An affirmative-diffractive re-reading of the policy instrumentation approach through agential realism and the accreditation instrument

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the ‘material turn’ in the social sciences, education scholars have engaged in discussions on various materialist modes of policy analysis for a long time now. This paper continues these discussions by experimenting with an agential realist re-reading of the instrumentation approach originally proposed by Lascoumes & Le Gales. Through an affirmative-diffractive methodology, the paper suggests that policy instruments can be conceptualized as socio-technical, entangled, and performative instruments that produce distinctive discursive-material effects by virtue of their particular capacities. This conceptualization continues key features of the original instrumentation approach, while contributing a concept of instrument capacities and amplifying the importance of the material and ontological character of the performative effects of policy instruments and their entanglement with policy content and wider sets of policies. By including the empirical case of higher education accreditation in the re-reading, the article offers an approach capable of analyzing how policy instruments contribute to the crafting of the ontological constitution of the university in alignment with the standards and practices produced by the accreditation instrument. The article suggests that the realities currently being invoked by instruments such as accreditation seem to reconfigure – and diminish – the very raison d’être of the university.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy analysis
• instrumentation approach
• accreditation as policy instrument
• agential realism
• diffraction

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank our peer reviewers for their engaging and useful feedback during the review process.

Disclosure of conflicts of interest Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katja Brøgger

Katja Brøgger is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the research program director of Policy Futures and host of the Policy Futures International Webinar Series. Her research on education policy and governance focuses on the role of universities and explores the relations between international reform processes and national policymaking. Brøgger is the PI of two comparative projects on the rise of neo-nationalism in higher education funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Brøgger has published several articles and book chapters on education governance, the EU, the European Higher Education Area, privatization, and the rise of neo-nationalism. 

Miriam Madsen

Miriam Madsen is Assistant Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research on educational policy, governance, and administration focuses on quantification processes and the impact of the use of performance indicators in educational governance on higher education thinking and design. Madsen is the PI of a project on the performative effects of budgeting and accounting practices in university education funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Madsen has published articles on higher education metrics, graduate employability policies, and competition in public educational governance.