Richard Freeman

Our study is concerned with the fundamental problem of order in complex domains, and with how that order is developed by multiple, collective actors.  We are interested in the particular role of knowledge as a resource for regulation.  This paper draws on a case study of WHO Europe's initiatives in mental health.  Its principal sources of empirical data include the social scientific literature on WHO, WHO's own publications and policy documents, and a series of elite interviews.

The paper sets out to show how WHO works by comparison, which means producing and deploying knowledge which brings actors into relation with one another.  These comparisons are both 'scientific' and 'practical'.  WHO epistemology is in part that of epidemiology, now applied to policy and health service organization rather than to disease.  Its surveys of policy and practice encode the activity of medical and other staff, planners, administrators and other public officials, service users and their carers in abstract, comprehensive and mutually exclusive categories.  Through them, discrete units of organization and behaviour are constituted, discriminated and sorted.  But WHO thinking also assumes a mutual and practical interrogation, by actors of each other and of the domain in and on which they act.  Through what is a multilateral process of information gathering, actors come to know about each other, about what others know about them, and about themselves.

The paper is in two parts, which focus on international surveys and on international meetings respectively.

(i) the comparison of performance

In conducting surveys of mental health policies and services in European countries, WHO has proceeded by exploration, by trying to find out what it might find out.  Different initiatives have been followed incrementally, unfolding through the agreement, redefinition and redirection of projects over time.  We review successive surveys undertaken at more or less ten-year intervals since the early 1970s, including work on subnational regions and districts and a signal attempt to classify mental health services in order to compare them more effectively.  We discuss the 'baseline study', a jointly financed WHO-EC survey of policies and practices meant to assess progress against WHO's Declaration and Action Plan for Mental Health in Europe.  We conclude by noting the emergence of a common agenda in mental health, attributing it at least in part to the performativity of comparison. 

(ii) the performance of comparison

We begin our study of WHO-sponsored international meetings and workshops by noting that the international order is also an interaction order: international relations are also human relations.  What is called the 'international' is a place and moment in which actors enter the presence of others, a moment at which some relationship between them is posited in some form or another.  Those actors chosen to represent their countries in meetings are concerned that others should respect the approach taken on mental health policy in their home countries.  Actors therefore seek to control the perception others form of them through the way they perform at meetings, and they do so through controlling the information others are able to gather about them.

Richard Freeman

School of Social and Political Science

University of Edinburgh (UK)

richard.freeman@ed.ac.uk

 

Hanneke Duijnhoven

 

The study on which this paper is based focuses on the ways in which organizational actors within

railway organizations in the Netherlands and Spain shape and give meaning to security in light of

institutional and societal changes and the ways in which this is enacted in their daily practices. In

particular it deals with the processes of sense making, interpretation, and the enactment of security

issues into the daily work practices within these organizations (Duijnhoven, 2010 ). One of the reasons

why security has become a very salient theme among railway organizations (and beyond) is the

increasing number of terrorist attacks and threats in Western societies. The Madrid bombings of 2004

were still fresh in people's memories when in the summer of 2005 the London underground was hit by

a new wave of terrorist bombings.

 

This was around the time that I started my PhD research on security practices among

organizational actors in the railways. I decided I wanted to study railway security in two very different

contexts, mainly because I was interested in understanding local constructions of meanings and

attitudes towards security, as embedded in broader (discursive) structures. The next step was to select

two contexts that seem to be different in many ways. I selected the Spanish and Dutch railways as my

cases, mainly because of the apparent cultural, historical and political differences between these two

contexts. In that respect, Spain may be characterized as a country with a very turbulent political history and experience with terrorism, and the Netherlands as a country with an image of tolerance and little experience with large-scale security threats and incidents. Obviously, these are stereotypical

representations of the two countries, but it offers enough ground for an interesting combination of

these fieldwork locations.

 

As Adcock (2006) discusses, an interpretive approach to comparison in social sciences generally

aims to combine the understanding of locally situated particularities with that of some general

movement or phenomenon. This general conception of a 'problem' (in this case security) serves "to

help illuminate how legacies of the past play into the shape of developments in different societies"

(Adcock, 2006: 63). To put it more precisely, an interpretive research design allows for the studying of

local manifestations of public discourses around security, in relation to individual actions and general

historical and political developments. The aim is not to talk, at an abstract level, about differences and

similarities between the Netherlands and Spain (as is often the case in more traditional, variable-based

'comparative' research designs), or compare the culture of both organizations/countries. On the

contrary, the aim is to discuss the situational meaning constructions of security and the life-worlds of

railway employees in the Netherlands and Spain, in relation to historical, political and societal

developments in each country as well as in the railway sector in general.

In this paper I will reflect upon my experiences with the comparative aspect of my research and

further develop some ideas concerning interpretive practices of comparison.

Hanneke Duijnhoven
Faculty of Social Sciences
Vrije Universiteit (NL) 
hl.duijnhoven@fsw.vu.nl

 

Barbara Lucas and Lea Sgier

The aim of our paper is to make a contribution to the methodological discussion around the use of discourse analysis in policy research.

The role of discourse in policy research has attracted increasing attention over the last decade, by scholars in public policy who have started to get intrigued about what they call the "ideational", "cognitive" or "ideological" aspects of policy, also referred to as "values" or "référentiels" (P. Muller)^[1], on the one hand; and by discourse analysts who have become more and more interested in policy issues^[2] on the other hand.

Although both approaches have produced valuable insights into the role of discourse in public policy, there remain gaps in-between these two approaches that hardly communicate. Policy analysts tend to have a rather vague and under-problematised notion of "discourse" (or their conceptual equivalents), and continue to rely on external explanation of policy change (such as changes in government coalitions) rather than taking into account also mechanisms internal to discourse, as discussed for instance by Foucault.

Discourse analysts interested in public policy, on the other hand, typically under-conceptualise the notion of public policy. The boundaries between a "policy" and a wider notion of politics often remain unclear. Similarly, the precise connections between discourse as "talk" and discourse as "practice" are often under-specified.

In our paper, we argue that these conceptual problems become particularly problematic once we consider comparative and/or longitudinal policy analyses. Both the synchronic and the diachronic dimensions of DA (as well as the combination of the two), have already been explored by discourse analysts, most prominently by Foucault in his genealogical works. However, with regard to contemporary quality criteria in qualitative research, these works must be considered unsatisfactory.

In our paper, we defend the usefulness of synchronic and/or diachronic policy analyses, whilst also arguing in favour of a clearer conceptualisation of key terms such as discourse, public policy, 'context' and (for diachronic comparisons) time.  On the basis of our own works - on care policies in Europe and on gender quota discourses - we will also illustrate the methodological difficulties of a diachronic and synchronic DA (such as the difficulty of establishing truly comparative analytical categories, dealing with the danger of historical anachronism, etc.).

 

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[1] We think of authors like F. Fischer, Majone, P. Hall, S. Hall or (in France) P. Muller.

[2] For example authors like M. Hajer, C. Bacchi, H. Gottweiss, H. Wagenaar.

Barbara Lucas

Department of Political Science

University of Geneva, Switzerland

Barbara.Lucas@unige.ch

 

and

 

Lea Sgier

Department of Political Science,

University of Geneva, Switzerland

Lea.Sgier@unige.ch