What is policy? 21 years later: reflections on the possibilities of policy research

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on What is policy? Texts, Trajectories and Tool Boxes, which was first published in 1993, in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. It looks back to what the 1993 paper was trying to do and at some of the developments of the ideas first sketched there in my later work, in particular in the book How Schools Do Policy (2012). It also considers the continuing tensions between domination and agency, discourse and text, in policy research and the misuse of the concept of discourse in some policy analysis work.

Keywords:

• policy
• discourse
• agency
• enactment
• subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Foucault does not offer a definition of truth; rather he provides a multifaceted characterisation (Prado, 2006, p. 81).