Anticipating a Post-Modern Policy Current?

Post-modernism is sweeping the social sciences but does it have anything to say to policy studies? There is little post-modern policy analysis to date but clues as to its configuration are evident in the post-modern approach to public administration (Caldwell, 1975; French 1992), planning and management (Carter and Jackson 1987), organization theory (Burrell, 1988; Clegg, 1990, Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Cooper, 1989; Turner, 1990), accounting (Arrington and Francis, 1989; Loft, 1986; Hoskin and Macve, 1986) and systems analysis (Pollack, 1993; Nodoushani, 1987). In general, when post-modernism is applied to what are essentially modern topics such as these, the modern is not entirely rejected. It is rather informed by the post-modern framework. This is because these fields, and policy analysis is similar in this respect, are intrinsically modern. So the post-modern is culled with a view to refreshing and invigorating what remains a basically modern activity (Wolter and Miles, 1983 is an example). To do otherwise would be to abolish one's topic entirely, to practice a carnival-style disappearing act, to implode the substantive upon itself (Todorov 1984 and Baudrillard 1983a , 1983b).

Post-modernism is complex and diverse, difficult to understand and, perhaps impossible to apply without contradiction.1 It is at once a philosophy, an approach, a world view, a form of critique, a method, a guide to political (in)action (Edelman 1977, 1988), and at the same time a denial that any of the former is even possible! Ashley and Walker (1990) argue that to attempt to explain or summarize a post-modern text is to "do violence" to that text. Lyotard (1988) says post-modernism "cannot be described and stated as other positions can" because it has a special logic all its own that defies efforts at clarification. I reject these views and suggest we proceed as best we can. To do otherwise is to find ourselves argued into a corner where we can neither speak nor write. (Rosenau, 1992; Chapter 9).

Post-Modernism Deconstructs Modern Policy Analysis

Post-modernism questions what is taken for granted by policy-makers and the policy process. It undermines unqualified confidence in modern technology, rational organization, reasoned consideration, 2 scientific assessment, and all analysis grounded on Enlightenment logic (Dear 1986, 1988; Cooper and Burrell, 1988). It rejects any suggestion that policy best be based on efficiency, integration, coordination and revision in light of feedback (Meehan, 1979). It sets aside whatever may drive the modern policy process such as a preoccupation with meeting objectives, a concern that policy is feasible, or the belief that specialists or experts, technicians or generalists, have a privileged voice. The post-modern questions policy dependence on statistics and the possibility that data can arbitrate between policy positions or allow us to conclude that one policy is superior to another. Classifying policies often leads to designating them as "good", "better", or "best" and some post-modernists contend that such distinctions are logocentric in that they claim legitimacy by reference to external, universally truthful propositions that are really self-referential.

Post-modern analysis rejects the modern context of policy-making such as the expectation that time can be controlled, distance measured and space predicted. Long term or short term policy assessments assume linear time and predictable outcomes and both are impossible in a post-modern era where the exact nature of time and space can no longer be anticipated. The tools or instruments of policy-making from law to moral suasion (Peters, 1993) have already been deconstructed (Fish, 1984; Edelman, 1988).

A particular set of policy structures would be equally suspect. Policy implementation from a post-modern point of view may be policy imposition. Post-modernists deny truth and the value of modern theory, treating both as naive (Rosenau, 1992, Chapter 5). So do they dispute that there can be an accumulation of knowledge on which to base policy. They are wary of proposed universal standards or reputedly impartial criteria by which to evaluate policy. Where modern policy aims to integrate the individual, the post-modern citizen deliberately disintegrates (death of the subject). This is related to the post-modern critique of humanism and the modern subject that humanism quietly assumes. Post-modernism's death of the subject also denies causality and agency. It emphasizes, even exaggerates the difficulty of attributing responsibility to specific political actors, political parties, or policy- makers (Rosenau, 1992: 31-33). Policy is never "authored" as such. It just is! If policy-makers value representation (be it vertical, horizontal, sectorial and locational), post-modernists deny the very possibility of any such re-presentation (Alvarez, 1979). Without a modern subject who is there to re-present anyway?

Fragments of a Post-Modern Method for Policy Studies

None of these post-modern critiques are entirely new or original. A number of policy studies anticipated a post-modern current, employing critical theory (Forester, 1985; Bobrow and Dryzek, 1987; Dallmyr, 1981), advancing post-positivist policy analysis (Hawkesworth, 1988), developing the interpretative policy mode (Healy, 1986) and criticizing rational choice policy (Luke, 1987). These reproaches relate to bureaucratization, hierarchy, scientism, and the centralized state and none of these policy theorists would locate their efforts in the post-modern current. They would all have major disagreements with it. The same might be said for more recent critical and revisionist approaches to policy that "challenge our theories and constructs about policy formation" such as those that borrow from catastrophe theory, turbulence, fluid dynamics, and chaos theory (Bosso, 1992: 22; Lee, 1992).

Post-modernism and deconstruction differ from all of these precursors, in that they refuse to construct a new paradigm based on new assumptions. They rather tell us that all paradigms are logocentric meta-narratives (mastercodes, grand world views) and as such are flawed because such paradigms are self-driven and internally validated.

The post-modern refusal to construct theory may, of course, be itself a paradigm. But even if we set this aside, the post-modern rejection of theory means we cannot count on it to help us formulate or design policy; the post- modern declines to make specific policy suggestions. Nor does it take anything for granted, not even, for example, the desirability of economic growth, full employment, or stable prices. It does, however, remind us to look beyond the center, to the margins, the forgotten, the left out, and the uncommon. It tells us to be on the alert for diversity, fragmentation, discontinuity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy rather than to always expect order, unity and consensus. All knowledge is community specific and relative in a post-modern context or it is openly and consciously unsystematic, decentered, and heterological. It refuses to speak with a privileged voice.

Post-modern policy analysis would tell us that all policy proposals cry out to be deconstructed, torn apart from within, laying bare their contradictions. They would suggest we get excited about policy breakdown and expect it. The post-modern world is not so much predictable as it is chaotic. We would be urged to treasure the paradoxical, the ambivalent, and the ambiguous and to never ignore serendipity as it is central to all human activity including policy-making.

As for research methodology post-modernists have more confidence in faith, emotion, imagination, and intuition than in any of the standard research techniques generally associated with policy studies. They place the qualitative on an equal footing with the quantitative. There is no room for rule-bound methodology in a post-modern policy analysis.

The Practice of Post-Modern Policy Studies

Post-modernism would focus policy studies in any number of interesting directions. It would seek new forms of knowledge that are "interactive and synergistic" (Caldwell, 1975). It would turn us toward symbols, rhetoric, and the discourse of policy-making. Post-modern policy-making might also be viewed as a genealogy, a constitutive process that reflects the interrelations of knowledge, organizations, techniques and personnel (Foucault, 1972). Post- modernism counsels us to examine differance (Derrida, 1972; Johnson, 1987) and to look to the local culture of the policy process. Policy effects cannot be circumscribed and one policy arena cannot be separated from another (Carter and Jackson, 1987: 70) because all policy is intertextual. All policies are related to every other policy. There is no such thing as an externality in a post-modern frame of reference. Each component of policy design (goals, outputs, target populations, etc.) is linked to every other element. All policy boundaries or parameters are arbitrary and undecidable. Stages in the policy process do not follow one another in any systematic fashion and there is no need to settle on such relationships.

It would advise us to ponder the interconnectedness of any policy with every other dimension of life. It might entice us to focus on the "everyday life" of policy choices, policy outputs and policy impacts. We would look not at the names, faces, dates, or geographical location but at the personal as "policy lived" at every level and by those outside the center (taxpayers, the disadvantaged, those who are HIV positive, children, single fathers as well as single mothers, etc.). One might explore how policy feels in various different spaces, in its application and reception.

In policy studies as in any other field post-modernism deconstructs the modern, often taken for granted, author-text-reader relationship. Everything is a text within a post-modern perspective and so are all dimensions of policy studies. The role of the policy-maker as author of the policy-text and that of those who experience policy (readers) is reversed. The reader writes the text, if not in reality at least in a metaphysical sense of being able to define what it is independently of what the author (policy-maker) intended. A post-modern approach to policy empowers because it grants to everyone the equal right to act as reader-of-the-policy-text. All are presumed to be policy analysts, to define and interpret policy. In the extreme it might be said that the author is dead (Barthes, 1977: 148; Foucault, 1979). For example, an urban city is not a concrete space, nor raw material for policy formulation. It is rather a text to be interpreted in a different way by various reader.

Post-modernists are unlikely to suggest that policy is or can be objective or ideologically neutral. Policy is rather indeterminate (Arrington and Francis, 1989: 1). Post-modernism itself is not inherently left or right wing and its impact on policy studies could be either progressive or regressive or both at the same time (Rosenau, 1992, Chapter 8).

The Up Side and the Down Side of the Post-Modern Policy Current

A post-modern approach to policy studies is both attractive and worrisome. It offers an opportunity for innovation, creativity, novelty, and originality to a field that may be quite mundane at times. A post-modern approach suggests we need not be despondent about the magnitude of the problems addressed. It is intellectually fascinating, creative, cheerful, buoyant, contagious in its inspiration, refusing to take things too seriously. Given, for example, the level of urban violence, the increasingly disturbing levels of poverty, and the national deficit, this attitude can be a welcome relief. At the same time it might be argued that post-modernism is frivolous because it diminishes the significance of these kinds of policy problems. In some sense post-modernism is a luxury of affluence and it almost assumes a post-scarcity society. In short, it is not practical. The consequences of mistakes and waste that might result from a singularly post-modern policy perspective could be substantial in certain circumstances (death? starvation? toxic hazard?).

Post-modernism's greatest contribution to policy studies may be that of critique in the form of deconstruction. Its role in this instance is to shake us loose of deep convictions. This creates an opening and, ironically, that may be enough if it does not impede or discourage moving on to new and expanded excellence in modern policy construction and design.

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