Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis

Abstract

This book is about the art and craft of policy analysis undertaken within the emerging interpretive tradition. Written by one of the best exponents of in-depth qualitative research in the rapidly expanding scholarly community of interpretive policy analysts, it is aimed especially at other researchers, both novices and the experienced. For Wagenaar, interpretive policy analysis is about getting to perceive and grasp the articulation of "meaning" in the flow of action. Himself a master craftsman and richly informed by his own experiences as well as the empirical work of others, in this book, he reflects on what is practically involved in policy research focused in this way.All fields of academic discourse have their particular trajectories, evident in the body of literature referred to and the key issues discussed. Policy analysis arises primarily from the fields of public administration and political science. Interpretive policy analysis (IPA) has developed as part of the broad intellectual revolution which unsettled and unseated the dominance of positivist science and empiricist research inquiry in the later 20th century. In this it parallels and overlaps with recent conceptual development in the planning theory field, although lacking the latter's input from recent post-positivist geographical work on the meanings of space, place and spatiality. What permeates the IPA field, however, is a rich awareness of the political and institutional dynamics of policymaking processes, and the complexities of policy formation in interaction with the evolving practices through which policy interventions get "practised" and penetrate into the life-worlds of all those affected.This awareness is shared by many scholars working in the field of urban and regional (or spatial) planning. Planning readers may know of IPA work through the collections of Fischer and Forester (1993), and Wagenaar's book edited with Hajer (Hajer & Wagenaar 2003). Yet getting an overview of contributions and controversies in this "trajectory" of academic work is not easy, because it is a broad and open "family" of approaches, some energetically differentiating themselves from each other and some operating quite independently. As a result, the field/family is awash with similar terms used in different ways, and different terms used for similar phenomena. Many scholars within the planning field will recognise the confusions that thereby arise, and the tendency for research studies to embark on complex theoretical introductions, which only weakly link to empirical evidence presented as demonstration of a particular conceptualisation.Wagenaar's project in this book is to create some order among this argumentative family, while at the same time attempting to counteract what he see as the bugbears of "intemperate theorising" and weakly crafted empirical inquiry. Embarking on any kind of ordering may offend some of those working with interpretive sensibilities, but most of the rest of us will be very grateful for Wagenaar's efforts. This is partly because he bu...

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