COMMENT:  I have been asked on several occasions how WPR is similar to or different from analyses that refer to framing and/or problem definition. I have written on this topic elsewhere and refer you to the sources at the end of this entry if you want to pursue the matter.

It seems important to locate this discussion in relation to views on the meanings of concepts. I argue, in good company, that concepts have no fixed meaning. They are never exogenous to (outside of) social and political practices. Therefore, we need to examine carefully specific uses of terms, including “discourse”, “reflexivity”, and our topics today, “framing” and “problem definition”. It is important to approach such theoretical languages as part of a terrain that needs to be mapped – see if you can identify something of the history of various usages (see Bacchi 2009) and try to ascertain the particular role or function served by the concept/s under investigation. That is, consider the meanings of concepts in terms of the specific projects to which they are attached. Following this thinking, you ought not to be surprised to see that “framing” and “problem definition” appear in many different theoretical projects, and with contrasting meanings.

In the main, “frames” are used by scholars who are interested in how social actors manage political arguments. Hence, in the main, they are interpretivists (see Bacchi 2015). As an illustration of this perspective, in the 1970s and 1980s an important group of American political scientists advocated training policy advocates in the skills of “framing” and “problem definition” (e.g. rhetoric). Dery (1984), for example, dedicates an entire book to “problem definition,” which in his view requires political scientists to be concerned “with the production of administratively workable and politically realistic ideas for solving social problems” (p. 38). A later development, within sociology, focuses on what is referred to as “strategic framing”, the marshaling of particular “problem definitions” to gain political support  (see Bacchi 2009).

In these approaches “problem definitions” and “frames” become competing interpretationsof an issue or problem, interpretations mounted by diverse social actors. By contrast, a WPR analysis interrogates how “problems” are conceptualised within policy texts. It starts from proposals within policies to see how they represent the “problem”, rather than examining how specific social actors mount their arguments. These contrasting starting points are tied to deep disagreements about the status of the political subject and the meaning of power, and have implications for political agendas (see Bacchi 2015).

A more recent development in health sociology draws on “discourse analysis” to examine how “problems” are conceptualized (or “framed”) within policy documents, suggesting a closer link with WPR than previous usages of frame theory (Bacchi 2016). However, the authors associated with this development locate themselves within “the linguistic turn”, whereas WPR offers a study of knowledges rather than of language use (see Bacchi and Bonham, 2014). The primary target of these frame theorists is the rhetorical distance between descriptions of “problems” within policies on the one hand and “recommendations” for change on the other hand, which are judged to be limited or disappointing. By contrast, in WPR, the target of analysis is not the rhetorical ploys of governments judged to be reluctant to deliver substantive change, but deep-seated “unexamined ways of thinking” (Foucault, 1981/1994, p. 456) that underpin specific policy proposals and shape “problems” as particular kinds of problems.

There is no doubt that the word “frame” is a useful term. At a very general level it means simply the shape or configuration of an argument or stance. For this reason I have occasionally used the term myself – though I now resist doing so to avoid confusion between WPR and frame theory. The emphasis on “problem representations” in WPR, as opposed to “problem definitions”, indicates the commitment to subject existing policies to critical interrogation.

I was reminded recently that no concept is “sacred” in some research I have been conducting on Herbert Simon, who wrote in the 1940s and 1950s primarily on administrative behaviour and decision-making (Bacchi 1999: 22-23). In later work Simon uses the concepts of framing and indeed “problem representations” (how disconcerting!). A closer look (Simon 1978: 275-276) clarified Simon’s usage of “problem representation”.  For Simon a “particular subject represents a task in order to work on it” and the “relative ease of solving a problem will depend on how successful the solver has been in representing critical features of the task environment in his problem space” (emphasis added). The focus in Simon’s perspective, therefore, is on social actors and their relative ability to produce “successful” representations – those that assist in “solving problems”. There is no interest in probing critically how “problems” are produced as particular sorts of problems. I hope the distance from WPR is clear, despite the overlap in theoretical terminology!

References

Bacchi, C. (1999) Women, Policy and Politics: The construction of policy problems, London: Sage. pp. 20, 21, 27,  34, 36-37.

Bacchi, C. (2009). “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. (2015). “The Turn to Problematization: Political implications of contrasting interpretive and poststructural adaptations”. Open Journal of Political Science, 5: 1-12. [Bacchi The Turn to Problematization]

Bacchi, C. (2016) “Problematizations in Health Policy: Questioning How “Problems” Are Constituted in Policies”, Sage Open, pp. 1-16 [Bacchi Problematizations Health Policy]

Bacchi, C. & Bonham, M. (2014). Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus’. Foucault Studies, 17 (March): 173-192.

Dery, David (1984). Problem Definition in Policy Analysis.Foreword by Aaron Wildavsky. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Foucault, M. (1994). So is it important to think? (R. Hurley & others, Trans.). In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984(Vol. 3, pp. 454–458). London, England: Penguin. (Original work published 1981)

Simon, Herbert (1978). “Information-Processing Theory of Human Problem Solving”, in W.K. Estes (ed.) Handbook of Learning and Cognitive Processes, Vol. V. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 271-295.

Comment: The title for this entry refers to the third chapter, by Jon Yorke and Lesley Vidovich, in Learning Standards and the Assessment of Quality in Higher Education: Contested Policy Trajectories (2016: 69-87). This book appears as Volume 7 of the series: Policy Implications of Research in Education. Yorke and Vidovich develop the concept of a “policy trajectory” framework, underpinned by what they describe as a “hybridized approach” between critical theory and post-structuralism. Such a project offers a useful perspective on the challenges posed by attempting to blend theoretical perspectives (see FAQ 2) – a topic that has been raised in earlier entries (10 Dec. 2017, 18 Feb. 2018, 4 March 2018).

Perhaps we need different ways to think about our entanglement in theory. If “no theoretical frame is self-sufficient or all-encompassing, and each can be useful to reveal what the others elide” (Chagani, 2014; emphasis added; see below for references), we require a form of inquiry that encourages comparisons along these lines. I believe that the WPR approach offers such a form of inquiry.

In Analysing Policy (2009: 249) I explain that all theories are forms of proposal and therefore contain problem representations. Hence, they can be subjected, productively, to the questions in the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” approach. I follow up this suggestion in my analyses of health policy (pp. 128-136), criminal justice policy (pp. 103-105) and gambling policy (pp. 249-251). Other authors have pursued the suggestion that WPR can be applied to forms of academic text and argument. See for example Månsson, J., & Ekendahl, M. (2015). Most recently, Skovhus and Thomsen (2017) have used WPR to conduct a critical review of Danish career guidance research, indicating the potential of using WPR to conduct a critical literature review. The goal in this suggestion to apply WPR to varieties of theory and knowledge production is to focus attention on what is at stake in different perspectives (Question 5) and to help identify critical “sticking points” (Question 2) (Bacchi WPR CHART).

References

Chagani, F. (2014) Critical political ecology and the seductions of posthumanism, Journal of Political Ecology, 21.

Månsson, J., & Ekendahl, M. (2015). Protecting prohibition: The role of Swedish information symposia in keeping cannabis a high-profile problem. Contemporary Drug Problems, 42, 209–225.

Skovhus, R. B. & Thomsen, R. (2017). Popular problems, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 45(1): 112-131.

Comment: This entry is prompted by the publication of The Handbook of European Policies: Interpretive Approaches to the EU, edited by Hubert Heinelt and Sybille Münch (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018).

A book on interpretive approaches to European politics is most welcome. The Introduction, written by the editors, suggests the breadth and complexity of the field. The stance they develop is that the term “interpretivism” serves as an “umbrella” that “embraces both hermeneutical as well as post-structuralist approaches” (p. 4).

I would like to reflect briefly on the labels we attach to our theoretical perspectives and whether or not they matter. I would suggest that they matter if there are important discrepancies among approaches and if these discrepancies affect the kind of political analysis produced. I would not, for example, include the poststructural analytic strategy, known as WPR, under a broad umbrella of “interpretivism”. Briefly I’ll explain why not.

The editors acknowledge the importance of the distinction I draw elsewhere (see Bacchi The Turn to Problematization) between a Foucauldian poststructural analytic strategy and varieties of interpretivism. As they say: “Whereas interpretivists in the hermeneutical tradition regard political subjects as agentic, ‘that is, as sovereign or foundational subjects, who stand outside of and shape “reality”’, authors in the tradition of “discursive meaning” see subjects themselves as constituted in discourses and therefore as ‘precarious, contradictory and in process’ (ibid.; referring to Bacchi 2015, p. 3)”. However, this issue is not raised again in the Introduction and it is clear that most of the contributions to the book, as discussed in the Introduction, operate within the hermeneutical tradition. They are interested in actors and on the meanings those actors impart to issues. Mostly, the focus is on narratives and frames, described as “interactive sense-making” (p. 7). Frames are offered as competing constructions, commonly referred to as “problem definitions”, of “what the problem really is”.

By contrast WPR does not target people’s competing interpretations or definitions of a “problem”, which is presumed to exist. In WPR, there is no “real problem” in this sense in dispute. Rather, “problems” are constituted or produced within governmental policies and technologies, and the critical task is to interrogate these problem representations. A key point to pursue is how these problem representations shape ways for subjects to be – called “subjectification effects” – through “subject positions”, and with what political implications (see Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. Poststructural Policy Analysis, 2016, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 49-53). Subjectification effects are tied to the suggestion that political subjects are precarious, contradictory and in process (see above). In contrast interpretive analyses tend to emphasise how political actors shape their arguments, often for strategic reasons (see preceding entry, 18 February 2018).

The strong emphasis in interpretive approaches on sense-making and argumentation, as opposed to the focus in WPR on subjectification, appears in the meaning imparted to “discourse”. While the editors note the importance of contested meanings of “discourse”, they equate “discourse” with the “role of language” (p. 4). In Foucault-influenced poststructural policy analysis, discourses refer to knowledges, in the plural, not to language (see Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2014 Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus: Political implications, Foucault Studies, no. 17, pp. 173-192). Hence, attention is directed, not to the “communicative interactions” of social actors, but to the deep-seated assumptions and presuppositions that underpin ways of thinking.

In an earlier entry (10 December, 2017) on “ontological politics”, the point is made that theories play a constitutive role in shaping realities. Hence, there is a responsibility for researchers to reflect on the realities their theoretical propositions create. There is a common view in interpretive approaches that political subjects can and do operate as sovereign agents who shape arguments for a range of purposes. By contrast in Foucault-influenced poststructuralism subjects are always “becoming”, produced in practices, including policy practices. Such a perspective draws critical attention to both the operation of assumptions about a fixed human nature that underpin a range of policies – with effects that need to be traced – and to the ways in which policies are involved in producing particular types of subject (see entry on gendering, 11 February 2018).

COMMENT: This entry is a reply to Andrew Clarke’s 2017 article in Critical Policy Studies entitled: “Analyzing problematization as a situated practice in critical policy studies: a case study of ‘customer focus’ policy in urban compliance services” (DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2017.1414619).

Clarke argues the need for a “supplement” to the WPR approach, which would offer an analysis of “the situated practices that give rise to particular problematizations” (Abstract). He wishes to provide a method to reveal “how a certain discourse came to be imbued in the policy under study” and to this end wants to foreground “the work of particular actors in shaping the formation [of] policy problems in particular times and places” (p. 2; emphasis in original).

Let me preface these brief comments by noting that I am genuinely pleased and flattered to see researchers exploring possible modifications of and additions to WPR as I have never suggested that it provides the only useful form of political analysis. However, in my reading, the focus on actors as agents locates Clarke’s analysis within an interpretive analytic tradition, which I distinguish from Foucauldian-influenced poststructuralism and the WPR approach, making his suggestion of a “supplement” difficult to support (see “The Turn to Problematization: Political Implications of Contrasting Interpretive and Poststructural Adaptations” Bacchi The Turn to Problematization].

A key distinction between interpretivism and WPR is how the political subject is conceptualized, an issue that Clarke does not address. In brief, interpretivists can be located in a hermeneutic tradition that sees people’s self-interpretations as central to understanding social organization, whereas Foucault-influenced poststructuralists support a posthumanist analysis that questions the existence of a sovereign subject who can access “true” meaning (see C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin 2016 Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 40). Put briefly, Clarke probes the competing understandings of “problems” put forward by specific subjects/actors whereas WPR interrogates governmental problematizations and how subjects are constituted within them (see “subjectification” in Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016, pp. 49-53).

Clarke (p. 4) argues that the perspective he offers derives from “the novel reading of Foucault’s later work advanced by Rabinow (2003) and Collier (2009)”, and leads to “an alternative conception of problematization that examines it at the level of situated practices”. However, Foucault uses the term “problematization” in two ways, adopting a verb form to describe a kind of analytic practice (“thinking problematically”) and a noun form, to refer to the objects for thought that emerge in historical problematizing practices, including governmental practices (“the forms of problematization themselves”) (Bacchi 2015, p. 3). Collier and Rabinow are concerned with the former usage. Their intent is to elaborate the specific form of thinking Foucault is putting forward as “thinking problematically”. Clarke correctly quotes Collier who describes this form of thinking as “critical reflection that establishes a certain distance from existing forms of acting and understanding and also works to remediate and recombine these forms” (Collier 2009, p. 80; my emphasis). This view of thinking in Foucault is reinforced in another quote from Collier (p. 90): “As we will see, he [Foucault] places particular emphasis on the work of actors – thinkers – who constitute existing ways of thinking and acting as problems, and seek to reform and remediate them.” Here Collier (p. 96) is exploring how thinking in Foucault “makes possible a certain critical distance from existing ways of understanding and acting” – an elaboration of “thinking problematically”.

The point here is that Collier, drawing on Foucault, is describing a particular way of thinking critically, not simply the thinking that goes on in the formation or development of public policies, which Clarke describes. This point is clear in Collier’s use of the italicized term “thinkers” (see above from Collier, p. 90), a term that unfortunately is cut from Clarke’s version of the Collier quote.

By contrast with Collier Clarke’s analysis looks to explain “contradictory discursive explanations” within selected policy documents. The frequent references to “strategy” and “strategic” suggest that he offers a version of strategic framing (see Clarke, pages 12 and 16), which fits within interpretivism. On this point, Clarke usefully describes WPR as “a critical and reflexive approach to studying policy problems that is more sensitive to the productive role of discourse than existing approaches to problem framing” (p. 4; my emphasis), pointing to the tensions between interpretivism and Foucault-influenced poststructuralism.

We are left therefore with a familiar dilemma – is it possible or useful to blend paradigms? Can we adopt an interpretive focus (such as Clarke’s) to study the contributions of policy actors to the formation of understandings of “problems” and add it as a “supplement” to a poststructural analytic strategy (i.e. WPR)? Elsewhere, Malin Rönnblom and I develop the argument that it is important to consider how methodologies create realities and that there is a need therefore to reflect on the forms of politics enabled in contrasting theoretical stances. In that paper we make the case that poststructural theory offers opportunities for political challenge closed off by more empirical approaches and invite researchers to engage theories at the level of politics, to ask how they are political, and what sorts of politics they make possible. This invitation remains open! (see Research Hub entry on ‘Ontological politics’ 10 December 2017; see also C. Bacchi and M. Rönnblom 2014. Feminist Discursive Institutionalism—A Poststructural Alternative, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2013).

COMMENT: In her recent book (Struggles in (Elderly) Care: A Feminist View, Palgrave Macmillan 2017; see previous entries 21 and 28 January, 4 February 2018) Hanne Marlene Dahl embraces the language of “gendering”, to which she adds “de-gendering”. The use of gerunds (putting “ing” onto nouns) is a well-known post-structuralist device for challenging fixity (essences) and highlighting process. The goal here is to draw attention to how “things” are continually being made with the effect of opening up spaces for challenge and change (see C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 31).

This challenge to fixity is particularly difficult to maintain in relation to people, especially those people marked as “men” and “woman”. We are certainly not used to thinking of these categories as anything but fixed!

Poststructuralism makes the case that there is “no essential, natural or inevitable way of governing or classifying people” (M. Tamboukou 1999. “Writing genealogies: An exploration of Foucault’s strategies for doing research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20(2), p. 208). Rather, people are seen as in “ongoing formation” and as constituted in practices (see Bonham, J. & Bacchi, C. 2017. “Cycling ‘subjects’ in ongoing-formation: The politics of interviews and interview analysis”. The Journal of Sociology, 53(3): 687-703).

It is argued, for example, that policies as practices can play a role in producing “women” and “men” as gendered beings (Bacchi, C. 2017. “Policies as Gendering Practices: Re-Viewing Categorical Distinctions”. Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 38(1): 20-41). Importantly, we are never completely “gendered”; rather, we are always becoming “men” and “women” (signaled through the use of quotation marks around the terms). For a helpful illustration of how research and policy are gendering practices that take part in the co-constitution of binary genders, see David Moore, Suzanne Fraser, Helen Keane, Kate Seear & Kylie Valentine (2017), “Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy”, Australian Feminist Studies, 32(93): 309-324.

De-gendering, it follows, are practices that interfere with the “ongoing formation” of “women” and “men” as particular kinds of gendered being. As Dahl (p. 39) describes, in de-gendering, “efforts are made to de-link gender from bodies with gendered signs”. An example would be the efforts in the five Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – to encourage “men” to assume more caring and domestic responsibilities (p. 40).

Deploying this theory leaves us with a dilemma – how to refer to and develop policies that aim to assist existing “women” and “men”, those who inhabit the categories. With Joan Eveline, I describe a “politics of movement” that involves strategies of “fixing” and “unfixing” the meanings we attach to concepts given the politics of the situation.

Recognising that “knowledge” is always political, a “politics of movement” relies upon willingness to self-identify as critical researchers, with the decisions about when to fix and when to unfix meanings dependent upon reflexive judgment about the political exigencies of the particular situation. (C. Bacchi and J. Eveline, Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering Practices and Feminist Theory, University of Adelaide Press, 2010, p. 13; available as a free download from University of Adelaide Press – https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/.