Education policy enactment research: disrupting continuities

Abstract

The work in the book 'How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools' is important, interesting and necessary. It carries on a tradition of policy critique that in the main makes careful and judicious use of Foucauldian scholarship that has opened, and continues to open, the way for many researchers in critical policy sociology. However, there are several cautions to be made, that I will come to shortly. The book under review proposes new theory and research possibilities that will, and are already, moving the field of education policy studies in fruitful and interesting directions. I think it makes important steps forward for researchers interested and involved in investigating education policy enactment. It establishes a firm ground from which to think through the complexity of what happens with policy in schools, away from the potential monolithic nature of understandings that inhere in most studies of policy implementation, particularly in the US tradition of policy studies. 'Enactment' seeks complexity and nuance and multidirectionality (as opposed to the unidirectionality implied in 'implementation'), and this is captured especially in some of the tentative, open and complex writing in the book. The title also signals an important conceptual shift to 'doing' policy and this moves attention for research away from the substance of policy (isolating its textual or semiotic features, for example) itself to the practices in which policy becomes implicated and to which it contributes (however positively or negatively this may occur). This move in itself has large methodological and theoretical implications. Theoretically this potentially opens up policy research: moving it from being about knowing what policy is, as a quite static object that becomes open to interpretational or analytic hermeneutic approaches aimed at discovering the contents of policy, to something that is more concerned with the messiness and unpredictability of what people do.