Living Creatively, In and Through Institutions

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From Instrument to Policy: Observing the Meaning Process to Make a Decision

From 1950, a lot of researchers try to understand what is policy, how to define it and what kind of knowledge we can produce about it. When Harold Lasswell in 1942 proposed to develop the policy science, he established a strong connection between the development of policy sciences and democracy. He deemed that there was a complementary relationship between knowing policy and the political system. With policy analysis at the end of the century, two kinds of knowledge have been developed. First, knowledge about the substance of policy, the different kind of instruments which compose it, their effects, meaning and goals. Second, knowledge of the policy process, to understand how and why policy changes. Each knowledge has its own dynamics. But the problem is always the difficulty to link the two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of instrument analysis and knowledge of policy dynamics analysis. We can choose between work which understands the substance of policy but does not examine policy dynamics, and work about policy dynamics that does not take into account the specific substance of policy. Finally, a lot of researchers who produce knowledge of instruments never understand why their knowledge has so little influence. The paper aims to review the complex relationship between knowledge of instruments and knowledge of policy dynamics, and proposes to open a new way by considering the role of knowledge of instruments inside policy dynamics. The main idea is to focus on the discursive process of actors who transform instruments into policy by making sense of the instruments, and to illustrate this by some empirical examples

Learning through transitions: The role of institutions

In this paper two models are proposed for analysing transitions in education. Firstly, transitions are the processes that follow ruptures perceived by people. They include learning, identity change, and meaning making processes. Secondly, processes of change are observed through a semiotic prism, articulating self-other-object-sense of the object for self, and located in a specific social frame. Transitions are thus analysed as reconfigurations of such semiotic prism. The paper proposes to highlight the role of institutions as social frames likely to facilitate, or constrain, such reconfigurations. The role of institutions in transitions is discussed through three case studies: the transition to vocational training, the transition out of a religious school, and the transition to work at war-tim

From the Garbage Can Model to the Theory of Recycling: Reconsidering Policy Formulation as a Process of Struggling to Define a Policy Statement

One of the main paradoxes produced by the garbage can model is the empirical observation that a proposal does not necessarily appear through problem-solving but by a coupling process where a proposal searches for a problem. This empirical observation looks like a paradox for those who consider that the meaning of a policy proposal is fundamental during the policy process. This article suggests a new way to combine the garbage can model with the argumentative turn by taking into account both of them: the coupling process between a solution and a problem highlighted by Cohen, March and Olsen and the gluing process that allows the argumentative strategy which contributes to give meaning to a proposal

On the Emergence of the Subject

The paper retraces the elaboration of a model that accounts for the emergence of subjectivity—the possibility to distance self from others and oneself—if we consider people as always taken in social and cultural streams of meaning and tensions. It builds a model considering first, human experience as possible when a person takes distance from the here-and-now. Second, it suggests considering two general semiotic streams that feed in, or support, that distancing—social and cultural discourses, and personal experience. Third, a knitting model suggests the constant creation of personal patters out of these two streams. Fourth, a dynamic, star-like model is proposed to account for the actual and constant emergence of subjectivity out of such social and cultural configurations. The model is constituted by a 2, 3 or N-number of eight-shaped crossing loops, resulting in a star-like model situated in a 3 dimensional space. The proposition is to analyze a person in a specific situation: the attractors enabling these loops, or end-points of the star, are the relevant social and cultural elements: others with whom he or she interacts, specific bodies of shared knowledge, social representations, cultural elements and tools, and so on. In each situation, the relative strength of these elements, or the tension they generate, are negotiated by the person; the unique ways of dealing with that situation and inviting solutions can thus be seen as the emergent subjectivity. The model is explored to account for developmental dynamics at various scales in the lifecourse. Finally, the pragmatic interest of a model emphasizing complex configurations, not simple causalities, is recalle

Difficult secularity: Talmud as symbolic resource

Religious systems are organised semiotic structures providing people with values and rules, identities, regularity, and meaning. Consequently, a person moving out of a religious system might be exposed to meaning-ruptures. The paper presents the situation of young people who have been in Yeshiva, a rabbinic high-school, and who have to join secular university life. It analyses the changes to which they are exposed. On the bases of this case study, the paper examines the following questions: can the religious symbolic system internalised by a person in a religious sphere of experience be mobilised as a symbolic resource once the person moves to a secular environment? If yes, how do religious symbolic resources facilitate the transition to a secular life? And if not, what other symbolic and social resources might facilitate such transitions