There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.
Author(s): Chris Shore, Susan Wright, Davide Però
Series: EASA series, 14
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 343
City: New York
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 Conceptualising Policy: Technologies of Governance and the Politics of Visibility - Cris Shore and Susan Wright - 1
SECTION I STUDYING POLICY: METHODS, PARADIGMS, PERSPECTIVES
Introduction - Susan Wright - 27
Chapter 2 Illuminating the Apparatus: Steps toward a Nonlocal Ethnography of Global Governance - Gregory Feldman - 32
Chapter 3 Politics and Ethics: Ethnographies of Expert Knowledge and Professional Identities - David Masse - 50
Chapter 4 Peopling Policy: On Conflicting Subjectivities of Fee-Paying Students - Gritt B. Nielsen - 68
Chapter 5 'Studying Through': A Strategy for Studying Political Transformation. Or Sex, Lies and British Politics - Susan Wright and Sue Reinhold - 86
Chapter 6 What was Neoliberalism and What Comes Next? The Transformation of Citizenship in the Law-and-Order State - Susan Brin Hyatt - 105
SECTION II STUDYING GOVERNANCE: POLICY AS A WINDOW ONTO THE MODERN STATE
Introduction - Cris Shore - 125
Chapter 7 Intimate Knowledge and the Politics of Policy Convergence: The World Bank and Social Security Reform in Mexico - Tara Schwegler - 130
Chapter 8 Shadow Governing: What the Neocon Core Reveals about Power and Influence in America - Janine R. Wedel - 151
Chapter 9 Espionage, Policy and the Art of Government: The British Secret Services and the War on Iraq - Cris Shore - 169
Chapter 10 The (Un)Making of Policy in the Shadow of the World Bank: Infrastructure Development, Urban Resettlement and the Cunning State in India - Shalini Randeria and Ciara Grunder - 187
Chapter 11 Sweden's National Pension System as a Political Technology - Anette Nyqvist - 205
SECTION III SUBJECTS OF POLICY: CONSTRUCTION AND CONTESTATION
Introduction - Davide Però - 223
Chapter 12 The Case of Scanzano: Raison d'Etat and the Reasons for Rebellion - Dorothy Louise Zinn - 227
Chapter 13 Migrants' Practices of Citizenship and Policy Change - Davide Però - 244
Chapter 14 Integration Policy and Ethnic Minority Associations - Clarissa Kugelberg - 264
Chapter 15 The Elephant in the Room: Multistakeholder Dialogue on Agricultural Biotechnology in the Food and Agriculture Organization - Birgit Müller - 282
AFTERWORD
Chapter 16 A Policy Ethnographer's Reading of Policy Anthropology - Dvora Yanow - 300
Notes on Contributors - 315
Index - 319
