Comment: This new book – Welfare Words: Critical Social Work & Social Policy (London, Sage, 2018), by Paul M. Garrett – brings a critical and discerning eye to the use of language in welfare policy in the UK. Drawing inspiration from the classic book, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (London, Fontana, 1976), by Raymond Williams, Garrett zooms in on a cluster of concepts that have shaped a good deal of welfare debate in recent years, including Dependency, Underclass, Social In/Exclusion, Early Intervention, Resilience, Care and Adoption. His goal is to question the taken-for-granted meanings of these terms, to show how specific meanings reflect power relations, and to encourage researchers to think more critically about the languages they adopt. Since WPR also directs attention to the operation of key concepts and categories in shaping social worlds (through Question 2) it is useful to consider the overlaps and discrepancies between WPR and Welfare Words. Basically, we encounter through this work some of the ongoing debates about the relationship between critical policy analysis and poststructuralism. There is certainly common ground in Garrett’s concern regarding the authority to name “social problems” (2018, p. 14). However, the focus on “a struggle for meaning where dominant forces seek to embed certain hegemonic understandings to serve their class interests” signals a point of contrast in approach. In Foucault-influence poststructuralism, the theoretical target is not powerful groups manipulating meaning for gain but how we are all immersed in taken-for-granted knowledges that shape what is possible. Garrett (2018, p. 16) shows an inclination towards this form of interpretation where he draws on Foucault (The Birth of Biopolitics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 243) to highlight the need to “gain insight into the ‘analytical schema or grid of intelligibility’ of the social formation in which these words are prevalent”. The question remains as to the possibility (or impossibility) of blending these positions (see FAQ 10).
“Policy Moves”
Comment: Although this book (Making policy move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage, by J. Clarke, D. Bainton, N. Lendvai and P. Stubbs, Policy Press, Bristol) came out in 2015, it deserves attention for the novelty of the content and its theoretical grounding. The latter is signaled in the book’s subheading, where the key terms “assemblage” and “translation” locate the argument as aligned in some measure with the broader tradition of Actor-Network Theory (p. 38). However, importantly, the authors express concern that some ANT theorists do not always make the concept power central to their work (p. 38). Making Policy Move offers a useful challenge to the notions of “policy transfer” or “policy learning”, emphasising how policies are interpreted, inflected and re-worked as they change location. The book explores conceptions of agency, stressing with Foucault that agency is not a “generic property of human beings” and treating agents as points of condensation of “multiple, heterogeneous and possibly contradictory forces” (p. 58). The authors also deem it important to reflect on the place of emotions in policy analysis, without lapsing into “psychologistic or biologistic essentialism” (p. 58). We have here important engagement with theoretical issues central to WPR thinking.
Carol Bacchi 