Dwellers on the threshold of practice: the interpretivism of Bevir and Rhodes

Abstract

Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes' interpretive political science hardly needs an introduction to policy scholars. Their approach, philosophically sophisticated and grounded in a realistic appraisal of the nature of governing in modern liberal democratic societies, is of considerable significance to anyone in political science, public administration or planning with an interest in interpretive methods. Focusing on the concepts of meaning holism, anti-representationalism, tradition, dilemma and decenteredness, I briefly describe the philosophical foundations and substantive theory of interpretive political science. The main part of the essay consists of a critique of interpretive political science. My argument is that the key concept of practice is underdeveloped. The point of a philosophy of practice is to integrate belief and action to the point where they form one organic activity system for the purpose of moving about effectively in the world. Bevir and Rhodes' insistence on keeping belief and action separate and, in addition, on privileging belief as the major driver of change and adaptation to changing circumstances, inserts a deep inconsistency into their work; an inconsistency that, to my mind, becomes manifest in the relative paucity of their own empirical work. I conclude the essay with a brief exposition of what a practice-based, posthumanist approach to policy research entails (centering on the concepts of agency, the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, temporal emergence and cultural extension) and of what its practical implications are for policy analysis.

Keywords:

• interpretivism
• decenteredness
• anti-foundationalism
• practice
• agency
• posthumanism

Notes

1. Bevir and Rhodes do provide empirical examples of their approach themselves. However, these are rather disappointing. The most interesting, and the ones that most closely follow their own methodological prescriptions, are the ethnographic studies of cabinet ministers and high level civil servants. Although these provide us with fascinating insights into the everyday lives of these high officials, they sometimes seem under-conceptualized. What are we to make of a claim about a minister that: ‘He “makes a difference”, but spends much time and effort at the appearance of ruling’ ( Bevir and Rhodes 2010, pp. 133–134). I am willing to accept that ministers and permanent secretaries rely on protocols to contain chaos and stress, but it simply flies in the face of common sense to downplay the enormous influence that cabinet ministers can have on the state of a nation. Although Bevir and Rhodes (2003, p. 103) claim to be working here within the anthropological tradition of ‘thick description’, their research is a far cry from the interpretive brilliance of its originator Clifford Geertz. When it comes to Bevir and Rhodes’ analysis of traditions, they do not progress much beyond a textual hermeneutics of traditional British political traditions (McAnulla 2006, p. 131, Wagenaar 2011, p. 102). Their treatment of the resistance of local actors to centralized directives is restricted to the presentation of some cases and long transcriptions of interviews. They miss the empirical and analytic sophistication of the work on administrative resistance in, for example, Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) or Barnes and Prior (2009).

2. The common argument is that the field of interpretive research is fractured into different approaches with different philosophical foundations (Wagenaar 2011). However, following intense debates in journals and at conferences, and perhaps driven by the confrontation with doing empirical interpretive research, a gradual converging of the different approaches that honor anti-foundationalism may be under way. In their reply to their critics in Political studies review, Bevir and Rhodes conclude, for example, that the differences between them and the poststructuralists are getting smaller: ‘But, instead of quibbling over how best to interpret Foucault or Laclau, we welcome other postfoundationalists, such Howarth and Glynos, who openly recognize situated agency. Once other postfoundationalists recognise agency, the differences between them and us will be mainly terminological’ (Bevir 2008, p. 3). It might help if Bevir and Rhodes were a bit more generous in referencing others who work in the interpretive tradition. In many places in their last book they present their work as if they are the first or only ones who have developed a particular idea. For example, the concept of tradition has been developed with considerably more subtlety, and in more depth, by Gadamer and his followers (Gadamer 1989). The decentered nature of the state has obvious resonances with Dewey's (2008) understanding of the state as an emerging public. And their empirical work on traditions has much in common with frame analysis as practiced by Schön and Rein (1994). Even if the authors think their work differs from these progenitors, it would be helpful if they could articulate the differences.

3. The forward looking perspective in man's dealings with the world is one of the central themes of the pragmatism of John Dewy. As Campbell (1995, p. 61), one of Dewey's most incisive interpreters, puts it: ‘(F)or Dewey, we find ourselves, as incomplete creatures living in changing social and natural situations, antecedently committed to lifelong attempts at overcoming difficulties … The possibility of intelligent action thus compels inquiry; and in defending this stance Dewey embraces the “forward-looking” charge we saw above. As he writes in one of several such formulations: “we live not in a settled and finished world, but in one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective, and where retrospect – and all knowledge as distinct from thought is retrospect – is of value in the solidity, security, and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.” … The function of thinking is to contribute to a life that is forward-moving, carrying with it all that matters from the experiences of the past and the present.’ (Dewey quote from Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 158). The same embeddedness in a world of acting and practical engagement is what distinguishes Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics from classical hermeneutics. Interpretation is identical to acting and living (Wagenaar 2011, ch. 8).

4. This is the problem with the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). As Pickering (1995, p. 9) puts it: ‘The great achievement of SSK was to bring the human and social dimensions of science to the fore. SSK, one can say, thematized the role of human agency in science. It thus partially displaced the representational idiom by seeing the production, evaluation and use of scientific knowledge as structured by the interests of and constraints upon real human agents’. However, this foregrounding of human agency in explaining scientific process obscured the view on the agency of the substances that science manipulated, processed, worked upon and interpreted (Pickering 1995, p. 10).

5. This formulation suggests that the distinction of types of agency must not be seen as putting them into exclusive categories. A particular system can be all three at the same time: natural, artifactual and human. For example, an IVF clinic straddles all three agency types. It is an artifactual system interposed on natural processes that is guided by normative principles. The distinction helps us to focus on the different functional requirements of the system, and not to privilege one over the others (Noam Cook, personal communication).

6. When Bevir and Rhodes talk of cultural practices, what they refer to is human and artifactual agency. However, by focusing exclusively on ‘cultural’ practices we run the risk of drawing, planning our field of inquiry too narrowly. Many fields of governance, such as bioscience, psychiatry, and health, or environmental energy and industrial policy, present complex interactions of natural, artifactual and human agency.

7. Given that, with the three types of agency, I transcend, or, more precisely, expand, the human–nonhuman dualism, it would, strictly speaking, be better to drop the label posthumanism for something like an agential account of social science. But as I do not want to contribute to the proliferation of labels, and the term ‘agential’ does not strike me as particularly happy, I have opted for using posthumanist and performative as interchangeable labels. Performative is, thus, more than patterned action. It, and its noun practice, refer to the interplay of natural, artifactual and human agency and our attempts to harness this constantly undulating dance of agency.

8. One of those ‘deeply ingrained patterns of thought’ is the ‘comformating causality of sociological thought … with its traditional repertoire of enduring causes, (interests) and constraints’ (Pickering 1995, p. 24).

9. Bevir and Rhodes (2010, p. 29) seem to take a similar position in their spirited defense of anti-foundationalism. They argue against the correspondence theorists that they have no way of knowing what is behind their scientific methods and procedures, so if they claim that their results and theories correspond with the world as it is, they simply perform a giant act of faith in mystical revelation.

10. There is one critique that is often leveled at Bevir and Rhodes that I do not share. Bevir and Rhodes’ anti-essentialism, so the argument goes, leaves no place for aggregate concepts such as structure, state, institution or power (Glynos and Howarth 2007, Smith 2008). This critique seems to me beside the point, as the whole thrust of Bevir and Rhodes’ interpretivism is to disaggregate, to decenter, the big concepts of political science. This is not the same as arguing for the absence of aggregate forces that influence individual behavior. As Bevir argues, aggregation happens in various ways: through the force of traditions, through recurrent dilemmas, through practices (Wagenaar and Cook 2003), and through the unintended consequences of collective action (Bevir and Rhodes 2008, p. 6). The last category is of particular importance as these are a subset of the all-important emergent effects of the myriad interactions in complex adaptive systems (Axelrod and Cohen 1999, Wagenaar 2011, p. 281). All of these aggregate phenomena provide a set of constraints and affordances for individual actors. By decentering big political entities, Bevir and Rhodes return the force of agency to them. The point is not that state, structure and power do not shape individual behavior. Pure common sense tells us they do. The point is, instead, to explain the precise mechanisms of influence without resorting to vague allusions to ‘determination’ or ‘path dependency’. In my own book on interpretive policy analysis, I quote the sociologist Robert Prus, who beautifully captures what a decentered approach to explaining social phenomena amounts to: ‘Referring to the emergent or ongoing nature of group life, process is basic to an understanding of these other themes. Intersubjectivity (and the sharing of symbolic realities) is an ongoing process … The primary conceptual and methodological implication of this processual emphasis is this: since all aspects of group life take place in process terms or take their shape over time, it is essential that the human condition be conceptualized and studied in manners that are actually mindful of the emergent nature of human lived experience’ (Prus 1996, pp. 16, 17, 18, italics in original, in Wagenaar 2011, p. 62).

11. See also Wagenaar (2011, p. 100) for a further elaboration of this point.

12. In their 2003 book, Bevir and Rhodes are critical of the famous study on ‘everyday makers’ by Bang and Sørensen (1999). They argue that ethnographic analysis alone fails to capture the force of tradition, either at a historical moment in time or in a particular culture. Interpretive analysis of governance should also include historical and comparative analysis. Bang and Sørensen's micro-analysis of Nørrebro prevents them from seeing the activist reputation – call it tradition – of this district, even within a society that is itself famous for its tradition of high levels of citizen participation and consensual modes of conflict resolution in local governance networks. I do not disagree, but Bang and Sørensen did do exactly what Bevir and Rhodes exhort us to do: connect individual behaviors with the larger context of beliefs in which this behavior is embedded. What Bevir and Rhodes fail to see is that the Bang and Sørensen careful ethnographic research allows them to challenge traditional disciplinary categories. The Everyday Makers seem to be oblivious of the reach of local officers and city administrators. They operate outside political belief systems. Yet, they are a force in Copenhagen city politics. Politics, as a conceptual category, took on a new meaning, as an integral part of everyday life (Wagenaar 2011, p. 100).