In this seminar Clarke explores two key ideas in recent work in policy studies to examine their implications for thinking about public policy in the 21st century. The first treats publics as collective identities that need to be summoned and assembled, rather than being pre-existing groups. This has implications for questions of public value, public participation and the relationships between public services and their users. Clarke is particularly interested in what sorts of political and cultural work goes into assembling publics and the potential antagonisms that result (processes of inclusion and exclusion from publics; the refusal of some publics to be summoned and so on).
The second treats policy as a multi-layered, mobile and unfinished object by focusing on questions of translation. Here Clarke views translation as pointing to the shifting, contradictory and sometimes contested meanings that occur in the efforts to make policy and enact it. Different places, different levels and different settings are connected by the political and cultural work of translation, even as they are announced as different sorts of places (internationally the distinctions between policy innovators and policy learners; or within systems between policymakers and policy implementers). Translation as a concept and as a metaphor changes our perception of policy and practice.
Both terms (assembling and translating), Clarke will argue, draw attention to political and cultural work as central to the analysis of public policy. The seminar draws on a recent co-authored book – Janet Newman and John Clarke: Publics, Politics and Power: remaking the public in public services, London, Sage (2009).
John Clarke is Professor of Social Policy at the Open University in the UK, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (January-March 2009). He did postgraduate studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham during the 1970s and contributed to two major collaborative projects (Resistance through Rituals and Policing the Crisis). More recently, his work has explored political and discursive conflicts over the relationships between welfare, nations and states. He is currently part of an international collaboration working on citizenship (around the theme of ‘Disputing Citizenship’). He has also written about the roles played by managerialism and consumerism in the remaking of public services in the UK. Recent publications include: Changing Welfare, Changing States: new directions in social policy (Sage, 2004); Creating Citizen-Consumers: changing publics and changing public services (Sage, 2007, with Janet Newman and others) and Publics, Politics and Power (Sage, 2009, with Janet Newman).