Introduction

This first part of the book is oriented around the concept of meanings. Meanings operate at all levels, whether you are interested in what policies mean to us as individuals as we go about our daily lives; or your concern is more with national or international policy intents. Meanings are important because policy is an organising principle, not just a product or outcome.

One purpose of these chapters is to lay out some ground that readers can identify as foundational in all policy work, although the ground may not have been previously approached in this manner. The terrain to be covered includes, how policy makes sense of the world (and how the world makes sense of policy), how policy puts the world into categories (and how categories allow policies to be made) and how we might want to change it all, through visions of imagined futures, through symbolic politics.

In this section the authors adhere to the dictum of ‘questioning the taken for granted’. Jenkins begins the section by addressing the twin concerns of what ethnography can do for policy and what policy can do for ethnography. His answer is ‘quite a lot’, on both counts, provided we are willing to reframe what we currently accept as ‘policy analysis’ and to explore policy as an interactive process rather than a backdrop to everyday life. Phillips uses the process of EU enlargement as a lens to view relations between policies and values; that is, relations between how we might like the world to be and the forces that may work for and against this. He presents policy as representing a vision, an expression of the fundamental aspirations of collectivities. In the process he raises key matters of competition and dialogue; elements of policy work that are of increasing importance in our globalising world. Britton pushes us to face up to our categorising practices and the political sense-making of ‘who is who’. Her chapter raises issues of identity that remain too marginal in the policy field at the current time. If we continue to ignore matters of ‘representation’ (in an ontological sense), how are we meant to progress the understanding of the dynamics between policy and representation (in a political sense)?