Steve Griggs (De Montfort University) & Dr David Howarth (University of Essex)

It is perhaps something of a commonplace to suggest that mainstream political science tends to presume, and then favour, notions of equilibrium, continuity, order, and rational consensus. It is certainly true of rational choice theory, structural-functionalism, systems theory, and even Marxism. New institutionalism and historical institutionalism are no exceptions to the rule. Historical institutionalists like Paul Pierson argue that 'there are self-reinforcing processes in institutions', which 'make institutional configurations, and hence their policies, difficult to change once a pattern has been established' (Pierson, 2000 cited in Peters et al, 2005: 1276). These intuitions are captured by terms like path dependence, which are 'used to describe the powerful influence of the past on the present and future' (North, 1994: 364). Institutional change thus depends on previously existing institutional patterns and social relationships. Yet they are also visible in the concept of 'punctuated equilibrium', in which it is assumed that policies remain in equilibrium for a lengthy (though not determinate) period of time until they are diverted from one line of flight to another, thus inaugurating a new equilibrium (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993).

         An emphasis on continuity is also evident in the field of policy studies. A major tendency is concerned with the persistence of policies, and various obstacles to policy change. A minority report, on the other hand, stresses change and policy reversals, though their accounts are not wholly convincing. The focus on continuity is not unimportant. In fact, as we shall argue, concepts associated with institutionalism - path dependence, punctuated equilibrium, policy legacies, the logic of appropriateness, and so on - are essential in analyzing and explaining important aspects of public policy. Yet they need to be deconstructed, supplemented and then reworked. Part of this work is conceptual and theoretical. But in our view it must also be rooted in detailed empirical case studies, which enable theoretical ideas to be probed and tested, whilst also enabling them to be further developed and specified. Our focus on the grip of aviation in the UK works toward this task. More precisely, we explore the installation and persistence of what we term a regime of aviation expansion in postwar Britain, which emerged during WW2. On the surface, our object of analysis appears to exemplify the concepts of policy continuity, path dependence, punctuated equilibrium that makes up historical institutionalism. Yet our analysis will show how these notions are insufficient to provide a fully fledged critical explanation.

         Instead we use post-Marxist discourse theory to integrate the importance of political conflict in deciphering the 'ignoble origins' of various policies and regimes, and we articulate the complex interplay between social, political and fantasmatic logics to account for their sedimentation and reproduction. We begin by problematizing the issue of sustainable aviation in postwar Britain, and then set out the contours of our theoretical approach. We then use post-Marxist concepts and logics to characterize the regime of aviation expansion, before explaining its ignoble origins during WW2 and its immediate aftermath. By pinpointing a complex interplay of political and fantasmatic logics we then provide an explanation of the management and reproduction of this regime, and we conclude with a critique of the ideology of sustainable aviation, along with an alternative set of projections. In short, then, we take the problem of UK aviation as an exemplary and critical case study, which can offer us important theoretical and empirical insights into questions of policy change and continuity. 

Benjamin Hawkins (School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh)

This paper looks to explore the relationship which exists between the UK government's policy towards the EU and broader societal discourses about British identity and the position of the UK within the EU. Drawing on scholarship in the field of post-structuralist discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Glynos and Howarth, 2007), and its application in the field of international relations (Campbell, 1998; Hansen, 2006), the paper aims to develop a theoretical framework for analysing the question at hand.

In addition, it will argue that the logics of critical explanation developed by Glynos and Howarth provide a set of methodological guidelines for the examination of the foreign policy process. Discourse theory offers a set of concepts through which it is possible to investigate the structure of eurosceptic discourses and, drawing on the insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is able to account also for the strength and longevity of this discourse. In this way it aims to contribute towards the development of discourse theory as an approach to studying the political process at the supranational level.

The paper will offer an overview of the discursive terrain in which government actors are immersed and will examine the ways in which the hegemonic constructions of EU politics open up certain spaces for political activity, whilst precluding others. Drawing on a recent study of the debates surrounding the EU treaty reform process, it focuses on the eurosceptic discourse of British national identity which dictates the terrain on which debates about the EU are conducted in the UK.

Within the eurosceptic discourse, EU politics is seen as a zero-sum game in which the most powerful member-states compete for advantage. Above all, France and Germany are seen as the most powerful and influential states in the Union, who benefit from the EU at the UK's expense. Underpinning this discourse are fantasies of domination and suppression which are able to explain the strength and enduring appeal of eurosceptic discourses.

The construction of the EU as a forum for international bargaining means that the role of state actors is to defend their national interest. The focus is not on the benefits which may derive from EU membership, but the harms which must be avoided. The presentation of the EU as a threat to the British national interest which must be neutralised, it will be argued, precludes a more positive engagement with the EU and opens up only a narrow space of action for the British government in articulating its policy towards the EU.  

Dr Benjamin Hawkins (School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh)

e-mail: b.r.hawkins@sms.ed.ac.uk

Anja Eleveld, (University of Leiden)

Glynos and Howarth's Logics of Critical Explanation (LCE) can, thus far, be conceived as the most comprehensive attempt to construct an explanatory framework on the basis of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory. This explanatory model is innovative as it seeks to replace realist explanatory models without falling back on to the relativism of hermeneutics. This paper argues that LCE can also give a new impulse to post-positivistic policy analysis which, like hermeneutics, faces the critique of being mere descriptive. However, LCE can only be of additional value for post-positivistic policy analysis in case the model is modified in at least three respects. That is, LCE should also be of use for micro-level research. Secondly, LCE should not only draw on Laclau and Mouffe's post-structuralism but, on different post-structuralist insights. Thirdly, the strict distinction between the ontical and the ontological level should be softened. For this purpose, the paper proposes, among others, to extend LCE with the a further explanatory category, rhetorical logics. A critical explanation of the emergence of the Dutch life course arrangement illustrates the working of a modified LCE.

Anja Eleveld, PhD Candidate (University of Leiden)

e-mail: A.Eleveld@LAW.leidenuniv.nl

Jason Glynos & Dr Ewen Speed (University of Essex)

This paper explores the political and ideological significance of timebanking as a community economy in the UK. After a brief sketch of the basic features and variety of timebanking practices, we situate them in relation to the wider UK social economy and health policy context.

Timebanking rewards people who offer their services to others. The reward comes in the form of time credits which can be exchanged for services offered by other members of the timebanking network. The hour A spends ferrying B about in a car is credited with one time unit, which A can then exchange for the carpentry services of another time bank member, C. In such a framework, people's skills and assets are identified, acknowledged, and given recognition, and labour is valued equally, one hour's work always being equal to one time credit. Timebanking can operate as a free-standing practice, set up for whatever reason participants care to consider. However, an interesting feature of the way timebanking has developed in the UK concerns its tendency to function as a complement - support even - of public services.

From the perspective of public service delivery, timebanking is seen as a potential boon for service users, offering them the opportunity to become much more centrally involved in their care, and indeed in the wider community. In this context, timebanking is seen very much as an instance of co-production, in which service users and health and social care practitioners 'co-produce' the health or social services being delivered. But, we argue, co-production carries with it both radical and ideological potential. Timebanking can empower people and it can yield significant positive health benefits; but it can also be subsumed under a wider imperative to shrink statutory services and achieve compliance with public sector funding cuts. Which pathway is followed will be a function of the power relations and discursive strategies available to key actors operating within a shifting policy terrain. Situating itself broadly within a logics framework (Glynos & Howarth 2007) this paper draws on case material to explore the conditions under which iterations of co-production principles can receive, maintain, or lose the radical edge that advocates invest in them. The analysis will consider the implications of these different iterations in terms of what they might suggest in the context of 'policy as practice'. The paper thus starts to map out some of the main actors and dominant policy assumptions that advocates and practitioners of timebanking will have to negotiate or overcome in practice.

Dr Jason Glynos (Department of Government, University of Essex) & Dr Ewen Speed (School of Health and Human Sciences, University of Essex)

e-mails: ljglyn@essex.ac.uk; esspeed@essex.ac.uk.

Karen West (School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University)

This paper works from the assumption that public sector management is in the grip of a serious critical deficit in which there is limited space for practitioners to apprehend, much less to (politically) articulate, the decoupling of policy prescriptions from the underlying conditions they purport to address. Practitioners risk being reduced to mere performers in a surrealist policy pantomime.  However, knowing this and acting upon it depend crucially on having the right conceptual tools for diagnosing the pathology of 'performativity' (accepting that this term itself requires further exploration) and for the development of a critical response.  The paper argues that the concepts of radical contingency and hegemony are keys to such a critical project.  It draws on two (different) understandings of these, hailing from different schools of social theory - post-structuralism and science and technology studies/Actor Network Theory and explores the possibilities for a synthesis of these.  It takes Glynos and Howarth's logics of critical explanation as an exemplar of the post-structuralist and Anne-Marie Mol's (2002, 2008) notion of 'ontological politics' and the 'logics' issuing from competing and co-existing realities, of the Actor Network (or, perhaps more correctly, post-Actor-Network) approach.   In summary, it argues that Glynos and Howarth's logics, meshed into a comprehensive ontological schema, provide a framework for explaining the various ways in which subjects face (or not) radical contingency, and thereby offers up serious possibilities for critical re-engagement with public management.  However, it is also argued that the way in which their theory separates the social and the political risks de-radicalising the radical contingency they seek to foreground.  Conversely, Mol's deep commitment, as ANT and associational sociology more generally, to the empirical specification of the logics of practice and her understanding of the political as emerging from the (social) practical, serves firmly to fix the gaze on radical contingency.   However, and again as with ANT more generally, while this provides very sharp tools for engaging with the (radically contingent) empirical world of practice, it falls short in its lack of  overall analytical scheme for explaining the 'the transformation, stabilization, and maintenance of regimes and social practices' (Glynos and Howarth, 2007).   Hence it relies on a rather vague notion of hegemony.  This is also evident in the work of others who hail from the same ontological stall, for example Boltanski and Thevenot and Latour himself.

The paper begins with a brief empirical examination of the condition of performativity in the policy domain of older adult social care in the UK and explores the possibilities occasioned by the public sector financial crisis as a 'dislocatory event' (Glynos and Howarth, 2007) capable of reactivating political subjectivity.  It then examines Glynos and Howarth's influential logics of critical explanation, as a serious way forward in exploring and explaining the pathology of performativity and its possible remedy.  It then explores the ways in which alternative thinking on the logics of practice and the values they enact, in particular the work of Mol, could give back the radicality lacking in Glynos and Howarth.  It then considers how a synthesized framework might be deployed in enlivening the critical project in public management.

Dr Karen West (School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University)

e-mail:k.west@aston.ac.uk

Allan Dreyer Hansen (Institute of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University)

The notion of logics was introduced in Laclau and Mouffe discourse theory from the very beginning, specifying that the deconstruction of essentialism necessitates the redefinition of the status of the notions of "classical analysis - such as 'centre', 'power', 'autonomy'": No longer essences or fully fledged objectivities, they are now to be seen as "contingent social logics which, as such, acquire their meaning in precise conjunctural and relational contexts, where they will always be limited by other - frequently contradictory - logics; but none of them has absolute validity, in the sense of defining a space or structural moment which could not in its turn be subverted" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 142-3)

Two points should be given specific attention here. First, the distinction is made between discourse theory and classical analysis; second, in HSS logics are social logics. As is well known the development of Laclau's discourse theory let to the explication of the thesis of the ontological primacy of the political, from NRROT onwards, turning the most basic distinction in the theory into that between the social (sedimented) and the political (the reactivated)(Laclau 1990). 'Logics' has been developed into a centre stage concept by Glynos and Howarth, showing its advantage over 'classical' alternatives, be they of a causalist, interpretivist, or other kind. In their path-breaking work, however, they follow the basic claim and introduces the distinction between social and political logics as the founding one (even if supplemented with a third type, the fantasmatic) (Glynos and Howarth 2007).

In this paper I want to take issue with the notion of logics in the light of a critique of the claim of the ontological primacy of the political. I situate discourse theory in the theoretical frame of 'post-classical theory' as developed by Plotnitsky (1994; 2002). My claim is however, that the "irreducible loss" is to be situated not in ontologizing antagonisms (leading to the claim of the ontological primacy of the political), but rather in - what might well be called - a general (rather than a specific) theory of articulation. The point is that articulable objects - i.e. objects that are essentially open to change - is most productively seen as logics.

However, if the thesis of the primacy of the political cannot be maintained, we cannot maintain that logics are basically either political or social. This obviously has a set of consequences for the the concept of logics. First of all, all logics must be seen as social logics. Political logics are not to be distingusihed from social logics as such but from different kinds of other social logics: e.g. economic, artistic, scientific, legal etc. This forces one to state the ('social') specificity of political logics. In Laclau's later writings he has actually introduced the notion of 'claims' as a 'minimal unit' for political analysis (Laclau 2005a; Laclau 2005b). This seems to be a very productive starting point, but the question is whether this is a logic of 'national-popular subjectivity' and whether 'politics' do not cover a much broader spectrum. Furthermore, I believe that we need to rethink the status of the logics of equivalence and difference, presented by Howarth and Glynos as the main characteristics of political logics. My claim is that all logics can be placed along the parameters of substitution and combination.

I end the paper with a brief sketch of the debate on 'neo-liberal' hegemony showing how neo-liberalism should exactly be seen as a specific articulation of a set of logics, forcing us to be much more specific when referring to and analyzing neo-liberalism.

The paper is in 3 parts. 1) I situate Laclauian discourse theory within a broader post-classical theoretical movement. Here I show that the political might well be seen as a privileged site for the 'observation of contingency', but that it cannot be granted ontological primacy. 2) I dig deeper into the notion of logics in Laclau's writing, and present the way Glynos and Howarth has developed these first movements into a full account 3) I show how the 'sociality' of politics appears in Laclau's writings (on populism), and from there I sketch the way we might rethink 'social logics' when they cannot be distinguished from anything 'beyond' (i.e. non-social logics). 4) I conclude the paper by sketching how the re-articulated notion of logics can be used in analyzing 'neo-liberalism'. 

Associate Professor Allan Dreyer Hansen (Institute of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University)

e-mail: adh@ruc.dk