In two preceding entries, I engage with arguments raised by Rönnblom and Edwards (2025) on uses of WPR. Specifically, they say: “The WPR approach does not include any normative suggestions for political change and avoids assumptions of intentionality.” I identify three topics that invite consideration: (1) WPR’s analytic position in relation “values” (see Research Hub entry 26 Feb 2026); (2) WPR’s analytic position in relation to reform strategies (see Research Hub 28 April 2026) and (3) WPR’s analytic position in relation to questions about “intentionality” in political analysis. Today I tackle the third of these topics – how WPR deals with questions of “intentionality”. 

This topic attracts a good deal of discussion and concern. There is concern that WPR discounts the role of policy “actors”, in the process denying their “agency”. Here the focus tends to be on recognising the important role played by policy makers, but also “special interest” groups and lobbyists. Relatedly, there is concern that WPR pays too much attention to “conceptual” issues (e.g. conceptual logics, representations, subjectification) and not enough attention to implementation – what happens at the “coalface” of politics. The argument, put simply, is that policy/political actors can (intentionally) affect how problem representations take effect through the implementation process. 

The WPR approach questions the way in which these issues get raised. There tends to be an understanding that relies on a sequence of occurrences (I would call it a “sequential rationality”). That is, the assumption seems to be that, first (in the sequence), there is a problem representation and, second (in the sequence), there are processes involving its introduction/implementation. WPR challenges this sequential understanding. It looks to create a way to understand these processes as interconnected/interlocked (I call it a “simultaneity rationality”). 

And so it is with political subjects/actors. The WPR approach studies subject formation rather than targeting actors as outside of these processes (of formation). It targets what the subject becomes rather than assuming a subject with an interior consciousness whose behaviours need to be tracked and whose “motives” (intentions) need to be considered. 

Note: I am not saying that these other questions are uninteresting or useless. I am trying to explain the particular contribution that WPR offers. 

Let us begin with the “subject”. To deal with this topic, I make reference to related theories that hopefully assist our understanding. To begin I discuss some key rethinking associated with the “subject” leading up to consideration of the notion of “intentionality”. 

Subject formation

I note above that the WPR approach studies subject formation rather than targeting actors as outside of these processes (of formation). 

The starting point here is a questioning of conventional ways of thinking about subjectivity. The modernist conception of the subject, articulated in Descartes and Kant, posits a timeless and universal “man” with an essential humanity shared by all human beings. This subject is often referred to as the “Enlightenment” subject, or the “humanist” subject. This subject is characterised as rational, autonomous, asocial and ahistorical (Bacchi 2026, p. 60). 

In a Foucault-influenced approach such as WPR, this characterisation of the subject (just given) is conceived as a historical artefact – it is only one possible way of thinking about “subjects”. It follows that “subjectivity” is not the “free and spontaneous expression of our interior truth” but rather “the way we are led to think about ourselves” (Mansfield 2000, p. 10). Therefore, says Foucault (1988, p. 15, emphasis added), we need to study how the “subject” has been produced: “We must descend to the study of the concrete practices through which the subject is constituted within a field of knowledge”. 

I have put the term “constituted” in italics to highlight how the language we use around this topic is critically important. Above I refer to “subject formation”. The term “constituted” captures the same dynamic – how something is formed as real rather than presuming its reality as a “starting point”. It follows that we can talk about “subject constitution” and the “constituted subject” alongside “subject formation”. 

The term “subjectification” – a prominent term in the WPR approach (Bacchi 2026, p. 61- 63) – is meant to capture these processes of “subject formation”. We can think of “subjectification” as how a person is turned into a particular kind of subject. There is an emphasis on the role of the knowledges that are generally accepted as important in any particular intellectual tradition. In Western culture, think of psychology for example, but also economics, sociology, behavioural science, etc. How we think about ourselves as subjects follows from these knowledges – consider, for example, the whole notion of the “unconscious” (Freud) or the notion of “rational actors” (Adam Smith, Gary Becker). These ways of constituting the subject are considered to be “forms of truth” rather than “truth”. Foucault (1994, p. 456) calls them “unexamined ways of thinking” that are “in the true” (accepted as “truth”) and the critical task involves examining them (Foucault 1981, p. 61). 

How do these knowledges produce a “subject” of a particular kind? Above we saw that Foucault (1988, p. 15; emphasis added) stresses the place of practices in subject constitution: “We must descend to the study of the concrete practicesthrough which the subject is constituted within a field of knowledge”. 

Practices in subject formation

Language poses challenges to attempts to capture the originality in Foucauldian-influenced theory. Many “commonsense” meanings of terms need to be rethought. For example, we probably all have a firm view of what a practice is – it is something we do (is it not?). The so-called “practice turn” in political theory, which can be traced back to the 1960s, happily goes down this path (see Postill 2010; Schatzki 2001). 

Consider by contrast Gherardi’s poststructural “take” on “practices”. She (2009: 118) makes a useful distinction between conceptualizing practices “from the outside”, which directs attention to how people (in context) “do” practices, and conceptualizing practices “from the inside”, which rests on a posthumanist analytic in which practices “do” (constitute) “subjects”. 

You will recognise the first position – how people “do” practices – as the conventional way we use the term. I would link this position to the “sequential rationality” introduced at the outset. In this account, there are subjects (first) who do things (second).

Opposed to this view, there are “practices” which produce “subjects” (from the inside; see above). Practices and subjects emerge together (see “simultaneity rationality” above). Subjects are formed through “practices” (see “subject formation”). 

We need an example to illustrate the novelty of this thinking. There is a long tradition of treating “men” and “women” as fixed biological categories. A Foucauldian-influenced approach to this topic emphasises the wide variety of “practices” that form and reinforce these categories. Think for example of the many times we tick a box on administrative forms signalling our “gender”. Through these practices, “genders” are formed. Hence those in this theoretical tradition talk about “gendering”: 

The term “gendering” adopts a verb form of the noun “gender” to capture the active, ongoing, and always incomplete processes that constitute (make come into existence) (Jones 1997, 265) “women” and “men” as specific kinds of unequal political subjects. (Bacchi 2017)

We can see in this example how “practices” produce “subjects” (simultaneously). We are constantly becoming “men” and “women”.

Subject formation in discourse

I hesitate to open the can of discourse worms at this point, but I hope it reinforces the line of thought on the “subject” that I have been developing. It also brings us back to the topic of intentionality (which I assure you I haven’t forgotten!). The argument in this section comes from a chapter I wrote specifically on the “issue of intentionality in frame theory” (Bacchi 2009). 

The argument developed in that chapter builds on a distinction I draw between two discourse traditions: the first I characterise as “discourse analysis” and the second as an “analysis of discourses”. To put it too briefly, I associate “discourse analysis” with Fairclough and a focus on language use, while the “analysis of discourses” refers to Foucault’s emphasis on discourses as knowledges (see above) (Bacchi 2026, Chapter 16). We are well familiar with the first use of “discourse”, but the latter is less often discussed. 

The importance of the distinction emerges when we consider whether “subjects” are “discourse users” or are “constituted in discourse”. I’m hoping you can see that understanding “subjects” as “discourse users” follows the tradition of discourse as language – so, “subjects” use language for political purposes (think of the “sequential rationality” I introduce above). By contrast, the argument that “subjects” are “constituted in discourse” (meaning knowledge) sees “subjects” and discourse as simultaneous “products”. Foucault (1968 in Burchell et al. 1991, p. 58; emphasis added) makes this distinction clear:

… there are not on the one hand inert discourses, which are already half dead, and on the other hand, an all-powerful subject which manipulates them, overturns them, renews them; but that discoursing subjects form a part of the discursive field. 

This wonderful notion of “discoursing subjects” captures nicely the simultaneity of “processes” I have been trying to enunciate (a “simultaneity rationality”). 

In Foucault-influenced accounts, “discourses” are well-bounded areas of “knowledge” that influence what can be thought and, hence, what can be said. These “broad historical systems of meaning” constitute what Graham Burchell describes as “the contours of the ‘goldfish bowl’ we inhabit” (Burchell 1993, p. 277 in Shore and Wright 1997, p. 17). For Foucault, then, the goal of social analysis extends beyond analysing talk and conversation (“discourse analysis”); rather, the task becomes identifying and explaining the a priori of talk, the “concepts, objects, strategies and subject positions that organize statements prior to individual reception” (Blackman 2001, p. 84). 

To put it in other words, Foucault’s primary interest is in “the limits and forms of the sayable”, what it is possible to speak of. And, as he explicitly explains, he tries to do this without “referring to the consciousness, obscure or explicit, of speaking subjects” (Foucault 1968 in Burchell et al 1991, p. 59). WPR follows Foucault to focus on what is sayable rather than on (intentional) language use.

Ethnography and intentionality

I mentioned at the outset that there are many expressed concerns about the Foucauldian “subject”. Many of these concerns come from those writing in the ethnographic tradition. The emphasis in ethnographic accounts is on the need to consider the “agency” of policy actors and their involvement in interpretation, contestation and resistance (Rodin 2017, p. 20) According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Schlosser 2015), in “standard” ethnographic theory, “agency” is usually taken to refer to the exercise of the capacity of individuals to perform intentional actions. Hence, the concept includes a “mental element” and is linked to an interior consciousness. 

I hope it is clear that this ethnographic conceptualisation of “the subject” sits in sharp contrast to the constituted “subject” of Foucauldian-influenced accounts. As an example, Ian Parker (1990, p. 195-196) describes discourses as “sets of meanings which constitute objects”. He states that “once we start to describe what texts mean, we are elaborating discourses that go beyond individual intentions” (emphasis added). 

We have reached the crux of our “dilemma”. Just how is it possible, or is it possible, for these two divergent views of the “subject” to be reconciled? And what does the answer to this question mean for the usefulness of a WPR form of analysis. Will we continue to see researchers “pulling” for one side or the other – agency versus constituted subjects? 

Mitchell Dean (2015, p. 265) provides some much-need guidance on this issue. As he explains, what are needed are studies that “connect how people govern themselves to how they are governed in a broader institutional set of arrangements” – “how techniques of the self interact with techniques of governing”. This suggestion to look at “connection” and “interaction” fits well the “simultaneity rationality” I endorse earlier. 

Let us look at a couple of examples illustrating this “simultaneity” dynamic. In her study of feminist politics and neo-liberalism Roy (2023) draws on an ethnography of rural development workers in eastern India to question the “dichotomous understanding of feminists as either co-opted or resistant”. She enlists the Foucauldian concept of “counter-conduct” to offer a way to understand how “subjects” can be formed in power while able to refuse certain ways of being in the world.

Along related lines, Wartmann (2024, p. 903) illustrates the Foucauldian premise that “modern power engenders disciplinary practices” in her study of the radical equality reforms in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. She illustrates that these reforms impose “another set of expected standards of femininity” (p. 918), policing women’s bodies. At the same time, as she explains, 

the discourse about women’s rights and gender equality is by no means static. It is continuously constructed and reconstructed, exhibiting multiple surfaces and meanings, thus offering spaces and opportunities for women to contribute to the creation of new subjectivities. 

These examples illustrate how it is possible to direct one’s attention to the practices that form “subjects” (see “subject formation” above) while acknowledging the space available for challenge and change – “how techniques of the self interactwith techniques of governing” (Dean 2015, p. 265; emphasis added).

A word on implementation

The direction of the argument on “implementation” should be clear from this entry. The suggestion that policy actors alter or translate problem representations in the process of implementation pays insufficient attention to the subjectification processes at work in this account. As mentioned at the outset, there appears to be a sequential form of thinking in this position – first, policy development, and second, policy implementation. WPR questions this bifurcation and emphasises the “cross overs”, the intersections, the simultaneity of these processes. 

Freedom from intentionality

In a recent chapter on “thinking with WPR”, Rönnblom expresses her appreciation for being liberated from the intentionality that is central to many kinds of policy analysis. She describes the relief WPR offers in getting “rid of intentionality”: 

Because in traditional policy analysis, you kind of look for, you know, the intentions. And coming from another epistemology and ontology, that never made sense for me. Using the WPR approach you can actually analyse something, a policy or an interview, without thinking about intentions. 

This Research Hub entry provides the backdrop to understanding how WPR liberates researchers from a preoccupation with “intentions”. At the same time, doubtless, there remain questions about the role played by specific social actors in influencing policy directions and in manipulating legal processes. Recent Research Hub contributions on authoritarian governmentality and imposed constraints on research directions (28 Sept. 2025; 29 Oct. 2025) indicate the importance of tracking these developments. 

References

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