Analysing policy in the context(s) of practice: a theoretical puzzle

This essay contributes to the construction of a critically informed toolbox of diverse concepts for education policy analysis. Focusing on the context(s) of practice of the policy cycle, the article outlines an interpretative framework to grasp policy enactment across different localities, the influences bearing upon those enactments as well as their intended and unintended consequences. It has the underlying theoretical concern of building bridges between modern and postmodern approaches in policy analysis. The argument develops through three steps. First, it conceptualizes policy as discourse taking seriously the postmodern concerns with the discursive and power/knowledge regimes. The adoption of some concepts offered by Foucault's archaeology allows the mapping of the generative interrelations linking policies to wider discursive contexts. Second, the postmodern sensibility is balanced with the introduction of heuristic devices drawn from the strategic relational approach and structuration theory to take into account the structural arrangements setting the possibilities and the conditions of policy enactment. Third, the bridging between modern and postmodern approaches is completed through the acceptance of a dialectic between subject decentring and recentring. A composite conceptualization of the agent's internal structures is proposed to analyse how people can make a difference exerting their agentic powers. Keywords: policy analysisdiscoursestrategic relational approachstructuration theory Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Stephen J. Ball and Roberto Serpieri for their insightful observations on previous drafts of this article. They have been invaluable sources of inspiration and support in the reworking of the present essay. I would also like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their stimulating and constructive comments and suggestions. Notes 1. The distinction between the discursive and the nondiscursive disappears in Foucault's genealogies and later works, overcome by the notions of dispositif and Power/knowledge (Foucault Citation1975). The emphasis on the archaeological tools in this work does not imply any underestimation of the genealogical method, neither it responds to the will to state the preeminence of the former on the latter. The choice in favour of the archaeological machinery is rooted in the purposes of the present work that requires the possibility to analytically distinguish between knowledge and power. In the construction of a critically informed toolbox to analyse policy enactments, such a distinction allows the balancing of the postmodern concerns with the discursive and power/knowledge regimes with the introduction of interpretative devices accounting for the structural arrangements that set the possibilities and the conditions for policy enactments. 2. Following Mouzelis (Citation2008, 111–3), the analytical distinction between three types of 'social structure' is endorsed here: (a) institutional structures, which are clusters of interrelated roles or institutions linked to normative expectations; (b) figurational structures, i.e. 'the actual relationships between actors unfolding syntagmatically in time and space' (ivi, 111) and (c) distributional structures, which refer to the distribution of virtual or actual traits (i.e. life chances or income) among social categories and groups.