Carol Bacchi

Comment: This entry is prompted by Luigi Pellizzoni’s provocative book – Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature (Surrey, Ashgate, 2015; available as a free download online) – and by my own deployment of the term “ontological politics” (see “Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice”. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds.) 2012, Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 141-56; https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/).

My use of the term relies on my reading of Annemarie Mol’s work on the topic (see in particular Mol, A. 1999. Ontological politics: A word and some questions, in Actor Network Theory and After, edited by J. Law and J. Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell, 74-89.) Mol points out that “ontological politics” is a compound term, relying on meanings of “ontology” – what is posited as “real” – and “politics”. At a basic level the term “ontological politics” signals a close connection, of some form, between ontology and politics, with “the ‘real’ and the ‘political’ being deemed to be directly implicated in one another” (Pellizzoni, 2015, p. 7). A broad definition of politics as the heterogeneous strategic relations that shape lives leads to the contention that the “real” is a political creation, doubtless a confronting proposition! How is this view supported?

“Ontological politics” can be considered part of the new wave in social theory referred to as “the turn to ontology”. The use of “turn” in relation to theoretical developments signals a particular new focus of some kind. The “turn to ontology” is associated with an expressed dissatisfaction with the preceding “linguistic turn”, based on claims about excessive reliance on language to understand social relations. Susan Hekman, for example, says that the error of the “linguistic turn” was the assumption that discourse alone is constitutive of reality (see Hekman, S. 2010. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 24). In her view the “new ontology” (sometimes described as “the new materialisms”) resurrects “reality” to its rightful place, without lapsing into modernist conceptions of “the real”.

However, the “ontological turn” in social theory is a “variegated phenomenon” (Pellizzoni, 2015, p. 72) and some perspectives – consider for example “feminist new materialisms” and “speculative realism” – may not sit happily together. There are nuances among the numerous contributions to “the ontological turn” that ought to be considered should one decide to engage with these debates.

Annemarie Mol (1999, p.74), in association with John Law and Actor-Network Theory, takes as a starting point that the reality we live is “one performed in a variety of [socio-material] practices” – an illustration of another contemporary theoretical direction, referred to as “the turn to practice”. Because practices are plural, it is argued, so too are the realities they enact. “Reality” is, in effect, multiple (see Mol’s book, The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press, 2002). However, we do not experience the world as multiple, raising the question – how do plural realities become produced as a singular “real”? The answer to that question directs attention to the play of politics in coordinating aspects of reality as the “real”, making “the real” an accomplishment – or in my terms a political creation. It follows that what is deemed to be “real” and fixed, can be challenged. WPR initiates this kind of questioning of presumed fixed problems.

Some difficult theoretical issues invite further analysis. Pellizzoni (2015) identifies a shared problematization between neoliberalism and some versions of the “new ontology” or “new materialisms” that requires attention. He (p. 77) also stresses the need for conceptual development of practices, which, at times, tend to be treated as “self-evident givens rather than perspectival “cuts” in the spatio-temporal flux of events”. If practices are treated as unmediated in this way, a kind of materiality is reinstated, undermining attempts to establish a “non-dualist, ‘post-constructionist’ understanding of material reality and human intermingling with it” (Pellizzoni, 2015, p 7). This conclusion reinforces the call by Woolgar and Neyland (2013) in the earlier entry on “Mundane Governance” for constitutive interpretations to be further developed. In recent work I have emphasized the place of problematizations in the constitution of “objects” and “subjects” (https://ndri.curtin.edu.au/events/cdp2017/].

Comment: We have here a contribution to Edward Elgar’s Handbooks of Research on Public Policy series. This volume is edited by Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee (2017). The publisher’s blurb (http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/handbook-of-policy-formulation) describes the book as a “pioneering effort to consolidate the state of knowledge on policy formulation”. The blurb also locates the book within what I describe elsewhere (see Analysing Policy, Pearson Education, 2009, p. 1) as a reactive approach to public policy in which governments are seen to be reacting to fixed and identifiable problems that are exogenous to (outside of) the policy process: “In attempting to resolve pressing public problems, governments devise, deploy and develop policy tools in many different ways in different sectors and jurisdictions”. It is of course this whole notion of exogenous problems that are purported to exist separate from policies that WPR is designed to challenge!

Chapter 5 in the Handbook by Arnost Veselý deals explicitly with “Problem delimitation in policy formulation”. Veselý (2017, p. 85) suggests that “scholars from all strands do not take policy problems as ‘objective entities’ that are to be found, but as constructs that are defined”, while acknowledging that authors differ in “how this construction should be understood”. He (2017, p. 83) draws a distinction between rational (positivist) approaches and interpretive (post-positivist) approaches to “problem structuration”, while acknowledging the contrasts I identify between post-structural perspectives and interpretivism, due to the latter’s focus on different actors’ problem definitions (see Bacchi The Turn to Problematization. Veselý (p. 92) sees promise in two recent conceptual developments in the field, “wicked problems” and “problematization”. Unfortunately, he has little to say about these developments (on these topics see Bacchi Problematizations Health Policy. Moreover, he concludes that “problematic situations” “must be labeled and clustered into sets of problems that can be subject to policy actions”, a proposition that appears to affirm the reactive stance of the Handbook (see above) with policy problems as simply existing and waiting to be solved – a disappointing conclusion.

Comment: “Nudge theory” has been in the news lately, due to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to the American economist, Richard Thaler. Thaler’s work led the UK government to set up a “nudge unit” – known also as the “Behavioural Insights Team” – under former Prime Minister, David Cameron. As an example of a “nudge” initiative, in 2012 the UK government enrolled employees automatically in a firm’s pension scheme, unless workers formally requested to be exempted. Saving funds for retirement was therefore created as the default position, on the assumption that workers really wanted to save and that inertia prevented them from doing so. Inertia, of course, was also presumed to create the guarantee that the initiative would work – people would simply not bother to opt out.

How are we to comment usefully on this policy development? Below I suggest deploying a WPR analysis in two ways, in commenting on the “nudge” phenomenon itself, and also in critical analysis of any particular “nudge” intervention (such as the pensions scheme).

If we apply WPR to the “nudge” phenomenon, the “problem” is represented to be failures on the parts of citizens to behave in desired ways. Those who are enthusiastic supporters of “nudge theory” are clear that the goal is behaviour modification. Note that the associated field is Behavioural Economics.

Thinking about this problem representation produces useful insights into subjectification processes in current regimes of governing (on subjectification see Bacchi and Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis, 2016, pp. 49-53). Whereas neoliberalism is commonly associated with an assumed rational actor who is charged with self-regulation on the presumption that they will act in their own best interests, in “nudge theory” citizens need “steering”. That is, the “subject” is constituted as, to an extent, irrational, as not knowing what is in their “best interests”. So, “nudge theory” provides a caution to over-generalization about any presumed neoliberal hegemony and alerts us to the existence of hybrid forms of rule within liberal regimes (Bacchi, Analysing policy, 2009, p. 29).

It is also useful to think in genealogical terms about “nudge theory” (see Question 3 in Chart). How has it come about? And what is its novelty, given that almost every policy is directed, to some extent, towards shaping citizen behaviours? For example, how is Scotland’s minimum unit price for alcohol NOT a “nudge” http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-41981909? The term “nudge” provides a hint here. The suggestion in “nudge” is that the shaping intervention is gentle or minor, simply encouraging or promoting “desirable” behaviours. In this way such changes are portrayed as consistent with a governmental approach where the state “steers” rather than “rows”, a position associated with New Public Management and UK Labour’s so-called “Third Way”. You could say that the interventions are portrayed as rather “mundane”, making me wonder why Woolgar and Neyland (2013; see “Mundane Governance” entry in “Research Hub”, 12 November 2017) do not mention it.

In terms of any specific “nudge” intervention, a WPR analytic lens produces the question – what is the “problem” in this intervention represented to be? In terms of the above example of the pensions scheme, what kind of “problem” is produced by a policy of compulsory saving for old age, and where are the silences?

What is noteworthy here is that, as “nudge theory” currently stands, there is no space to ask this kind of question. The behavioral changes prompted by the “nudges” are taken for granted as desirable, as are the presumed “problems” requiring those altered behaviours. A good deal of necessary critical reflection simply disappears. Woolgar and Neyland (2013, p. 135) offer questions that could usefully be employed here. Instead of thinking about “mundane governance” simply in terms of compliance (“does it work?”), they insist on the need to broader the terms within which judgments are formed about the “effectiveness” of any policy – “we need to ask ‘working’ on whose terms, according to whose definition, assessed by what means, in what circumstances, when, for how long and to what ends?” These questions, which are consistent with the kind of analysis produced in Questions 2 and 4 of WPR Bacchi WPR CHART), would provide a basis for critically analyzing “nudge” interventions.

Comment: This wide-ranging book on cycling is available as a free download from the University of Adelaide Press website https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/ Edited by Jennifer Bonham and Marilyn Johnson (2015), it offers both a comprehensive overview of the “state of play” on the current engagement with cycling together with chapters on strategies for and processes of change. The latter, as the book jacket declares, reflects “different ontological positions”. I will mention a few chapters that pursue a poststructural perspective.

Chapter 9 [“Gender and cycling: Gendering cycling subjects and forming bikes, practices and spaces as gendered objects”], to which I contributed, applies Poststructural Interview Analysis (Bonham and Bacchi 2016, in Bacchi and Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis, pp. 113-121; see Question 8 in FAQ) to interview texts from a study conducted by Bonham into “Women Returning to Cycling”. The chapter focuses on how, through a poststructural analysis of interview texts, we can understand the processes through which “women” and “men” come to be marked as distinctive categories, processes described as gendering. On the various meanings of gendering in feminist analyses, with a particular emphasis on how it is used in this chapter to describe the “making” of “men” and “women”, see Bacchi, C. (2017). “Policies as Gendering Practices: Re-Viewing Categorical Distinctions”. Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 38(1): 20-41.

Chapter 11 [“More than a message: Producing cyclists through public safety advertising campaigns”] by Rachael Nielsen and Jennifer Bonham applies WPR to a road safety campaign screened by the South Australian Motor Accident Commission (MAC) between 2010 and 2014. The authors show how the ads in this campaign inadvertently normalized motoring and how “traffic” and “cycling” are formed as objects for thought within a multiplicity of discursive practices. On this topic see Bacchi, C. & Bonham, M. (2014). “Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus”, Foucault Studies, 17 (March): 173-192.

Chapter 10 [“Making (up) the child cyclist: Bike Ed in South Australia”] by Anne Wilson brings a Foucauldian analytic lens to a 2012 South Australian bicycle education course. Wilson shows how the program and its practices tended to shape “the child” as responsible for its own safety and to reinforce the norms of automobile culture.

Mundane Governance: Ontology and Accountability (OUP, 2013) by Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland is deservedly attracting a good deal of attention, attested to by the Conference on the topic at the Australian National University (Call for Papers_Mundane Governance. The book, in conjunction with a 2013 paper by S. Woolgar and J. Lezaun (“The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?”, Social Studies of Science, 43(3): 321-340), provides useful reflections on some of the key issues in contemporary social theory. Specifically, these sources address what is or may be involved in references to the “turn to ontology”, with particular attention to STS (Science and Technology Studies). Their starting point is that constitutive interpretations have to be developed further. This injunction is particularly relevant to those who engage with WPR since a WPR analysis adopts a constitutive approach to “problems”, “subjects”, “objects” and “places” (see Bacchi and Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis, 2016). So, let us take a closer look at what is proposed.

The book and article mentioned above offer guidance on both what is intended by, and on the political implications of, the proposition that practices constitute (or enact) entities (including “objects” and “subjects”). This proposition is a basic contention of those who associate themselves with “the ontological turn”. The point of this claim – and it is a perspective shared with WPR – is that it directs attention to the unfinished nature of things that are deemed to be fixed and, equally importantly, to what gets left out of particular conceptualizations of the “real” world. The primary target in Mundane Governance is the “mundane” objects through which governing takes place. Examples include micro-chipped garbage bins, speed cameras and security devices in airports. A key part of the argument is that none of these “objects” sits outside the complex relations that shape them; hence, they are ontologically uncertain. It follows that entities are politics by other means.

While endorsing this perspective, I am less convinced by the critique of neo-Foucauldian governmentality theory (perhaps not surprisingly!). Woolgar and Neyland (2013) make the case that such theory offers too smooth an interpretation of the operations of power and tends to portray political subjects as “cultural dopes” (p. 27). They prefer to emphasize the “messy” aspects of social relations and to insist on space for resistance and irony. This view clearly suits the ethnomethodological research position they occupy, with the focus on the sense-making capacities of people.

The WPR position on subjectification (see Question 5 in Bacchi WPR CHART) can be described as neo-Foucauldian. In subjectification, political “subjects” are constituted, or made, provisionally through policy practices (see Chapter 5 in Bacchi and Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis, 2016). With governmentality scholars there is a particular interest in how some of those practices promote identities that “perform” behaviours deemed to be desirable, rendering “subjects” governable. However, there is no suggestion that regimes of governance determine the kinds of “subjects” we become. So, we certainly do not have “cultural dopes”!

On this issue it would be fruitful to compare how power is theorized in Mundane Governance and in WPR. Woolgar and Neyland seldom mention power and then only within its conventional political sense as “power over”, a view they find limited. An alternative theorizing of power as productive may have proved useful in thinking through the constitution of “subjects”. This position is clearly developed in Chapter Chapter 5 of Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice (Bacchi and Goodwin, Palgrave, 2016). On a related topic, while Woolgar and Neyland (2013, p. 335) deem it to be worthwhile to consider the extent to which researchers may themselves be involved in ontological constitution, they do not pursue the matter. By contrast, WPR considers self-problematization and hence reflection on one’s (perhaps inadvertent) role in constituting particular “realities” to be a paramount responsibility (see FAQ 5 and Step 7 in Bacchi WPR CHART).

Given the focus in WPR on how governing takes place (see Bacchi, Analysing Policy, 2009, p. xiii), reflection on the “mundane governance” argument is clearly important. It is particularly useful to consider this argument in the context of “nudge theory”, which, as we will see in a forthcoming entry, enthusiastically endorses “mundane” behavioural interventions. What to make of “nudge theory”? – coming soon!