Working with Policy: Restructuring Healthy Eating Practices and the Circuit of Policy Communication

Abstract

This case study examines how multiple stakeholders participated in the construction and enactment of policy texts that restructure healthy eating practices. Policies serve important communicative roles in the organizing of everyday experiences. By framing policy as a discursive practice, this analysis illustrates the complex ways that communication figures prominently in participatory policymaking processes. The case study focuses explicitly on food policy, as well as the ways in which stakeholders engaged in practices such as managing paradox and wordplay to restructure school meal programs. To best capture the discursive practices surrounding policy, this essay also introduces the Circuit of Policy Communication as a framework for analyzing and enacting policy work.

Keywords:

• Policy
• Participation
• Strategic Ambiguity
• Reflexivity
• Discursive Practice

Acknowledgments

She would like to thank Drs. Angela Trethewey, Clifton Scott, and David Carlone, for their advice during the development of this manuscript, as well as the comments from the Editors and anonymous reviewers from JACR for additional feedback.

Notes

1. For a full description of the discourse tracing method, including its application to the case study of school food policy in Arizona, see LeGreco & Tracy (2009).

2. In order to preserve the confidentiality of participants, all schools and districts are referred to by pseudonyms, and all individual participants are referred to by their professional relationship to this project (e.g., Eastland food service director, Eastland student).

3. Stohl and Cheney (2001) characterize the paradoxes of power as being those related to control (encountering less as opposed to more freedom through participation), leadership (waiting for a charismatic leader to direct participation), and homogeneity (failing to see the worth of oppositional views while claiming the need for diverse opinions).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marianne LeGreco

Marianne LeGreco (PhD, 2007, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro