Case Study 4:
A postmodern approach to ‘policy studies’
Research in the postmodern is often text based, usually involving the deconstructive analysis of the ‘truth claims’ of a text and the way that the rhetoric of the text positions the reader. This is different from the usual critical attention paid to a text that is the basis for the IMP’s ‘Making an Argument’ assignment/assessment task. In the text-based, postmodern research mode, the researcher, for example, may open up a discussion on how a text is ‘gendered’ (as an example, see ‘Real Men Don’t Collect Soft Data’, Gherardi and Turner, 2002); or the delineation of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the text as a legitimate statement or as a text of resistance (as an example, see Chapter 12 ‘Reading Education’, from Blake et al, 1998). The research act in this case is discursive, and involves the analysis of discourse presented by the researched text(s). ‘Text’, as mentioned previously, has come to be used loosely in postmodernism to refer not only to written or electronic forms, but also to media in general, and to embodied social practices. This section offers an example of a postmodern approach to researching education policy that rejects functional readings of policy documents for treatment of policy as a product of a number of intersecting discourses.
Scheurich (1997, p.137) notes that research methodologies are a product of the interaction of three things:
Ontologies (our experiences of what we think of as ‘real’)
Epistemologies (truth claims - the ways that we come to know, or legitimise, what we think of as ‘reality’, or valid theories of knowledge)
Axiologies (what we come to value and judge as good or bad – the ethical and moral dimensions to social activities). In each of these areas, research in the postmodern fundamentally questions modernist assumptions.
The rational positivist approach to policy research follows a modernist agenda:
The assumption of a given, a priori condition, that causes an educational problem.
A range of competing policy decisions is entertained.
An appropriate policy is chosen and implemented.
The impact of the implementation is evaluated in time.
There are two major assumptions informing this model. First, a clear cause and effect. Second, that research is dealing with a transparent ‘reality’ that can be described or uncovered. There is no suggestion that the ‘reality’ described through the research may be a construction or product of the research process itself. The model is instrumental or ‘technical-rational’, aimed at fixing a problem, not at problem-stating or problematising.
Postpositivist and interpretivist researchers follow a similar line of thought, but are critical of the instrumentalism of the positivist model. They suggest that policy research will be largely ‘symbolic’ in its effects, giving voice to perceived latent public concerns but not necessarily ‘solving’ a problem rationally. Both models, however, subscribe to an improvement view: a liberal, emancipatory world view in which, through research, we fix what is wrong with the system or social order, without fundamentally challenging the nature of the social order itself, that is taken as a given reality. There is then no reflexive questioning concerning the conditions under which policy decisions come to be taken, or are legitimated. For example, within the modernist view, if research ‘shows’ that children are failing to read by a particular age, the instrumental policy response is to introduce new reading schemes, extra teaching support, or to question the current models upon which the teaching and learning of reading is based. The Foucauldian model that Scheurich introduces asks: under what conditions is a criterion of ‘failure to read’ decided? Further, how is such a criterion legitimised?
In Scheurich’s model of policy ‘archaeology’ (a term borrowed from Foucault to describe the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence and legitimation of a social practice), research would not be approached as a problem solving activity. Rather, there is a recognition that education ‘problems’ are not simply ‘given’, neutral, and stable, but are socially constructed, situated or relative, and unstable. Thus, how does a ‘problem’, such as ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’, come to be constructed as a symptom that requires specific treatment (in this case, a drug treatment – Ritalin)? How does a behavioural ‘problem’ become legitimated as a chemical imbalance? How does this particular example illustrate a wider discourse such as the ‘medicalisation’ of behaviour and experience? Scheurich (1997, p.98) notes the ‘constitutive grid of conditions, assumptions, forces which make the emergence of a social problem … possible.’ Foucault’s (1974, 1989) early method of ‘archaeology’ is the research process uncovering such a ‘constitutive grid of conditions’. In another favourite descriptor of Foucauldians, how is the so-called ‘problem’ given ‘visibility’? Of course, once a social effect is cast as a ‘problem’ it necessarily attracts instrumental, or ‘problem solving’ attention. The issue becomes a focus for efficiency rather than puzzlement or complexity, the latter discouraged as impractical or an abstraction. Scheurich, again in the language of Foucauldian analysis, is interested in how networks of regulatory practices come to allow the constitution or emergence of a ‘legitimate’ practice, now seen as normative.
The archaeological method employed by Scheurich is claimed as a research ‘methodology’ (Scheurich, 1997, p.99), and described as the uncovering of historically- and culturally-contingent webs of rules and principles within a discourse – usually remaining tacit until rigorously scrutinised – that regulate or govern behaviour and experience, and are productive of identities and social practices. (Case Study 5 reframes this approach as ‘discourse evaluation’). Such webs of power produce or legitimate what is taken as ‘knowledge’. This view challenges the ‘sovereign power’ view of modernism, which sees education policy as a transparent product of intentional agency or conscious choice. It also suggests that ‘truths’ are relative to historical and cultural context or occasion, and then neither universal, transcendental nor stable, a point that is repeated many times throughout this component. For Scheurich, conventional education policy study does not offer solutions to educational problems, but, rather, is itself a problem worthy of investigation.
West Indian boys have persistently been labelled as ‘failures’ within the school system. The modernist policy intervention includes a combination of improved educational and social support, linked to social interventions that attempt to both understand and regulate the home lives of such boys (which is perceived as negative toward schooling). Scheurich notes the futility of such policy intervention from the perspective of a ‘policy archaeology’. The more one intervenes along these lines, the stronger one constitutes the ‘West Indian boy’ as ‘failure’ or ‘outsider’ to the normative ‘white’ discourse. The interventions may claim liberal intentions based on multi-ethnic tolerance, but cannot escape the dominant version of ethnicity in the culture, framed as an opposition of white (self/same):non-white (other). We do not discover some intrinsic academic ‘failure’ of West Indian boys, we construct such ‘failure’ as a relational issue according to normative, but relative, views of ‘success’. The good intentions of practitioners in implementing policy become a policing of the boundaries of the normative discourse - a form of regularization. Educational research of the modernist variety adds to this effect of ‘governmentality’ (another of Foucault’s favourite descriptors), or tacit regularization.
The point of the above example is that the policy ‘solutions’ proposed by emancipatory liberal views are not then touching the larger discursive effect of the very ‘white supremacy’ that they oppose in principle. The normative social order is paradoxically not only left untouched, but is unintentionally reinforced, leaving Scheurich (1997, p.113) to admit that he ‘find(s) inadequate the answers to the questions that rely on the individual political and moral agency of supposedly self-aware and free-choosing subjects of liberal and critical thought.’
A critique of Scheurich’s position
While Sheurich’s Foucauldian research analysis does not offer ‘truth claims’, does it nevertheless offer a rhetoric that could be taken as claim for the what Derrida would call the ‘presencing’ of a view? This would be a privileging of a view, bringing it to the foreground, not just as an alternative to the view criticised, such as the modernist model of policy research, but offering a rhetoric that persuades the reader into its validity. Where ‘archaeology’ is offered as the research process uncovering a ‘constitutive grid of conditions’, will the reader now think that a treasure has been dug up – that here indeed is the ‘answer’ to the modernist problematic? Where Foucault speaks of regulative forces of power as productive of ‘visibility’, is Scheurich’s analysis also not offering visibility to a view that challenges normative discourse in an effort to replace it? Does this turn the relativist claims of ‘policy archaeology’ into the research equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes? Where Scheurich rejects ‘truth claims’, is his model a truth claim effected through rhetoric rather than ‘evidence’?
Scheurich (1997, p.100) describes Foucault as one of the ‘postmodernists’. However, in this quote, he chooses as his reference for Foucault’s ‘postmodernism’ The Order of Things (Foucault, 1989). This is generally regarded as Foucault’s archetypally structuralist text, neither post-structural nor postmodern in any of the senses that we have defined these terms up to now. Stronach and MacLure (1997, p.94), writing at the same time as Scheurich, also tackle the problem of a postmodern reading of policy studies, noting however that Foucault’s model of a regulative discursive web of power/knowledge interplay can itself be read as ‘totalizing’ and ‘freezing’. They read Foucault as offering ‘metaphors for the modernist condition’. The danger, then, is that despite Scheurich’s strenuous desire to offer an alternative to rationalist and modernist policy research that does not offer a truth claim, paradoxically, he invests in a method that can be read as totalising. Scheurich wants the reader to see how liberal humanist modernist policy studies assumes that there is an optimum social condition, maladaptation to which offers a problem to be fixed through idealistic educational and social intervention. The assumed optimum social order itself, however, is ‘white’ and then tacitly ‘racist’. The very Foucauldian methodology ‘uncovering’ such a tacit ‘white racist’ bias can be seen to be totalising, offering a new ‘racism’ of theory. Here, I am suggesting that Scheurich’s view at the very least should be read as a rhetorical device, persuading the reader into a Foucauldian perspective.
By now, you may think that this is simply an internal bickering in the postmodern camp, making it no different in kind from the internal splits in modernist research, such as the quantitative versus qualitative ‘divide’. It is however, a very important debate for postmodernists, for, as I argue below, it demonstrates some difficulties raised by including Foucault’s ‘grand narrative’ theorising within the ‘postmodern’. (In a lucid account, Quentin Skinner (1990) describes both Foucault’s and Derrida’s work as part of a contemporary ‘return of grand theory’ in the human sciences). As I open this debate, I hope that a number of issues of research practice in the postmodern will emerge. Postmodernism claims plurality and tolerance of difference as core values. It must then suffer the contradiction set up by this debate on researching policy studies.
Stronach’s and MacLure’s reflexivity
Stronach’s and MacLure’s (1997, pp.85-98) chapter on ‘Dilemmas in the deconstruction of educational discourse’ takes as its focus education policy studies. It offers a paradigmatic case study of the reflexive attitude at work in education research in the postmodern. Stronach and MacLure focus upon tensions between ‘postmodernist’ critique and classical Derridean deconstruction, which exposes the contradictions inherent to the postmodernist critique. (Recall that restructive postmodernists, such as Charles Jencks, see Derrida as an avant-garde modernist, while ‘cynical’ postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard, see Foucault as a neo-structuralist, a ‘grand narrative’ theorist. These views would exclude both Derrida and Foucault from membership of the school of postmodernism, reminding us of the need to be wary of using ‘postmodernism’ in the singular).
Stronach and MacLure demonstrate some of the lateral thinking that is essential for research in the postmodern. Their inquiry is text based. The chapter in question moves through two phases:
A critique of modernist policy discourse from a postmodern perspective.
A deconstructive analysis of this postmodern critique, exposing its internal contradictions.
Through these two stages, the authors demonstrate the dangers of adopting any view that makes a claim to a totalising or explanatory perspective. They offer deconstructive method as a rigorously ethical methodology, resisting stereotypes of deconstruction that see it as a-moral in its radical relativism, and as conservative in its political implications. They claim that deconstruction does not undermine the human rights agenda of liberal humanist critique, but offers a more comprehensive or far-reaching mode of critique that is still humane (but not humanist).
Stronach and MacLure focus on the discursive formation of ‘vocationalism’ as an illustration of ‘policy hysteria’, a term first coined by Stronach. Through close readings of policy documents, vocationalism is seen as a ‘discursive space’ inhabited by a number of strands of discourse that effectively construct meanings. Central to the discourse of vocationalism is the manner in which learning is legitimated only if it is ‘practical’, ‘relevant’ and free from interference by educational theorists, but governed rather by politicians influenced by managerialism. What is innovative in Stronach and MacLure’s analysis is that they see ‘policy studies’ as best researched and understood through temporal rather than spatial metaphors. Policy decision making in their view is infected by dominant models of time, and it is these models that invest the particular discourses of vocationalism with their respective characters. ‘Policy hysteria’ is the term coined to describe ‘a cluster of related features in UK educational policy development’ which pivot on a particular view of temporality – in essence, a string of ‘panic’, short-term measures, with no longer term strategy (Stronach and MacLure, 1997, p.87).
Educational reform in the 1980s and 1990s is seen as characterised by waves of short term vocationalist policies that enter with attention-seeking claims for educational (or training) improvement, such as TVEI, only to die in a whimper, hardly noticed, a few years later. Such frantic measures are termed ‘policy hysteria’. The innovations would paradoxically die back, to be replaced by another reform, well before any serious, long-term evaluation was possible. Yet each improvement would be heralded as positive, as solving a training and workforce problem, and as effective despite the lack of rigorous evaluation. Such innovations were ‘inconsistent and incoherent’ (Stronach and MacLure, 1997, p.88). Such reform initiatives became symbolic in nature. Rather than solving problems, they satisfied a perceived public need for ‘performativity’ – that something seemed to be being done.
The characteristic critique of such policy activities from politically oriented interpretivist researchers points to the origins of policy decisions not in educational theory, but in political expediency related to perceived economic issues (the provision of an uncritical, manually skilled workforce within a late capitalist economy). Educational thinking was perceived as being replaced by managerialism, leading to cynicism amongst practitioners. An instrumental ‘training’ mentality replaced an educational values framework. Terms such as the ‘enterprise culture’ came to be associated with the commodification of education and training. Students became ‘customers’. ‘Pupils’ became ‘students’. A production line mentality emerged for so-called ‘lifelong learning’. ‘Relevance’ in learning replaced ‘meaningfulness’.
Stronach and MacLure point to three emerging temporal themes from this period of ‘policy hysteria’: first, an emphasis upon linear time, centred on the notion of ‘progress’. The argument runs that if we do not subscribe to the new vocationalism, we will not progress within the intense competition between advanced capitalist economies (Thatcherism and Reaganism). Second, is an emphasis upon cyclical time, a nostalgic view in which education and training must focus upon recapturing ‘lost’ virtues such as the work ethic, application, persistence and duty. Here, we return to a mythical-historical view of a ‘better time’ (Majorism – ‘back to basics’). Third, is an emphasis upon ‘catastrophic future time’. Here, adequate education and training shores up against a possible ‘future shock’. Concern with present time and with ‘history’ is abandoned to obsession with paranoid, virtual, future time scenarios: possible global economic crashes, environmental disasters, western capitalist-Islam conflict and northern first world nations bearing the costs of the emergence of rapidly industrialising third world nations (whose cheap labour force is exploited for first world consumption needs).
As this doubles back to the world of education policy, so we find an emergence of ‘policy hysteria’ as a bubble. This protects against actual current time realities of education through engagement with either virtual, nostalgic ‘recovery’ of history (return to a mythical golden age), or shoring up against a virtual and uncertain, possibly catastrophic, future, or investing in an ‘inevitability’ linear progress model. In all cases, the loser is education. Education becomes an easy scapegoat for perceived economic ills. Politicians displace self-scrutiny through blaming teachers for producing a future workforce that does not display cumulative ‘progress’ (such as clear improvements in pupil performance), or an embracing of ‘golden age’ virtues, or for failing the agenda for ‘upskilling’ and ‘mulltiskilling’ for a virtual future demanding technological sophistication.
Stronach’s and MacLure’s argument seems pretty strong at face value. However, as committed ethical researchers in the postmodern, they refuse their own model of ‘policy hysteria’ as a construction, exposing it to a reflexive critique through deconstructive method.
As I have previously outlined, deconstruction, as a method of research, inquiry or evaluation, is based on scepticism toward any single claim for ‘truth’, definitive account, or a monopoly on ‘fact’ (Gasche, 1986; Norris, 1991). Any such search is seen as a claim for ‘presence’ – that a theory can be grounded in a principle or a piece of evidence that will end uncertainty (‘closure’). Such a notion of attainable certainty is endlessly deferred in deconstruction. Difference is privileged over identity so that no textual or discursive object has an essential nature, but is known by its differences from other objects. Hence, any piece of evidence or argument that is claimed as fundamental is itself dependent upon the presence of another thing (that is absent rather than present), by which it is known. This is an extension of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: there is no essential ‘master’ and no essential ‘slave’. The term ‘master’ is dependent upon the term ‘slave’ and vice-versa. Anything that is frozen as a definitive account, or given ‘presence’ is to be distrusted, and will present internal contradictions to support such distrust of its status and claim. If a counter argument is not apparent, you simply are not seeing it.
Thus, Stronach and MacLure offer a deconstructive reading of their initial comments on ‘policy hysteria’ as one of premature closure. Most importantly, by attempting to represent policy as a temporal phenomenon, they paradoxically freeze policy in time. Their critique of so-called policy hysteria as frenetic (short-termist, without evaluation) privileges, or brings into presence, the alternative of stability, long-termism and order, as the implied privileged condition. Indeed, this exposes nostalgia for education policy governed by educationalists and rooted in ‘present’ time (another appeal to stability). Suddenly, it is Stronach’s and MacLure’s critique that looks conservative, privileging stability. In other words, they tacitly claim a superior and ideal condition, underpinned by an appeal to the assumed expertise of educationalists. Further, while they criticise the lack of evaluation of short-term Government policies, they provide no evaluative evidence to demonstrate that educationalists know better than the managers and politicians they oppose. They have inadvertently returned to a state of pure origins, from which the new vocationalism is seen as a deviation and aberration. By using the word ‘hysteria’ to describe the critiqued condition, they unwittingly ally themselves with a historical patriarchal discourse that has excluded the feminine as ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ (especially in psychoanalysis), uncovering their desire for a rational system.
The authors admit ‘we cannot hope for a definitive account’ that makes an appeal to an implicit or explicit ‘foundational state’, and must accept ‘the provisionality of meanings’ (Stronach and MacLure, p.93). They note that the task of deconstruction is to counter any claims to presence that results in a freezing of meanings for ideas, arguments, social acts and material culture (artefacts). This brings us full circle to a critique of Foucault’s notions, embodied in Scheurich’s analysis, such as ‘governmentality’, ‘surveillance’, ‘gaze’, ‘regulation’ and ‘power/knowledge’ relations, which offer examples of such presenced and frozen notions, claiming critical powers as first principles of analysis.
Having illustrated the power of a ‘deconstructive praxis’ through reflexive examination of their original postmodern approach, through which they see themselves as having constructed the notion of ‘policy hysteria’ and reified it into a privileged concept, Stronach and MacLure ask ‘What does a deconstructive praxis now look like?’ They proceed to make a claim for the ethical power of such praxis, as a research methodology within the postmodern that can be reflexively applied to rigorously examine the claims of other methodologies within the postmodernist family group. Further, there is the ethical responsibility of the research text itself, which should offer reflexivity, or concern for the conditions of its origins. Turning the usual modernist appeal for methodological responsibility (validity, reliability, generalisability, ethical sensitivity) on its head, the authors suggest that modernist research’s appeal to foundationalism constitutes in its own right an ethical dilemma, subscription to which can be seen as ‘irresponsible’ and call for the emergence of postmodern researcher in the guise of the ‘responsible anarchist’ (Stronach and MacLure, 1997, p.98).
The notion of the postmodern educator and researcher as a ‘responsible anarchist’ is developed in Elizabeth Atkinson’s (2000a) paper: ‘The responsible anarchist: postmodernism and social change’. Atkinson (2000b, 2000c) has produced a series of excellent papers on education research in the postmodern that also model such research, developing a feminist postmodernism for education inquiry that calls for research as critique, not simply as evidence for practice or policy ‘improvement’.
For an interesting paper setting education policy studies against the wider cultural background of movement into the era of postmodernity, focusing upon tensions between bureaucracy and professionalism, see:
Hargreaves, A. (1994) Restructuring Restructuring: Postmodernity and the Prospects for Educational Change. Journal of Education Policy, 9, pp. 47-65.
(Reprinted as Chapter 23 in Halsey, A.H. et al (eds) (1997) Education: Culture, Economy, Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 338-54.
Atkinson, E. (2000a) The responsible anarchist: postmodernism and social change. Draft paper.
Atkinson, E. (2000b) The Promise of Uncertainty: education, postmodernism and the politics of possibility. International Studies in Sociology of Education. 10:1, pp. 81-99.
Atkinson, E. (2000c) What can postmodern thinking do for educational research? Paper presented at AERA, New Orleans.
Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R. and Standish, P. (1998) Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism. London: Bergin & Garvey.
Foucault, M. (1974) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications.
Foucault, M. (1989) The Order of Things. London: Routledge.
Gasche, R. (1986) The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. London: Harvard University Press.
Gherardi, S. and Turner, B. (2002) Real Men Don’t Collect Soft Data. In A.M. Huberman and M.B. Miles (eds) The Qualitative Researcher’s Companion. London: Sage, pp. 81-100.
Hargreaves, A. (1997) Restructuring Restructuring: Postmodernity and the Prospects for Educational Change. In A.H. Halsey et al (eds) Education: Culture, Economy, Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 338-54.
Norris, C. (1991 2nd ed) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
Scheurich, J.J. (1997) Research Method in the Postmodern. London: Falmer Press.
Skinner, Q. (ed) (1990) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stronach, I. and MacLure, M. (1997) Educational Research Undone: The Postmodern Embrace. Buckingham: Open University Press.