Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power

Description

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. 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