the interpretive position is developed. Thereafter, the tangible positive consequences for policy making of this approach are further discussed. The paper concludes with some reflections on the relationship between the positivistic and interpretive paradigms.