The Role of Theories in Policy Studies and Policy Work
representations of a knowable reality , “ out there ”. In the performative idiom , scholars and their theories are not judged by degree of “ truth ”, but pragmatically by degree of effectiveness , performance , or worldly success .
In this article , we want to address the representational and performative roles of theories of the policy process in policy studies ( see Figure 1 ). In Working for Policy , we addressed the same theme but with a different purpose in mind . There , we primarily showed the discrepancy between the experiential accounts of the policy process told by practitioners engrossed in their own policy work , and the researched and theorized accounts of that same process by academics ( cf . Turnbull 2013 ). The question of how academics and practitioners speak to each other and with what impact on each others ’ work was addressed only superficially ( Colebatch , Hoppe , and Noordegraaf 2010 , 193ff ). Here we explore the same theme , but from the angle of policy practices influenced — sometimes leavened and sometimes biased — by policy studies or science .
“ Policy ” is a particular way of framing the activity of “ governing ”, seeing it as harnessing state authority to getting to more or less coordinated and deliberated collective , public action ( Hoppe 2010 , 2 ); a framing that purports to present both “ policy ” and the “ policy process ” as somehow logically coherent , authoritative , and appropriate . This framing happens , usually tacitly , in the reflection on and during practices of policy workers ; but it also underlies the framing of policy in much academic work . In this article , we take as a starting point the policy scholars ’ efforts to describe , articulate , codify , and explain , as accurately as possible , what is , supposedly , “ really ” going on in practice .
This academic effort produces a fairly large number of formal accounts of the policy process , as propositions or warrantable assertions about such processes . As codified and abstract statements they “ travel ” easily , that is , they become widely socially distributed in the peer community of policy scholars and nonpeers with an interest in such theories . Thus , starting from “ theory ” ( a rather immodest label , we will show ) as representing practices of policy work ( upward curved arrow in Figure 1 ) we move to performation in practices ( downward curved arrow ). In policy work practices , the formal accounts do influence the framing of practices , but now in nongeneral , narrativized form ; and thus less or uncodified , very concrete , contextually specific and constrained by time and place , and limited in social distribution .
The question we ask is : are there selective affinities between academic policy process theories and narratives of policy practice — do policy process theories not merely perform substantive discourse on “ observed truth ” codified as warrantable assertions in systems of propositional knowledge ( or “ logos ”, as Gottweis 2012 ; Turnbull 2014 would say ), but also as practical effort to negotiate social relations (“ ethos ”) and feelings (“ pathos ”) in policy process practices ?
The next section deals with academic accounts of policymaking in the representative idiom . We show that , by and large , there are three big “ families ” of theoretical accounts ; each with lots of branches and twigs , and quite some parasitic connections between the three major branches . The third section looks at these academic accounts , reframing them into a performative idiom , as expressive of or prescriptive for policy work practices .
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