Fashion, Fiction, Fertile Inquiry?
Struggling With the Postmodern Challenge
and Social Policy Analysis
Greg Marston
School of Social Work and Social Policy, University of Queensland
1
Introduction
Until relatively recently, a profound silence could be heard in core social policy as to
the postmodern, conveying a notion of isolation from key trends in social theory
(Carter, 1998: 102). While some policy academics and practitioners have seized on
the possibilities offered by poststructural understandings of power, identity,
knowledge and discourse, many question its exploratory and explanatory potential
(Yeatman, 1994). It is perhaps not surprising that ‘orthodox’ social policy research
remains sceptical and even hostile towards the intellectual perspectives offered by
postmodernism. Social policy research, that which is understood as the academic
study of welfare, has an unavoidably structural element; its whole history as a subject
(its causal logics, its research tools; its statistical headings) has been concerned with
patterned disadvantage (Carter, 1998: 110; Deacon and Mann, 1999). To relinquish
that is to apparently relinquish its core goals and purposes. As Taylor-Gooby (1994:
403) argues, 'The implications for social policy are that an interest in postmodernism
may cloak developments of considerable importance'.
While some academics in the social policy community may choose to stand firm and
argue that social policy does not bend to the dictates of fashion, the risk is that new
lines of inquiry, issues and questions will be overlooked, and opportunities for a richer
and more sophisticated account of policy practices may be missed. Advocates of
postmodern approaches to social policy issues claim, among other things, that this
diverse body of theory draws attention to local struggles and transformations, to the
dialectical relationship between language and material practices and to the centrality
of identity, difference and culture in social change – practices and processes that were
previously obscured (Fairclough, 1995; Penna and O’Brien, 1996; Mann, 1998). Of
course, these claims should not be taken at face value.
This paper addresses the question of the usefulness of postmodernism for social
policy, focusing attention on social policy analysis1 and starting from the assumption
1
Typically the social policy tradition is distinguished from the broader category of public policy analysis.
The dominant perspective in public policy analysis is to look at political decision making, exploring such
phenomena as the operations of power and the influence of interest groups, while social policy centres
on the normative bases and distributional consequences of particular policies (Petersen et al., 1999: 7). In
this section I will be drawing on and evaluating both forms of overlapping policy literature, as both are
relevant to the concerns of social policy given that the processes of policy making are what constitutes
policy outcomes.
Marston, G. (2002), ‘Fashion, fiction, fertile inquiry? Struggling with the postmodern challenge and
social policy analysis’, in T. Eardley and B. Bradbury, eds, Competing Visions: Refereed Proceedings
of the National Social Policy Conference 2001, SPRC Report 1/02, Social Policy Research Centre,
University of New South Wales, Sydney. 298-316.
STRUGGLING WITH THE POSTMODERN CHALLENGE
that poststructuralism is no different to other new schools that tend to overemphasise
the distinctiveness of their own approach and to dwell at some length on the
deficiencies of what went before (Petersen, et al., 1999: 7). In the first part of this
paper, I briefly summarise the academic social policy debate about the value of
postmodernism for social policy analysis, and in so doing introduce the concepts that
will be further explored later. In the second part, I outline some of the key theoretical
tensions that distinguish positivism, critical theory and postmodernism. In the third
and final part of the paper, I seek to demonstrate the value of postmodernist
approaches to social policy analysis, to show how a ‘critical postmodernism’
(Yeatman, 1994; Carter, 1998) offers productive ways of thinking about
contemporary social policy issues. In illustrating these possibilities, I focus on critical
discourse analysis as one site where a critical postmodernism can be made operational
in studies of the policy process. In summary, this paper argues for a constructive
dialogue between postmodernism and social policy research, where the task is one of
augmentation and adding – not replacing existing research paradigms.
The Debate So Far
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, all the disciplines
in the social sciences have experienced a fundamental reappraisal
of their basic assumptions, theories and methods. The most
significant common feature of this reappraisal is the recognition
that ‘culture’ deserves much more serious attention as an object of
study in its own right and this has produced a reassessment of the
linguistic, discursive and cultural conditions of social research
(Smith, 1998: 231).
The above quote captures trends in epistemology, postmodern social theory and
analytical frameworks that are reassessing the importance of language and culture.
Missing from the above excerpt, however, are the differentiated effects that the socalled ‘cultural turn’ has had on social science disciplines that remain resistant to
alternative epistemologies. In the area of social policy analysis for instance, there are
policy academics that remain sceptical about the postmodernist critique of
conventional social science (Taylor-Gooby, 1994; O’Neill, 1995), while others are
more optimistic about the possibilities offered by these intellectual perspectives
(Bacchi, 1999; Clark, 1998; Carter, 1998; Leonard, 1997).
There are many reasons that may explain an ambivalent attitude towards
postmodernism. The subject of social policy is under a massive weight of history and
orthodox visions of what is proper are deeply embedded in educational institutions –
at present it is somewhat like asking a currently unadapted car to run on unleaded fuel
(Carter, 1998: 110). On another level, the debate stems from a question about whether
the study of culture, discourse and meaning should replace the traditional concerns of
social policy, or whether this fluid body of theory is able to sit alongside established
research paradigms.
Claim and Counter-Claim
Over the past five to ten years, social policy research has started to engage with the
question about the usefulness of postmodernism for policy research. In the mid 1990s,
the Journal of Social Policy published a debate about whether postmodernism
represented a ‘great step backwards’, or ‘a small step forwards’. Here the debate was
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polarised. On one hand, there was Taylor-Gooby (1994) who viewed postmodernism
as depoliticising the agenda of social policy. On the other hand, there was Penna and
O’Brien (1996) who believed the different strands of poststructuralism and
postmodernism offered alternative theoretical frameworks and a more inclusive
political agenda to address contemporary welfare state restructuring.
Taylor-Gooby (1994: 385) argued that postmodernism contributes to depoliticising
social inequality and disadvantage, by discrediting structural analysis and
emphasising plurality and relativism:
Postmodernism ignores the significance of market liberalism and
the associated trends to inequality, retrenchment and the regulation
of the poorest groups. From this perspective, postmodernism
functions as an ideological smoke screen, preventing us from
recognising some of the most important trends in modern social
policy.
In this argument, the value of postmodernism is being evaluated against a modernist
understanding of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, articulated within a meta-narrative about market
liberalism. In response, Fitzpatrick (1996: 306) states that Taylor-Gooby largely bases
his reservations about postmodernism on assertions, rather than argument, and as a
result he does not ask whether postmodernist theory could be used to develop a
critique of economic liberalism. In other words, setting up unitary conceptions of
modernism and postmodernism as ‘binary opposites’ does nothing to clarify that
which is useful in recent theoretical debates (Taylor, 1998: 31; Thompson and
Hoggett, 1996).
Taking a more positive interpretation in their article in the Journal of Social Policy,
Penna and O’Brien (1996: 60) believe that social policy analysis can and should
benefit from postmodernist theorising:
At the level of political culture and at the level of political
economy the capacity of normative policy analysis to deliver
effective solutions to the multiple lines of exclusion and
marginalisation characteristic of contemporary society is at best
uncertain. Postindustrial, postfordist, poststructuralist and
postmodernist writings, separately and together, provide the
discipline of social policy with alternative theoretical perspectives
and a political agenda with which to address the complexity of
current restructuring.
However, for these ideas to influence social policy, they need to appear as operational
and utilisable constructs for the study of welfare (Carter, 1998: 104). This empirical
challenge has started to be taken up in recent years.
A Practical Engagement
In the late 1990s, through a series of edited collections and journal articles, the debate
about the utility of postmodern thought moved toward a practical engagement with
contemporary social policy issues (see Carter 1998; Mann, 1998; Ferge, 1997; Taylor,
1998; Leonard, 1997, Fraser, 1997; Culpitt, 1999; and Bosworth, 1999). In the
Australian context, among others, Dean (1997, 1999) has developed Foucault’s work
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on governmentality into an analytical technique to interrogate the construction of the
unemployed citizen and labour market programs in general. Using a theory of
discourse, Bacchi (1999) and earlier, Watts (1993), have employed theories of
discourse to understand policy as discursive practice. Yeatman (1994) assesses the
implications of postmodern feminist theorising for questions about the state and
community. Petersen (1999, et al.) have employed poststructural accounts of power
and knowledge to discuss questions of citizenship, technology and public welfare in
Australia. These writers have all engaged with issues that are of current importance to
the social policy field.
The critical interests of social policy – an analysis of power relations, the state and an
overriding concern with the distribution of resources – have not been lost in these
accounts. However, the way in which these constructs are conceptualised is very
different to how they have been discussed in a modernist discourse. In this respect,
postmodernist thinking stands in a critical, but not necessarily an oppositional,
relation to modernist ideas. Postmodernism acts as an analytical aid by opening up
different ways of thinking about rights and justice. ’Postmodern emancipatory vision
does not offer a utopian future, but works to develop contestatory political and public
spaces, which open up in relation to existing forms of governance‘ (Yeatman, 1994:
ix).
This brief summary of the debate about the value of postmodernism for social policy
analysis suggests a particular account of what postmodernism signifies. In this paper,
for example, I am not using the terms modernism and postmodernism to describe two
distinct historical eras, or to assert that we have moved into a postmodern age.
The ‘post’ prefix is used here to denote a different intellectual and philosophical
orientation to the project of modernity. ’The term ”post” suggests that it is possible
now to bound the project of modernity, to discern its features, to understand the kind
of paradigm it comprises‘ (Yeatman, 1994: 8). In exploring the discourse of
modernity and its influence on social policy research, I want to consider briefly some
of the distinguishing characteristics of traditional and postmodern approaches to
policy analysis, which have been touched on in the above discussion. In the following
section, I have been careful to avoid simply rehashing the somewhat tired
philosophical binary between positivism and post-positivism (Mann, 1998). Yet, at
the same time, and as a starting point for a dialogue, it is important to have a sense of
what defines these different paradigms before discussing how a ‘critical
postmodernism’ (Yeatman, 1994; Carter, 1998) might be envisaged and practised in
studies of the policy process, and social policy research more generally.
2
Evaluating the Differences Between Positivist, Critical and
Postmodern Social Policy Analyses
This section explores some of the competing epistemologies that have informed social
policy analysis, including positivism, critical theory and postmodernism. A detailed
evaluation of these paradigms is beyond the scope of this paper. In the following
discussion I have focused on a brief appraisal of the major features of each position.
What will be identified and defined in this discussion are the conceptual tools that can
be used to constitute a form of critical social policy research, which is informed by
poststructural theorising.
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Positivism and Social Policy Analysis
In short, positivism is based on a notion that the laws of understanding and studying
the ‘natural’ world also apply to the social world. ’Positivism assumes an
unproblematic relationship between conventional knowledge of the nature of the
world and its actual nature‘ (Hastings, 1998: 193). Despite recent challenges to
positivist philosophy, a rational, value-free science continues to have significant
hegemonic power in normative analyses of the policy process and welfare regimes. In
the post-war period in the West, a form of positivism emerged that emphasised the
importance of value-freedom, hard-facts and prediction as the basis for developing
‘objective’ policy proposals for governments, businesses and other private institutions
(Smith, 1998: 77). The following definition succinctly captures the positivist nature of
orthodox social policy research. ’Social policy research is concerned to generate high
quality objective knowledge that can be deployed in social planning‘ (Taylor-Gooby
1994: 387).
This epistemological position has inspired much of policy research’s most used
methods, such as survey, the questionnaire and statistical models (Hughes, 1990: 16).
Despite emerging epistemologies that are calling into question the founding principles
of the modern welfare state, orthodox social policy research continues to be captured
by a positivist tradition that has in turn inspired large numbers of population based
studies aimed at improving social planning (Mann, 1998: 84). In general, orthodox
policy research relies upon a positivist epistemology where the main task of the
researcher is one of discovering objective facts and presenting them in a descriptive
format in the expectation that policy makers will take notice and act accordingly
(Jacobs and Manzi, 2000: 35). Arguably, this paradigm has had mixed success in
influencing policy-makers (see Dalton et al., 1996).
Rational Actors and Empiricism
The positivist approach remains limited, partially due to its conceptual reliance on a
rational-actor understanding of the policy making process and its continuing faith in
the transformative potential of empirical facts (Ham and Hill, 1993: 77; Watts, 1993).
Rationality in policymaking can be defined as the process where, when faced with a
range of policy options, the decision makers choose the alternative most likely to
achieve the stated outcome (Ham and Hill, 1993: 77). Within this paradigm, policy
language is accepted as a neutral medium in which ideas and ‘objective’ worlds can
be quantified, represented and discussed. From the rational perspective, the state is
regarded as an empirical agent of governance and policy making, reliant on empirical
processes of problem discovery, and secondly as an entity whose history, processes,
and institutions can be understood empirically (Watts, 1993). The reliance on
‘objectivity’ has meant that policy analysis has largely ignored policy language,
particularly the implications of both the passing of certain words from policy
discourse and the introduction of new terms that feature prominently in policy debates
(Jacobs and Manzi, 1996: 544).
Moreover, the rational representation of policy making remains problematic for its
insufficient account of the political context, insufficient emphasis on the participants
in the process and the ideal type nature of the model itself (Dalton et al., 1996: 17).
While not seeking to deny the place of positivist policy analysis, this approach has its
limitations, particularly when it comes to understanding issues of power and social
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relations between actors in policy change. As Yanow (1996: 6) states: ’Positivist
knowledge does not give us information about meanings made by actors in a situation.
When we read a policy we see more than just marks on a page, we hear more than just
sound waves‘. In other words, the positivist paradigm does not invite the policy
researcher to be reflexive about their practices of truth production in policy
development. In order to capture the cultural, political and contested dimensions of
policymaking it is important to consider what the critical theory tradition offers.
Critical Theory and the Argumentative Turn
Critical social theory, with its classical roots in Marxism and Hegelian philosophy, is
principally concerned with liberatory social transformation via political struggle to
overcome oppressive structures (Healy, 2000). This stands in contrast to positivism
where the role of social science is merely to understand and investigate a given social
order. Despite its theoretical advancements, the understanding of culture and ideology
in critical social science has tended to retain the Marxist theory of ‘false
consciousness’, where oppressed social groups internalise dominant ideologies, and
are thus prevented from transforming themselves and society into an ideal utopian
state until this falsity is recognised (Bottomore, 1984). This definition of ideology
rests on the assumption that the oppressed have greater access to the truth, where the
agency of the oppressed indicates the truth of humanity and the path to emancipation
(Dean, 1999: 123). The assumption in this version of critical social science is that
there is a fixed system of true representation and false representation. In this account,
critical theory is conceived of as a mental construct used to guide emancipation, with
little acknowledgement that emancipation is always relative to an established
discursive order (O’Brien and Penna, 1999: 52; Yeatman, 1994: 7).
In the case of critical theory and public policy making, there has been some work
done on transforming this body of theory into forms that are relevant for everyday
policy practice, particularly in the case of second-generation critical theorists such as
Habermas. For example, Forester (1993), in his work on the relevance of critical
theory for public policy, argues that in using Habermas’s theory of communicative
action we can conduct policy research that focuses on the situated, performative
qualities of the policy analysts’ work – their conversations and their texts – and realise
how power, class, culture, ethnicity and control manifest themselves in their speech,
writing and gesture. Similarly, Jackson (1999) uses Habermas’s work on ‘public
spheres’ to discuss the communicative processes involved in a Council tenants’
forum, where he observed the clash of discourses of the local government, social
housing providers and the ‘lifeworld’ discourse of tenants.
These examples of critically informed policy making studies constitute what Fischer
and Forester (1993) refer to as the ‘argumentative turn in policy analysis’. Diverse
theoretical perspectives, ranging from French poststructuralism to the Frankfurt
school of Critical Social Theory, have informed the growing concern with
argumentation in policy practice (Fischer and Forester, 1993). From these rich sources
research questions can be formed about what policy analysts and decision makers do,
how language and modes of representation enable and constrain their work and how
policy rhetoric includes and excludes policy actors.
The argumentative turn in policy analysis acknowledges various understandings of
power, it emphasises the constructive nature of policy language and it draws attention
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to the complex relationship between agency, identity and institutional structures. This
style of policy analysis challenges the positivist assumption that all human action is
literal, measurable and instrumentally rational, and seeks to reveal how this
assumption overlooks the extent to which policy issues are enunciated as the outcome
of power relations, identity formation, ideological contestation and political conflict
(Yanow, 1996; Jacobs and Manzi, 1996). It follows that much of the emphasis in
critical accounts of the policy process is on communicative approaches to achieving a
more democratic policy process through diverse forms of participation and
negotiation.
In terms of social planning, Healey (1993: 249) argues that what is being invented
through these types of studies is a new form of planning that is both appropriate to our
recognition of the failure of modernity’s conception of ’pure reason‘; yet is searching,
as Habermas does, for the continuation of the Enlightenment project of democratic
progress through reasoned argument among ‘free citizens’. In doing so, Habermas
seeks to recuperate the ‘public sphere’ of modernity (Steele, 1997: 50). However,
holding onto a theory of reasoned argument among free citizens suggests that
participants in the policy process are momentarily able to step outside practices of
domination. This possibility is problematised by the postmodern insistence that
domination and resistance are embedded in all practices of power (Leonard, 1997).
The next section explores this claim further and in a broader sense considers the
contribution of postmodernism for critical social policy research and policy making
studies.
Postmodernism and Social Policy Research
Postmodernism is based on an epistemology, or more precisely an ontology that
acknowledges multiple meanings within any given discursive context. In this way,
postmodernism shares the foundations of a social constructionist epistemology, where
meaning resides in individual interpretations within specific contexts (Spivey, 1997).
Postmodernism and poststructuralism, separately and together, provide the discipline
of social policy with a range of pathways that assist in theorising ‘societal
restructuration’ at the discursive level. The multiple strands of postmodernism and
poststructuralism dispute totalising meta-narratives of western reason by arguing that
social progress is particular to specific contexts, which brings greater attention to
cultural regulation at the local level (Agger, 1991: 121; Penna and O’Brien 1996: 40).
In considering the implications of these claims for social policy analysis, I have
focused on how social power, the state and universalism are represented, followed by
a discussion about poststructural understandings of the policy process itself.
Social Power, the State and Universalism
In terms of understanding power and policy analysis, postmodernism offers an
important contribution, however, not in the ‘top-down’ or authoritative sense that
state-political power has been understood in social policy research (Ham and Hill,
1987: 22). For postmodernists, power is not principally repressive, and it must be
practised, rather than possessed. Foucault believes that individuals are always in the
position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising power (Jacobs and Manzi,
1996: 549). In other words, power is both multi-dimensional and complex (Jacobs and
Manzi, 1996: 550).
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There are a number of implications of this position for researching and theorising
policy change. First, postmodernism argues that the perceptions of individuals are a
central dimension for understanding power relationships. Second, language as an
expressive act is a form of power, and language is a creative and controlling force
(Jacobs and Manzi, 1996). This dual account of power means that research attention
must be given to both ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ understandings of power, to
identify practices of resistance that disrupt domination. Postmodern theory provides
an important contribution for understanding micro-processes, precisely because these
intellectual perspectives reject grand theories that seek to offer only one interpretation
or one explanation of social phenomena. Attention to resistance and other microrebellions at the local level of policy practice help to overcome a totalising, repressive
and functional view of social power and the state.
Social policy research generally treats the state as a unitary object with its own
rationale, motivations and interests. In this normative account, the welfare state is
positioned as some kind of ‘thing’ that thinks and responds; in contrast, postmodern
narratives dismember the state, emphasising the various and inconsistent practices,
which shape its manifold components (Petersen et al., 1999: 8). The position of the
state as the main seat of power is also downplayed in poststructural and postmodern
approaches. In the Foucauldian governmentality literature, the state emerges as one
segment of a much broader play of power relations involving professionals, schools,
families, leisure organisations and so forth (Dean, 1999). In this respect, among this
network of state practices, it is not possible, nor it is desirable to develop welfare
programs based on grand narratives divorced from local contexts.
The Welfare Subject
This decentred account of the state also problematises conceptions of the universal
welfare subject. In his critique of positivism, Foucault (1983) argues that the
dominant discourses of modernity transformed human beings into universal subjects
through ‘modes of objectification’, where the individual was created as an object of
study and intervention to be regulated and divided through various binaries and
exclusions (for example sane/insane, heterosexual/homosexual, bad/good). Social
policy, for example, constructs its subjects, such as the ‘needy’, ‘disabled’ and
‘homeless’. Bodies, minds, values, interests and behaviours are then inscribed onto
them (Gibbins, 1999: 37). The subject within this modernist discourse had to possess
a fixed identity, able to be placed in the social order as either one of ‘us’, or one of
‘them’ (Leonard, 1997: 17).
Modern welfare inspires a belief in the universal human subject, which exists in spite
of differences across time, place, culture, gender and ethnicity (Fuery and Mansfield,
2000: 6). Basically, there is an inherent universalism in the project of modernity that
has little place for particularist knowledge and identities (Thompson and Hoggett,
1996; Ellison, 1999). In postmodern feminist theorising, critiques of positivism have
continued to build (Yeatman, 1994; Weedon, 1997). In the wake of feminist and postcolonial criticism, the debate has sometimes polarised between those who cling to the
tradition based on a model of universal humanity, and those who see human society as
a field of endless and irreducible differences (Fuery and Mansfield, 2000: 6). In the
field of social policy, this is by no means a new debate. Over the past twenty years
there has been a sustained critique of universalism from various sources, including
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feminists, single parents, disability groups, anti-racist groups and many others (Mann,
1998: 99).
There is a dichotomy here that runs to the heart of social policy analysis. On one side
stands the universalist plea for greater social justice and equality, a ‘fair’ allocation of
social goods to mitigate the inegalitarian effects of the market; on the other, demands
for the recognition of diversity and ‘difference’ sustain the view that universalism can,
paradoxically, be socially exclusive (Ellison, 1999: 59). The question about
reconciling particularism and universalism is obviously central to debates about the
value of postmodernism for social policy; however, there is not sufficient space to
address this issue here. The basic point is to recognise that the search for solidarity on
basic economic and social issues, while retaining a commitment to responding to
diversity, will continue to be of considerable political importance (Leonard, 1997:
176). Dismembering the state and the goals of social policy are not the only objects
that are subject to the postmodern critique. Postmodernism also raises valuable
questions for studying the policy process, particularly in relation to the category of
discourse.
Poststructuralism, Discourse and the Policy Process
In the case of policymaking research, French poststructuralism, and particularly
Foucault’s work on discourse, offers an important contribution. Using Foucault’s
work, one author who has been at the forefront of the study of the symbolic and
linguistic aspects of policy making since the 1960s is Murray Edelman (Parsons,
1995: 179). In one of his later books, Constructing the Political Spectacle Edelman
(1988) argues that the real power in policy-making resides in the process whereby
problems are constructed and articulated, since it is through language that we
experience politics. Similarly, in the Australian context, Bacchi (1999) has developed
what she refers to as a ‘what’s the problem?’ approach to policy analysis, where the
deconstructive analytical emphasis is on how the policy problem is discursively
represented because this contains an explicit or implicit diagnosis about how the
problem should be addressed. Both these political theorists draw on the work of
Foucault and Derrida in making sense of discourse and policy change.
Despite the valuable work of these policy theorists, interrogating and deconstructing
the language of policy has not received sufficient attention in social policy research.
In fact, there is limited evidence about the influence of discourse analysis on the
social policy community (Jacobs, 1999: 210). While the term ‘discourse’ itself has
entered social policy writing, it is also the case that there is often little theoretical
acknowledgement or engagement with the social theories that have placed discourse
on the social policy agenda. The lack of explicit interrogation of policy language may
seem somewhat surprising, given that policy-making is heavily constituted by
discursive practices. As Majone (cited by Fischer and Forrester, 1993: 2) states: ’As
politicians know only too well, but social scientists often forget, public policy is made
of language. Whether in written or oral form, argument is central in all stages of the
policy process‘. Yet, policy research has largely ignored the possibilities offered by
discourse analyses in favour of super-structural accounts of social change pursued
within the social science of variables (Jacobs and Manzi, 1996; Hastings, 1998).
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The Social Construction of Policy Problems
Positivist conceptions of language as an objective mirror of an external reality are
destabilised by poststructuralism. ’Poststructuralism emphasises the instability and
contingency of the structural context of social interaction‘ (Torfing, 1999: 55). The
plurality of language and the impossibility of fixing meaning once and for all are
basic principles of poststructuralism, informed by a social constructionist
epistemology (Weedon, 1997: 82). The implication of using a social constructionist
epistemology is not to question the existence of the ‘object’ per se; it is the
universalism of knowledge that is questioned in these accounts. Lyotard (1984), for
example, believes that knowledge is stable, and even predictable within specific
situations – but it is not necessarily universal.
There is of course nothing particularly enlightening about suggesting that objects are
constructed in thought. The research innovation comes from showing how policies are
constructed and contested. For showing that policy problems are socially constructed
implies – in theory at least – that they can be constructed differently and that there are
alternatives to the dominant discourses that currently define the terrain of social
policy. The aim then is to encourage reflexivity and inspire the moral imagination of
policy makers, or at the very least to make policy-makers consider the consequences
of talking, acting and thinking in certain ways. To take a current example in the
Australian political context, the Commonwealth Government constructs asylum
seekers as ‘illegal refugees’, or simply ‘illegals’. This construction immediately
positions this group of people as lawbreaking ‘others’, who should be treated with
contempt, rather than compassion.
Moreover, constructing the policy problem in terms of ‘illegality’ immediately
legitimises the current policy prescription of enforced detention. This example
highlights how policy language can become its own form of ‘cultural injustice’
(Fraser, 1997). A basic assumption in this approach to policy research, is that
discourses, which are regularised and ritualised (that is racist, sexist), have as much
capacity to injure, to oppress and to exclude as the material barriers that people face in
their everyday lives (Corker, 2000: 447). Yet, this does not mean that discourses are
fixed; they are also contestable and contingent.
Policies as Socially, Culturally and Historically Contingent Realities
In accepting the poststructural claim that social policies are not pre-existing givens,
reflecting an underlying reality, it follows that what constitutes a policy problem or
solution is historically, socially and culturally contingent (Yanow, 1996; Torfing
1999). Contingent meanings are inherently unstable discursive structures. Discourses
that underpin the welfare state, for example, are not simply imposed from above but
involve the way people view themselves; hence dominant discourses are potentially
fragile and malleable. Policy meanings are only ever partially fixed and different
participants in the policy process are, at various times, engaged in a struggle to
advance their particular version of the policy problem or policy solution. ’In this sense
the problem and the participants are ”mutually constitutive”: the one reinforces the
other‘ (Colebatch, 1998: 27). It follows that from a post-structural perspective the
objects of investigation are both the policy products (documents, legislation) and the
individual and organisational activities that develop and implement these products.
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In capturing this process, the aim is to find an approach that makes it possible to
consider the relative autonomy of symbolic and cultural systems without giving up the
traditional political-economic focus of critical social policy. According to Nancy
Fraser (1997: 7) both cultural politics (recognition/identity) and social politics
(redistribution) must be re-coupled, both practically and intellectually, if we are to
conceive of provisional alternatives to the present political order:
A critical approach must be ’bivalent‘, in contrast, integrating the
social and the cultural, the economic and the discursive. This
means exposing the limitations of fashionable neostructuralist
models of discourse analysis that dissociate ’the symbolic order‘
from the political economy.
It is important to interpret critical social theory and poststructural accounts in terms of
their possibilities of building a comprehensive conceptual framework for the study of
social policy change which is able to accommodate structure and agency, and able to
investigate the relationship between discursive and material change at multiple levels
of analysis. The next section will briefly articulate a specific form of discourse
analysis that holds onto the critical tradition while at the same time utilising the
insights of poststructuralism and postmodernism discussed above.
3
A Possibility for Dialogue: Overcoming an Either/Or Position
One site in which poststructuralism and critical social policy analysis can meet is in
an adequate theory and method of discourse analysis that recognises both material and
discursive practices. The starting point is to keep a critical focus on questions of
justice, rights and material disadvantage, and to avoid the trap of unqualified
relativism which, at its most extreme, postmodernist thinking embraces (Ellison,
1999: 70). There is a risk in wholeheartedly abandoning conventional paradigms,
embracing the new or adopting an either/or position in relation to social theory.
Poverty, for example, is an ideological formation, it is a truth produced by particular
discursive strategies, but it is also a social construction – and people die from it
(Clarke, 1998: 183). It is clear from this example that where social constructionism
becomes problematic is where it disregards the relative solidity and permanence of
some social entities.
In working through these epistemological issues and complexities, policy researchers
must not be bound by simplistic dichotomies that force them to choose between
critical social theory and postmodernism (Agger, 1992: 75). Each body of theory
needs to be seen as a set of intellectual tools that can be used together, but at the same
time held in constant tension. Moreover, in suggesting that a dialogue needs to be
promoted, it is not simply a case of social policy listening to social theorists, it is also
a case of social theorists being a little more reflexive and a little more attentive to
debates within social policy (Mann, 1998). There is sometimes a tendency among
postmodern writers to represent the welfare state singularly in terms of its public
welfare and disciplinary practices (Rose, 1996, 1999), while remaining silent on the
function and features of occupational and fiscal welfare. Similarly, in the work of
Fairclough (1992) there is a tendency to discuss the forces of marketisation and neoliberalism as if they were a colonising force that has swept into previously protected
spaces. Yet, the Australian welfare state, like many others in the western world, has a
long history of market forms of human service provision through a mixed economy of
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welfare. Arguably, what has changed in recent years is the intensification of market
forms of welfare provision.
Moreover, the theoretical tools developed in the ‘post’ literature – discourse,
language, power/knowledge, subjectivity – need to be coupled with everyday
struggles and practical concerns. As Mann (1998: 101) argues, it is the struggles of
those who have to rely on public welfare that have done much to generate a more
reflexive but distinctly critical social policy, and it is to these critical voices, these
subject identities that we should pay much more attention. In other words, in social
policy analysis, it is not enough to simply engage in academic discourse analyses of
written policy texts. As Jacobs (1999: 204) states: ’A commitment to both text and
practice is necessary to understand the policy process‘. In the interests of producing a
richer and more politically informed account of policymaking we need to consider the
interpretative accounts of policy actors, paying particular attention to which groups
are able to access the production of policy discourses and the reasons others are
marginalised. In a policy context, this involves empirically exploring the discursive
and non-discursive components of policy implementation and the way meanings are
made, used, conveyed, disseminated and translated (Healey, 1993: 28).
Meanings are produced in the interpretation of a text and therefore they are open to
diverse readings, which may differ in their ideological import, hence the importance
of capturing the voices of those that negotiate the policy field (Fairclough, 1992: 36).
Indeed, the intersection of discourses can be regarded as moments of interactions
between actors, not just of the relationship between discourses, which are moments of
such events. In a research sense, this means bringing together the material focus of
traditional social policy analysis with the poststructural insights about the
constitutional power of language and representation. Paying attention to these voices
demands a theory of discourse that explicitly incorporates the perspectives of those
that find themselves excluded from policy processes. One approach that meets these
demands is critical discourse analysis.
Using Critical Discourse Analysis to Study Social Policy Change
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is basically a sociological account of language use.
Critical discourse analysis attempts to bring together a political economic framework
appropriated from critical theory, with its focus on material inequalities, together with
the insights of cultural studies and poststructuralism. Critical discourse analysis is one
approach that is able to provide evidence of ongoing processes, such as the
reconstitution of knowledge and the reconstitution of ‘self’ through detailed textual
analysis, which acts as a counter balance to overly rigid and schematising social
analyses that have plagued social policy research (Fairclough, 1995: 209). In
countering an overly rigid structural analysis, however, CDA does not reduce all
social practices to a textual reality. Importantly, CDA differs from some versions of
discourse analysis that end up seeing the social as nothing but discourse, which in
itself represents a form of ‘discourse idealism’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999:
117).
CDA is interested in investigating the category of discourse as an instrument of power
and discourse as an instrument of the social construction of ‘reality’ (Sotillo and
Starace-Nastasi, 1991: 412). Whereas much of the earlier work on language use and
discourse has a linguistic bias, critical discourse analysis provides a more socio309
GREG MARSTON
political emphasis; which is what makes it suitable for social policy analysis (vanDijk, 1990: 8). In terms of theoretical orientation, critical discourse analysis shares
critical theory’s concern with ideology, hegemonic politics and the postmodern
critique of the value-free assumptions and cause-effect relationships underlying
positivist social science (Agger, 1991: 109). In this way, critical discourse analysis
makes it possible to forge links among critical theory, poststructuralism and
postmodernism and the links between micro, meso and macro accounts of discourse.
A Multi-Conception of Discourse Place
Discourses have micro features, in terms of their linguistic structure; however,
discourses also operate at more global, societal and cultural levels. At this macrolevel, systems of discourse are closely associated with ideology, hegemony and with
the enactment and legitimation of power (van Dijk, 1998: 9). Hence, the term
‘critical’ implies making visible the interconnectedness between concepts and
practices (Fairclough, 1995: 36). The relationship between macro, meso and micro
levels of discourse is of primary concern to Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995),
one of the founders of critical discourse analysis, who conceptualises discourse in
terms of three main dimensions. Textual analysis (micro) is concerned with
description about the form and meaning of the text2, discourse practice (meso)
focuses on the discursive production and interpretation of the text and socio-cultural
practice (macro) operates at the level of broader social analysis. In a policy setting,
this model can be used to study how policies are produced and interpreted.
A way of researching discourse at these multiple levels is by focusing on the network
of institutions that produce and interpret policy texts within established policy
communities (such as the housing sector, education policy, health networks, or the
community sector). For Fairclough (1995: 37) the institutional site, such as the
government, the school, or the family emerges as the pivotal site where social change
functions both upwards towards the social formation and downwards to concrete
social actions and material practices. Social institutions are (amongst other things) an
apparatus of verbal interaction, a site of discursive practices (Fairclough, 1995: 38).
Institutions, such as the government, government departments and community
agencies are critically important policy-making sites.
There are a number of recent studies that illustrate how critical discourse analysis can
be made operational in the context of social policy research (see Jacobs and Manzi,
1996; Wodak, 1996; Hastings, 2000; Marston, 2000). What has been missing from a
lot of the empirical research to date has been an account of how policy actors actually
interpret and negotiate contemporary discourses that define the contested discourses
of the welfare state (Hastings, 2000), such as neo-liberalism, communitarianism, and
the ‘new moral economy’ of welfare (Rodger, 2000). To address this gap, there is a
need to do more work on identifying resistant practices in the face of discursive
change. A poststructural reading of hegemonic practices is a useful way of theorising
these forms of contestation.
2
A text is taken to be any instance of written or spoken discourse.
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STRUGGLING WITH THE POSTMODERN CHALLENGE
Critical Discourse Analysis, Hegemony And Resistance
Hegemony can be defined as the discursive face of power, and as such is a central
concept in critical discourse analysis, and is particularly useful when thinking about
contestation over social policy issues. Hegemony is the attempt to provide
authoritative definitions of social needs, and the power to shape the political agenda
(Fraser, 1991: 100) In the social policy arena, hegemony is therefore concerned with
how social policies are culturally framed. Framing involves the attempt to fix policy
meanings and welfare subjectivities, which are used in political discourse to
legitimatise policy directions (for instance ‘dole bludger’, ‘welfare dependant’).
Hegemonic struggles in social policy discourse are in a sense a struggle about what it
means to be a welfare recipient.
This conception of subjectivity as a site of struggle helps us to focus on the way that
different social identities are discursively formed through power relationships within
welfare state structures. There is a pressing need to understand the way differences
and identities and the attendant ideologies of legitimacy and entitlement are
constructed in welfare discourses and how these relate to social relations of power
(Brah, 1996). This is particularly important given that the ‘regulation of the poorest
groups’ is not only material but also involves a discursive regulation, which is
inscribed with categories of contested identities (Taylor, 1998: 348). Hence, the
welfare subject is understood in critical discourse analysis as decentred and
heterogenous and is neither unified nor fixed, but fragmented (Brah, 1996: 122).
However, the capacity for voluntary action is retained within critical discourse
analysis. To get beyond the philosophical stalemate between subjectivity as a mere
ideological effect on the one hand, and the idea of an autonomous subject on the
other, it is necessary to look at micro-relations of power, which is where the concept
of resistance comes to the fore in critical discourse analyses of social policy issues.
Here, one is trying to render an account of the diverse everyday experiences of
heterogenous subjects as they struggle with the relationships between determining
structures, that which is internalised from these structures, and what remains in their
own intentions, albeit mediated in culture (Leonard, 1997: 47).
In research terms, it is important to focus not only on how hegemonic domination is
secured and reproduced at the expense of transformation, but also how subjects may
contest and progressively restructure domination through everyday practice
(Fairclough, 1992: 34-35). In terms of the broader objectives for policy-making
studies, ‘Discourse analysis can assist policy makers in reconceptualising their
approach to problems and to understand why certain issues come to be seen as
problems’ (Jacobs, 1999: 211). In other words, critical discourse analysis can be used
to deconstruct the policy texts to reveal assumptions, subject positions and social
relations between and within institutional contexts.
The recent Commonwealth Government welfare reform agenda provides an example
of the possible value of this form of analysis. The starting point is to problematise,
rather than accept, the discursive construction of the policy problem. In the case of
welfare reform, the policy problem was predominantly framed by the Commonwealth
Government in terms of ‘welfare dependency’. Structural explanations, such as labour
market changes, were jettisoned in favour of a moralistic, individualist account of the
311
GREG MARSTON
policy problem where welfare claimants were positioned as holding back the
‘economic competitiveness’ of the nation (Newman, 1999).
Policy academics and policy activists using this approach would interrogate the
discourse of welfare reform, rather than accepting the ‘policy problem’ as
representing some form of objective reality. In analysing this issue, critical discourse
analysis is interested in the connections between the socio-cultural context and the
text itself. A critical discourse analyst might ask what made this discursive policy
frame possible and more importantly, what are its multiple effects? Or we could ask:
how has the very notion of welfare become so derisory and why has ‘being
dependent’ become so pejorative? And what does this individualistic discourse mean
for governance and the emergent role of the state? In terms of the policy actors it
would be valuable to get an interpretative account of the policy process that was used
to develop the welfare reform package, to get a sense of the discursive contestation
that defined this particular issue – to capture the ‘messiness’ of policy-making that
gets lost in official discourse and government publications.
The political nature of these questions, and the power of this form of analytics, is to
disrupt the ‘naturalness’ and the inevitability of current rationales at the level of
policy practice. The assumption in this form of analytics is that criticism itself can be
a real power for change, depriving some practices of their ‘self-evidence’ or
‘naturalness’, while extending the bounds of the thinkable to permit the invention of
others (Burchell and Miller, 1991). In contrast to some forms of critical theory, the
intention of critical discourse analysis is not to put forward and impose a ‘blueprint’
for how people should live in the future, but to offer resources for transformation by
identifying resistance practices where they occur and giving a voice to those policy
actors that struggle to be heard in their attempts to access policy practices.
Highlighting positive forms of resistance, and micro-rebellions against dominating
discourses is an important social and political process. This does not mean that we do
not need our grand narratives to make some sense of global social change, however,
we should not make assumptions about how these grand narratives are experienced
and transformed by actors at the local level of policy practice.
4
Conclusion
In the first part of this paper, it was argued that in order to understand the changing
nature of social services, social policy research must go beyond static explanation and
normative policy analysis. Creating an intellectual and practical space for this to occur
will continue to be a struggle, given the weight of history behind social policy
education and the personal and professional investment that maintain particular
paradigms within research institutions. In negotiating the sometimes extreme
positions between positivism and poststructuralism and in seeking to avoid ‘trench
warfare’, this paper has argued for a common ground between the traditional material
concerns of social policy with patterned disadvantage and the radical constructivist
claims that reduce all objects of study to mere artefacts of knowledge represented in
ever shifting textual relations.
In taking this position, I recognise that there is a conservative and relativist strand
with postmodern writing, however, the ‘anything goes’ approach can be avoided as
long as a political focus on contemporary social struggles and ethical practices
remains at the centre of the research focus. It is also imperative that a capacity for
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STRUGGLING WITH THE POSTMODERN CHALLENGE
voluntary agency is retained, given the difficulty of conceiving of social policy
without its intentionally acting subjects. In addition, ‘critical postmodernism’ must
not only be interested in the sources of discourses, but also the lived effects of
discursive practices, particularly the dialectical relationship between discursive and
material change. These theoretical insights will also need to be worked out
methodologically to suit particular research interests within the social policy
discipline.
Critical discourse analysis is one approach that potentially meets this challenge and
provides a useful dialogue between critical theory and postmodern theorising.
In many ways, critical discourse analysis speaks to the core goals of social policy.
Social policy research has a long and significant history of investigating and
addressing material disadvantage, yet it is still in its infancy in terms of sufficiently
understanding the culture injustices that play a part in maintaining and obscuring
continuing inequalities. Critical discourse analysis is able to show how these material
practices are constituted by discourses. When used in conjunction with other
qualitative approaches, critical discourse analysis has the potential to be a powerful
and revealing form of social inquiry, particularly when used to investigate the nature
of changes and forces that are shaping welfare state programs and forms of service
delivery at the local, institutional and socio-cultural level. In its significance, the
discursive dimension of social change and its role in reproducing material inequalities
and practices of domination and resistance is unlikely to diminish in the future. As
Poynton (2000: 38) concludes:
Possibilities for an oppositional stance – for any kind of resistance
to the operations of new forms of power- are giving way to very
different kinds of engagement with issues of power, government
and their legitimation. Discourse remains at the heart of these
issues, however, rendering critical forms of discourse analysis –
current and future – of ongoing importance.
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