Delimiting the Discursive Sample Clauses

Delimiting the Discursive. 1.4.1 Analysing Policy with Xxxxxxxx'x ‘History of Problems’ One of the key differences between a Foucauldian approach and other discursive attempts to illuminate the question of policy ‘problems’, is in relation to the ‘gap’ mentioned in the previous section (see page 23). While some seek to do analysis about policy in order to solve or reduce the ‘gap’ between research and policy (e.g., Xxxxxx et al. 2011; Lomas 2000; Bambra 2011), Xxxxxxxx’x body of work points to a different direction. Xxxxxxxx offers a perspective where policy problems and solutions are two sides of the same coin, and interest lies not in adjusting the solution so that the problem gets fixed, but in understanding how this problem came to be constructed as such (Rose 1999). By this I mean that the kind of ‘discursive’ approach proposed by Xxxxxxxx questions the very foundations of the ‘problematics of government’ and how these might be analysed (Xxxxxx and Xxxx 2008: 55). This approach relies on the works of Xxxxxxxx that revolve around theorisations of the way in which humans identify, think and address phenomena as problems, and attention to this process of problematisation or, in other words, ‘the history of problems’ (Xxxxxxx and Xxxx 2003; Xxxxxxx 2011). As such, it is possible to consider how issues are ‘problematised’ as governable problems (Xxxxxxxx 1997b). As an approach to policy analysis, the Foucauldian approach rejects the notion of the universality of policy problems, as well as the notion of nation-states as stable and governable (Xxxxxx & Ronnblom 2011). Instead, it emphasises the historical process of producing problematised fields (see e.g. ‘sexuality’, crime or ‘madness’ in Xxxxxxxx 1977, 1978), but also the function or purpose of producing them (see Xxxxxxxx 2003, 2007, 2008).