This entry is prompted by the increasing attention directed to the possibility of blending, or integrating, WPR with other analytic approaches. The two analytic approaches I consider include Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) and Critical Frame Analysis (CFA). These approaches share a commitment to use large bodies of material and to find ways to organise that material. They also share some common terminologies, including “themes”, “coding” and “evidence”. There is, in these approaches, a tendency to focus on policy actors, though Walsh (2022: 5) points to an interest in “hegemonic discourses” in CFA. 

I have considered these topics elsewhere. Specifically in a Research Hub entry in 2023 called “Oops, I said ‘themes’” (23 December) I focus on the presuppositions underpinning Reflexive Thematic Analysis. In April 2018 I made some preliminary comments on the relationship between WPR and frame theory. In other writing (Bacchi 2009b) I begin to probe some possible links between WPR and CFA. Here I offer reflections on a conference presentation by Walsh (2022) that suggests the usefulness of integrating WPR and CFA (see also Walsh 2024). I refer in passing to other recent articles that propose blending WPR and RTA (Olvik 2024, Dinmore et al. 2024). 

Starting places: problematisations

In the earlier Research Hub entry on Reflexive Thematic Analysis and WPR (23 Dec. 2023), I stress the importance of considering the form of research question brought to one’s research material. Research questions provide starting places for thinking. Both RTA and CFA tend to ask why something happens. Walsh (2022: 28-29), for example, asks, in her selected policy areas, “why the assumption of a clash between culture and women’s rights dominates public debate and the academy”. WPR does not ask “why” questions. It asks “how possible” questions – how was it possible for women’s rights to be conceptualised in a way that sets them in opposition to assumed cultural standards? 

The boundary between “why” and “how possible” questions may seem to be blurred. If you ask how something is possible, could you not say that inadvertently you are explaining why something happened. However, the term “why” evokes a sense of causality that is not present in “how possible” questions. In the latter position, we are looking to examine thinking at a different level of analysis (see below). 

Problematisations provide a vital linchpin in opening up this level of analysis. Problematisation is a tricky term. Elsewhere, I talk about the two most common uses of problematisation (Bacchi 2012). First, there is the use of the term to signal an analytic approach that questions (or problematises) things. This usage has become part of the vernacular. Think, for example, of references to one’s desire to problematise an issue. 

Second, the term is used to refer to how “things” are problematised – these are the forms of problematisation themselves. Think for example of Foucault’s work (1980) on how different eras have problematized “sexuality” and thus made “sexuality” a particular kind of object for thought in different sites, either as a biological imperative or as part of a moral code.  

This second usage of problematisation is much less common in contemporary theory despite its centrality in Foucault’s work. Foucault talks about a desire to get “inside thinking” and he sees problematisations (the forms themselves; note the use of the plural) as a way to do this. We look to identify and examine how things are problematised. WPR applies both meanings of problematisation. It problematises (asks critical questions about) identified problematisations (the forms themselves). The study of the forms of problematisation themselves, the problematisations (plural), entails examining the presuppositions that make these problematisations possible (see “how possible” questions above). 

Walsh (2022: 28) identifies the importance of this task in WPR. She characterises WPR as concerned with “background knowledges”. This concern, as she says, is the characteristic that most clearly distinguishes WPR from CFA: “WPR offers methods for uncovering the power of background knowledges underpinning policy controversies that an upgraded version of CFA lacks”. 

The meaning of “background knowledges”, the term Walsh adopts to describe WPR, needs elaboration. WPR specifies a concern with the underlying ontological and epistemological premises that make what is said and what is done possible. Consider for example the policy of offering training programs to women to increase their access to positions of influence. A particular understanding of the individual (an ontological presupposition) underpins the proposal, one in which human beings are seen as “skill-acquiring” creatures. This understanding depends upon psychological theories of human development (epistemological assumption/presupposition). There is also an assumption that women are deficient, lacking in some ways, e.g., a gendered assumption about women’s lack of abilities in certain areas. Both psychology and gender are forms of social (“background”) knowledge (discourses). Note that in Foucault and in WPR discourses are knowledges rather than forms of language use.

With Foucault, the goal in identifying these underlying forms of knowledge (“background knowledges”) is to open them up for questioning. We ask: are there ways to think about human beings other than as “skill-acquiring” creatures? Do “skills” exist outside human beings waiting to be acquired? What are the epistemological and ontological assumptions upon which such a proposal relies? And what would happen if we challenged these assumptions, if the “problem” were thought about differently? We could do the same thing with “gender”, asking: are there ways to think about human beings other than as men or women with assumed, differentiated “skill” sets, etc. 

Walsh (2022: 19) describes CFA as a complement to the WPR focus on “background knowledges”. She identifies two different analytic processes: “framing and the (re)production of dominant knowledges”. In her account, the “constructivist” CFA position allows access to framing, described as “what is said”, while “constructionist” WPR focuses on “background knowledges”. The key distinction, for Walsh, is that “an upgraded CFA ensures researchers become intimately familiar with what was said, who said it, and what it means” (Walsh 2022: 20). As an example of what CFA offers, Walsh (pp. 15-16) mentions how centrist and radical right Dutch politicians silence Dutch Muslim women. The example of “cultural essentialism” is put forward as a “background knowledge” (what WPR offers) informing her selected policies – e.g., banning the burka in France. 

A difficulty here, I would suggest, is Walsh’s separation between “what is said” and “background knowledges”. In WPR such a separation does not exist. Recall the focus in WPR on “how possible” questions – how is it possible for certain things to be said, or for certain things to be done? To answer these questions, WPR (Question 2) examines the “background knowledges”, using Walsh’s term (see below), that make it possible to say certain things. The suggestion that we can separate “what is said” from the kind of epistemological and ontological analysis offered by WPR would need to be defended. This point links to the common characterisation of RTA and CFA as somehow more objective and rigorous than WPR (pursued later).

Starting places: Proposals

If we accept the distinctive contribution in WPR just described – a focus on how things said and things done become possible – , we need to see how this approach can be “operationalised”. The key analytic premise in WPR is that proposals to institute forms of change reveal what is presented as needing to change and hence what is produced as problematic. It follows that the starting place for analysis is precisely proposals for change. This argument is a nuanced one. For example, an endorsement of the need for greater social cohesion can be read as a proposal in which lack of social cohesion is constituted as a “problem”. The need to identify proposals leads to the frequent use of legislation or reports as starting places for analysis. From these it is possible to extract recommendations (proposals for change) and then to consider how a particular issue/practice is being problematised within them. To initiate a critical approach to these “proposals”, we move to Question 2 in WPR (see Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20) and ask about the presuppositions that make identified proposals possible (see above on “how possible” questions). 

With Sue Goodwin I have developed this way of thinking to embrace a wide range of practices and “entities” beyond public policies (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). In an earlier entry (14 January 2018), I describe how it is possible to see buildings as proposals. There I explain that buildings and other artefacts can be seen as proposals in the sense that they commit to particular ways of organizing the world. It follows that it is possible to ask: “If this building [or some part of a building, e.g. a purpose-built room or facility] is a statement about how things ought to be, what is seen as needing to change and hence as ‘the problem’?” Bottrell and Goodwin (2011, p. 4) use the example of modern schools with their “uni-purpose facilities located on enclosed land, fenced and gated” and how they reflect a “hidden curriculum” that problematises the moral and cognitive training of young people. 

Proposals provide a starting place for probing problematisations (problem representations) and the (background) knowledges upon which they rely. Problem representations are treated as implicit within proposals. If a program is put forward to train women, women’s lack of training can be identified as what is problematised (“the problem”). This analytic strategy stands at a distance from CFA and RTA where “themes” and “frames” are identified in forms of text, as elaborated in the next section. 

Levels of analysis

In the description above, the “steps” in WPR thinking hopefully become clearer. We start from what is done or what is said. We probe what is problematised in these practices or “statements” (work backwards to identify the implicit problem representations within them). We interrogate the “background knowledges”/presuppositions that make these problem representations possible. These distinctive research questions provide a unique level of analysis. To suggest blending WPR with RTA and/or CFA means asking if they operate at the same or at different levels of analysis. I suggest the latter.

Alvesson and Sandberg’s (2013: 53-56) work on how to develop interesting research questions assists in distinguishing different “levels” of analysis in varied research approaches. They identify five categories of assumptions underpinning specific theoretical stances: in-house, root metaphor, paradigmatic, ideological and “field assumptions”, associating the last with the work of Foucault. Studies that work at the level of “in-house” assumptions tend to accept the frames of reference adopted in their field. By contrast, Foucauldian-influenced research puts these terms of reference in question, unsurprising given the commitment to probe deep-seated presuppositions in “background knowledges”. As Alvesson and Sandberg note, Foucauldian-influenced theory questions “field assumptions” – that is, the assumptions taken for granted across many fields. 

Such an approach puts in question the commonly adopted categories of analysis in mainstream political and social theory. One example is the category of evidence. WPR brings a sceptical approach to presumptions of accessible “evidence”. Such “evidence” is associated with a positivist paradigm and a correspondence view of knowledge. In contrast with the critical approach to evidence in WPR, evidence tends to be referenced as taken-for-granted “knowledge” in those who support CFA (Walsh 2022: 4) and RTA (Dinmore et al. 2024: abstract and passim), suggesting deep-seated epistemological distinctions between WPR and these approaches. 

The acceptance of evidence in CFA and RTA corresponds with the terms mentioned earlier – “coding” and “themes”. According to Walsh (2024: 4), the “coding template” in CFA makes “evidence” “retrievable”, improving “intertextuality” and “accuracy”. The premise in this approach is that bits of knowledge can be identified and labelled and, henceforth, manipulated for research purposes. It is this perspective that leads to the enthusiasm for and defence of RTA and CFA as more objective than WPR. Olvik (2024: 6) develops such a contrast. She distinguishes between WPR, where she argues that “it is important to acknowledge the potential for researcher subjectivity in interpreting” policy documents, and RTA research practices, which ensure “consistency and reflexivity and mitigates researcher bias”. Contra this view, in a WPR approach to “knowledge”, “researcher subjectivity” is taken to be inevitable across the board (i.e. in WPR and in supposedly more objective RTA). For WPR researchers, however, “subjectivity” operates, not as a handicap, but as a research resource. 

Braun and Clarke (2006), who developed RTA, are more careful in their claims about “objectivity”. They do not position RTA researchers as independent of interpretation. Themes, they explain, do not emerge from thin air (Braun and Clarke 2021: 343). Still, they emphasise that RTA involves “Coding interestingfeatures of the data in a systematic fashion across the entire data set, collating data relevant to each code” (Braun and Clarke 2006: 87; emphasis added). In RTA, “the theory and method need to be applied rigorously” where “rigour lies in devising a systematic method whose assumptions are congruent with the way one conceptualises the subject matter (Reicher and Taylor 2005: 549)” (Braun and Clarke 2006: 96; emphasis added; see also Walsh 2024: 4 on “rigor” in CFA). It could be argued that current enthusiasm for RTA and CFA is in part due to the need to satisfy a research community wedded to “rigour” and “systematic” analysis, positions linked to positivist principles.

Braun and Clarke make a key point in recognising the central importance of checking to see if your research assumptions are “congruent with the way one conceptualises the subject matter”. It is at this level that distinctions among research approaches become clearest. While Braun and Clarke (2006: 77 Abstract) argue that RTA is a useful strategy in disciplines “beyond psychology”, the kinds of questions asked in RTA analyses tend to presume the existence of states of being or states of mind (i.e. premises within psychology). Byrne (2022), for example, focuses on deciphering the “opinions” and “attitudes” of research subjects. 

Key premises in this approach sit uncomfortably with a WPR analytic strategy. The presumption of sovereign subjects with “attitudes” is put in question in a WPR approach to subjectivity (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 49-53). Indeed, WPR treats “psychology” as a governing (background) knowledge and a contingent historical creation that needs “to be interrogated rather than enshrined as ‘truth’” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 5). On this point Walsh (2022: 22) usefully disclaims “truth” as her standard for assessment, indicating a possible link with WPR’s endorsement of “self”-problematisation. Marshalling empirical material in poststructural accounts becomes possible if truth claims are refused. 

Coming back to “problems”

Clearly, a way needs to be found to clarify distinctions among theoretical approaches. I tend to concentrate on conceptions of “problems”. In Analysing Policy (2009a: 251-252) I produce a “Guide to paradigms in major policy approaches” based on competing conceptions of “problems”. I offer a similar analysis of “paradigms in health policy” in a 2016 article: “Problematizations in Health Policy: Questioning How ‘Problems’ Are Constituted in Policies” (Bacchi 2016). The sub-title signals my intervention target – how “problems” are constituted as particular sorts of problems. 

At the most basic level, a contrast needs to be drawn between positivist endorsements of forms of problems-that-exist and the troubling of “problems” in WPR. Hence, it follows that, to check if different research approaches are congruent, it is necessary to check how “problems” are constituted. 

The contrast between CFA and WPR on this point (how “problems” are conceptualised) is clear in the “sensitizing questions” in Verloo’s (2005) version of Critical Frame Analysis (see Appendix B in Walsh 2022; see also Lombardo et al. 2009). The first questions in the CFA template under the heading “Diagnosis” read: “What is represented as the problem?” and “Why is it seen as a problem?”. 

I wish to highlight the significance of altering the opening question in WPR – “what’s the problem represented to be?” – to read “What is represented as the problem?”, as occurs in CFA’s (Verloo’s) questions. As we saw above, a WPR approach starts from proposals and works backwards to see how the “problem” is represented within them. There is no separation between “problem” and “solution” (or “diagnosis” and “prognosis” as in CFA); they are mutually imbricated. Hence, there is no such “thing” as a problem pure and simple.

The prompt in the CFA sensitizing questions: “What is represented as the problem?” initiates a different mode of analysis, examining how social actors talk about an assumed issue/problem – how they represent something (an issue). It follows that the focus in CFA becomes voice and rhetoric. 

If we examine the other CFA-based templates in Walsh (2022), it becomes clear that problems are presumed (simply) to exist at some level (I drop quotation marks around the term “problem” when it is used in ways that accept problems as existing states of some sort). I offer a few examples. Consider in Appendix D: Template 1 Example, Sensitizing Questions for Collecting the Evidence, S.A.S. v France, 201415 (Walsh 2022, p. 40; emphasis added): “What is the problem(s) identifiedby the speaker? Why is it a problem? Is inequality a problem? If so, what is the inequality?”. 

Consider the contrast between these questions and the many applications of WPR to the question: “What is the problem of ‘gender inequality’ represented to be?” (Bacchi 1999; Bacchi and Eveline 2010). Note, for example, in the selected sensitizing questions, the interest in how speakers identify problems (assumed to exist). By contrast, WPR probes specific proposals in policies and other practices to consider how “gender inequality” is produced as a particular sort of problem in specific contexts (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 64-68).

Is it possible to somehow blend these perspectives? Walsh (2022: 22) constructs two templates: a coding template and an analysis template, and “toggles” between them. She recommends “adding WPR questions to the analysis template but keeping them separate from CFA questions”. The goal here is to assist “scholars to maintain clear distinctions between frames and framing on the one hand and background knowledges (read WPR) on the other hand” (Walsh 2022: 22-23; emphasis added). Avoiding a mechanistic form of analysis, Walsh recommends an iterative process that “includes CFA coding with CFA and WPR analysis in conjunction”. 

While I applaud the innovation and clear thinking in Walsh’s intervention, as mentioned above, it is the very idea of a distinction between frames and “background knowledges” that WPR challenges. “Background knowledges” informframes; it could not be otherwise. Walsh (2022: 10; emphasis added) admits as much; however, there is a lack of specificity of just what “background knowledges” entail. In one place, they become “worldviews”: “I found that in each case every frame was informed by the speaker’s worldview and policy position, and that both informed the speaker’s rhetoric and reasoning”. In another, they become biases: “those unquestioned knowledges are likely to include racialized-sexist biases about Dutch Muslim women as oppressed and lacking political agency and hence who cannot speak for themselves” (also Walsh 2024: 5). 

Knowledges in a WPR analysis go deeper than biases which appear to be no more than opinions. Nor is the interest in “worldviews” that inform speakers’ “rhetoric and reasoning”. Rather, the focus is on the deep-seated presuppositions that make different proposals possible. To identify and question these presuppositions, the analytic process needs to start from the WPR questions. 

Conclusion

The examples in this entry indicate the fertile thinking sparked by considerations of how to develop useful political theory. I encourage such thinking and experimentation. Walsh’s (2022) detailed investigation of the premises underpinning CFA and WPR is useful and insightful, partly because it allows us to draw attention to distinctions among analytic approaches. 

Walsh is attentive to these distinctions. As quoted earlier, she (2022: 28) concludes that “WPR offers methods for uncovering the power of background knowledges underpinning policy controversies that an upgraded version of CFA lacks”. In her view, constructionists (WPR users) would benefit from “applying CFA not least because it ensures they escape the accusation of determinism and can help them to uncover resistant perspectives and resistant stories”. This is doubtless a worthwhile goal. There is certainly a need to develop our theories of resistance. I have hesitations, however, about the suggestion that the best way to do this is to construct a dichotomy (distinction) between what is said and “background knowledges”. 

As I develop above, what is said needs to be examined in terms of what could be said, what it is possible to say – what is “sayable” (Foucault 1991, pp. 59, 63). For elaboration of this point, I refer you to a chapter I wrote with Jennifer Bonham (2016), applying this thinking to interview transcripts. Asking “what is sayable” means rethinking conventional approaches to interviewing as a research method that treats “things said” as providing access to people’s interior thoughts and experience. Rather, in interviews and more broadly, “things said” are analysed in terms of the practices, including the knowledge practices, that give rise to them (Bacchi and Bonham 2016: 116; see next entry). This analytic strategy raises questions about the possibility of identifying “frames” (“what is said”) as a separate analytic category, distinct from “background knowledges”.

I look forward to continuing these conversations and exchanges. All the best for your research and writing in 2025. Hoping to hear from you via the WPR list ( Welcome to the WPR Network! | Karlstad University (kau.se)

References

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Bacchi, C. 2009b. “The issue of intentionality in frame theory: The need for reflexive framing,” in E. Lombardo, P. Meier and M. Verloo (eds) (2009) The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, bending and policymaking. NY: Routledge. pp. 19-35.

Bacchi, C. (2012). Why Study Problematizations? Making politics visible. Open Journal of Political Science, 2(1): 1-8.

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Stoor, J. P. A, Eriksen, H. A. and Silviden, A. C. 2021. Making suicide prevention initiatives targeting Sámi in Nordic countries. BMC Public Health, 21:2035. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12111-x  

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Walsh, D. 2024. A complementary approach to Critical Frame Analysis and “what is the Problem represented to be?”, Critical Policy Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2024.2383194