European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 121

European Policy Analysis - Volume 2, Number 1 - Spring 2016

The Role of Theories in Policy Studies and Policy
Work: Selective Affinities between Representation and
Performation?
Robert HoppeA & Hal ColebatchB
In this article, we intend to take a few steps to mending the disconnect
between the academic study of policy processes and the many practices of
professional and not-so-professional policy work. We argue, first, that the
“toolkit” of academically warranted approaches to the policy process used in
the representative mode may be ordered in a family tree with three major
branches: policy as reasoned authoritative choice, policy as association
in policy networks, and policy as problematization and joint meaning
making. But, and this is our second argument, such approaches are not just
representations to reflect and understand “reality”. They are also mental maps
and discursive vehicles for shaping and sometimes changing policy practices.
In other words, they also serve performative functions. The purpose of this
article is to contribute to policy theorists’ and policy workers’ awareness of these
often tacit and “underground” selective affinities between the representative
and performative roles of policy process theorizing.
Keywords: governing, policy, policymaking process, policy analysis, policy
work, representation, performation

“Policy” in the Analysis and This is not to say that they have no clue,
of course. Rather than one definition,
Accomplishment of Governing

I

n the second half of the twentieth
century, “policy” came to assume a
much more prominent position in
the analysis of the process of governing,
but it is not clear how much this has
made the analysis sharper (rather than
simply broader). In spite of six decades
of “policy sciences,” scholars have not
agreed on a shared definition of “policy.”

A
B

there is a cluster of different but related
meanings or connotations to roughly
indicate what “a policy” is. The concept
sometimes refers to the (sustained,
structured) activities of a collective actor
such as a government or governmental
body and sometimes to the results of
these activities; in all cases a “policy” is
designed. All these meanings somehow
express the intention to normatively

University of Twente
University of New South Wales
doi: 10.18278/epa.2.1.8
121