Introduction: Interpretation in the Study of Australian Politics and Policy

Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 291–295 doi:10.1111/1467-8500.12082

SYMPOSIUM

Introduction: Interpretation in the Studyof Australian Politics and Policy*

John BoswellThe University of Southampton and ANZSOG Institute for Governance, University of Canberra

Jack CorbettGriffith University

Amid the clamour of recent calls for evidence-based policymaking, citizen-centred gover-nance, open government, and any number ofother international trends in the business ofpublic administration, another, less-heraldedone has quietly taken root in Australia: a callto put interpretation at the centre of our anal-ysis. As the self-made image of the objectivecivil servant slowly erodes in Australia, as else-where, there is growing acknowledgment thatwhat the evidence says, how citizens shouldbe involved, what open government means andentails, or indeed the significance and implica-tions of any other trend in public administra-tion, must be subject to interpretation of the ac-tors involved. This is not to advance the notionof a new post-modern orthodoxy in thinkingabout Australian politics and policy—as fairlyobviously no such orthodoxy exists—but ratherto point out that an interest in subjective mean-ing is no longer the domain of the academicfringe. To mainstream policy and public admin-istration scholars and practitioners alike, then,increasingly interpretation matters. That is notto say it didn’t matter before – our contributionto this collection aims to show that to some

∗We would like to thank John Wanna, Janine O’Flynn andthe entire AJPA editorial team for their help in support-ing and overseeing this special issue. We also thank RodRhodes and Patrick Weller for their comments on earlierdrafts of this opening statement.

extent it always has – but that the advent of ‘in-terpretivism’ (the inevitable ‘ism’ that emergedto attach itself to a particular interest of scholarsin interpretation in politics and policymaking)has brought sharper focus to its significance,both in theory and practice.

An interpretive core?

As with every ‘ism’, however, once establishedas a legitimate alternative to mainstream under-standing, the term has acquired new followersand wider usage. In doing so its meanings haveproliferated and diverged – this is a key insightthat interpretivism brings to the table and so itshould not come surprise that academia is nodifferent to public administration – and discus-sion ensues about what the core features of thismove are; whose work justifies the label andwhy? The purpose of this collection is to openup debate about this question with a particularfocus on Australia. The Australian experienceis significant to this global movement for tworeasons. Firstly, several key figures, includingtwo of the contributors to this special issue,worked from Australia as the movement gainedmomentum, and a developing stable of earlycareer researchers in Australia are emergingfrom their shadow. And secondly, because theAustralian study of politics and administrationhas not approximated the positivist paradigm

C© 2014 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia

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(the label interpretivists tend to apply to thoseinterested in objectivity) in the way other coun-tries and regions have, the Antipodean expe-rience is an interesting vantage point to askquestions about what the core of this move is.

If interpretation mattering in Australian pol-itics and policymaking is a given, what thisspecial issue adds is a series of reflections onhow it matters and analyses of what it meansfor the conduct and study of public adminis-tration. The articles comprise a broad sweep—some historically-oriented on the roots of in-terpretivism, and others forward-looking to aresearch agenda for this enterprise; some fo-cused on specific cases or techniques of inter-pretation, and others on more general themes;some situated firmly in Australia, and othersdrawing lessons from abroad—but what unitesthem is a common set of questions. How can weunderstand the role of interpretation in the prac-tice and study of public administration in Aus-tralia and beyond? Why and how does it matter?What is the best way forward for scholars ofinterpretation? The answers provided are over-lapping, varied, even contradictory—indicativeof a lack of settlement that emerges in this spe-cial issue over how best to approach, study andrepresent interpretation in politics and policyscholarship in Australia.

If this special issue represents a spectrumof views on how interpretation matters for theways we think about policy, politics and admin-istration, then the inevitable conclusion is thatthe movement is not as tightly defined arounda core doctrine as is often assumed. Rather, it isa label that scholars use to denote, project andidentify with a series of loosely held meaningsand beliefs about what research is all aboutand how it should be undertaken (Bevir andRhodes might call it a ‘tradition’). This point isperhaps best drawn out by the eclectic affinitiesbetween the apparently sceptical challenge ofMarsh, Hall and Fawcett, supposedly lobbedin from outside the interpretive bubble, andsome of the other contributions from avowed,self-labelling interpretivists. To be sure, Marshet al. by and large stand at one pole, and Rhodes(against whom their argument is constituted) byand large at the other, but the other contribu-tions sit across this continuum, sharing aspects

of each of these contrasting accounts, taking amid-way position or adopting a slightly differ-ent take on key issues of contention.

Here we isolate three particular fissures thatloom in the interpretive account, all of whichspeak to ongoing unrest about the relationshipbetween interpretation and ‘the real world’, toborrow and bastardise from Marsh’s criticalrealist perspective. One is interpretation andpower, on whether ‘structures’ sit within therealm of interpretation or constrain it from out-side; another is interpretation and the truth, onhow the meanings actors ascribe to politicalissues relate to objectivity and causal explana-tion; and the last is interpretation and the other,on the place of interpretation in the broaderstudy of politics and policymaking in Australia.In this brief introduction to the special issue, webegin to sketch out these fissures in the hope oforienting the papers that follow and revealingmore clearly what is at stake in the similaritiesand disagreements among them.

Interpretation and power

By popular reputation, interpretivism entails awholesale rejection of structure and a reifica-tion of agency, with interpretivists seeing poweronly in meanings and beliefs, and not at all inthe ‘real world’ of hierarchy, access and capi-tal. Yet a closer reading of the contributions tothe special issue renders this strict dichotomyproblematic.

For certain, Rhodes positions himself closestto this understanding of interpretivism. His ac-count begins, after all, with a lament about therigid focus in mainstream public administrationscholarship on institutions and organisationalstructures and processes. In calling for publicadministration scholars to look to the humani-ties for new tools and techniques, he is in effectcalling for them to put humanity at the centre oftheir endeavours. But even Rhodes here, as wellas Hall in his account of the need for a conver-sion to thorough-going interpretivism in Aus-tralian International Relations scholarship, putstock in a soft or weak understanding of struc-ture as traditions and practices co-constitutedwith the actors who inherit them.


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Elsewhere in the special issue, structureplays a stronger role still. We can infer fromWeller’s account, for instance, in which he pro-motes Heclo and Wildavsky as crucial proto-interpretivists, that he might follow Wildavskyfurther in believing that analysts ought to‘speak truth to power’, where power is seento also come in tangible form distinct from theweb of meanings that actors reinforce and re-produce. In Colebatch’s agenda for interpretiveresearch in Australia, too, there is the sketch ofa faint but detectable hierarchy underpinningthe elite, techno-rational, problem-solving ap-proach that he claims has dominated public ad-ministration in Australia (and beyond) for toolong. Colebatch’s view is, in this sense, remi-niscent of the highly influential work of CarolBacchi, who draws on the Foucauldian notionof ‘governmentality’ to critically highlight themanner in which powerful actors use their privi-lege to reinterpret the scope and nature of policywork.1 Indeed, Colebatch’s interpretive orienta-tion also has striking affinities with the notionof a path-dependent ‘government knows best’tradition which also happens to be a key (but ofcourse not the only) structure in Marsh et al.’scritical realist analysis.

What emerges from the various contribu-tions to the symposium, then, is more a con-tinuum than a strict dichotomy. At one end,the thorough-going interpretivism of Hall andRhodes, sees only weak, co-constituted struc-ture; at the other, the ‘critical realism’ of Marshet al. sees structure in considerably firmer,albeit still ‘dialectical’, terms; but equally thereare those, like Weller, Colebatch and Bacchi,who play in the space in the middle, wherepower, in tangible form if not in rigid structure,is seen as both constituted by but constitutiveof interpretation.

Interpretation and the truth

Interpretivism is also often seen, from the out-side, as engendering a relativistic abandonmentof the pursuit of ‘the truth’ in scientific re-search. But, once more, the contributions tothis special issue reveal far greater nuance onthis point. There is in fact a complex set of ideas

at play about the degree of truth there should bein the claims interpretive researchers can make.

Firstly, this dissensus concerns the approachto interpretive research, and the prospect of ob-jectivity therein. Closest to the common un-derstanding of interpretivism in this sense isColebatch. In setting up his agenda for researchin contrast to a rationalist-objectivist approach,he implies a highly critical stance to any suchendeavour. But not all the other contributorshere bely such an orientation. Though Rhodesmakes a point of criticising the naturalist as-sumption of an objective truth, for instance, heupholds an objectivity of sorts in calling for ad-ministrative ethnographers to authentically un-cover the multiple, overlapping realities of theactors involved—and elsewhere he has advo-cated for an anti-naturalist version of objectiv-ity as ‘intersubjective agreement’ as governedby the rules of intellectual honesty (Bevir andRhodes 2010: 207). And for some other con-tributors, it is in fact objectivity in the naturalistsense of the term that should remain an aspira-tion. This is perhaps unsurprising coming fromMarsh et al., who explicitly maintain a faithin an objective reality which careful researchcan, if not entirely unveil, at least come closeto approaching. But, even with one foot in theinterpretive camp, Weller goes just as far, in hispaper hailing Heclo and Wildavsky’s determi-nation to retain the social scientist’s traditionalcommitment to objectivity.

Secondly, the contributions here speak to adeeper fissure still about claims to knowledgeand how far they can extend. Most closely inline with the interpretive caricature sketchedabove, our own historical account of interpre-tation in Australian politics and policymakingscholarship emphasises its capacity to elicitdeeper understandings of the subjective per-spectives and experiences of political phenom-ena. Something like this seems to be implicit inColebatch’s understanding of the work of inter-pretive analysis, too. But, explicit in both Hall’sand Rhodes’s accounts is a notion that goes wellbeyond this. For Hall, studying interpretations,if done properly, can generate explanations ofthese phenomena; by studying the underlyingbeliefs of the actors involved, interpretive re-searchers can provide plausible accounts of


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the causal mechanisms that underpin their ac-tions. Rhodes goes further still in defending thegeneralisibility of the case-specific work thatusually characterises interpretive research, ar-guing that the explanations provided in a singlestudy can act as ‘plausible conjectures’ for likecases elsewhere. Hall’s and Rhodes’s thorough-going commitment to anti-foundationalism, inthis sense, allows them to come full circle, andmake claims to knowledge that others mightdeem too positive.

The upshot is an uneven, unsettled under-standing of how interpretation relates to thetruth, understood either as objectivity in ap-proach or scientific explanation in outcome.The contributions to this special issue revealthat those who have an affinity with the ban-ner of interpretivism conceptualise and oper-ationalise this relationship in different and attimes conflicting ways. Each is independentlycoherent, but the collective does not speak to acohesive core, to say the very least.

Interpretation and the other

The final fissure that we want to highlight inthis introductory statement is in the understand-ing of how the study of interpretation relatesto mainstream approaches to policy and poli-tics scholarship in Australia. The popular im-age, again, is of a ‘counter-identity’ constitutedagainst and disengaged from the mainstream-ing, fractured and self-referential.

Yet it is on this dimension, more than anyother, that the contributions in this specialissue reveal the greatest diversity. Rhodes, inturning away from the traditional toolkit of so-cial science and towards those offered in thehumanities, would seem to be pushing moststrongly away from the mainstream of admin-istration and politics scholarship. Colebatch,too, pushes off against the mainstream—thedominant rationalist impulse in the practiceand study of public administration—to advo-cate for an agenda of inquiry in line withinterpretivism.

Our own account, and that of Weller, aremore reserved about embracing the ‘ism’ thatgoes with studying interpretation. Like Rhodes,

in tracing a range of influential mainstreamfigures in the study of Australian politics whopredate, anticipate or work alongside self-labelling interpretivists, we explore work inthe humanities or otherwise outside the es-tablished realm of political science. The pointwe want to advance, however, is not that theseroots mean interpretive scholars ought to movefurther away from the social science main-stream, but that interest in interpretation haslong seeped into the mainstream, at least in po-litical and policy studies. In making this claim,we advocate a more pragmatic approach thatreaches out to and engages scholars operatingin different paradigms or traditions. Weller, too,in linking interpretivism more explicitly withHeclo and Wildavsky, and in his characteristiceschewal of theorising in favour of substantiveanalysis, pushes the notion of a ‘broad church’.

More counterintuitively, Hall wants to doboth – to inspire a more ‘thorough-going’ ap-proach to interpretivism, and to unite a frac-tured scholarly community. His broad church,in this sense, refers less to conflicting or over-lapping research paradigms (of the sort we havebeen discussing) and more to scholars operat-ing with different and distinct tools, techniquesand types of data. In fact, he sees interpretivismnot as a radical counter to predominant posi-tivistic norms, but as a means of extending andunifying the fractured, ghettoised AustralianInternational Relations community which iscurrently limited by its quasi–interpretative ori-entation.

Marsh et al. approach this issue from aquite different angle altogether. In their em-phasis on the ideational or discursive compo-nent of their critical realist approach, they ofcourse reinforce differences with the interpre-tivism of Bevir and Rhodes (though, as wesuggest, some of these differences align themwell with other self-labelling interpretivists).But they also clarify the areas of overlap andagreement, most fundamentally of all on thevalue of putting interpretation at the centreof analysis. The essence of their ‘two cheers’sentiment is that interpretivists share morecommon ground with scholars operating in abroader range of orientations than is typicallyimagined.


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We see, then, in the various contribu-tions, conflicting accounts of how the studyof interpretation relates to scholarship aboutpolitics and policymaking in Australia. This be-fits the complexity of this relationship in broadterms and the intricate web of connections(and pointed disconnections) among Australianscholars of an interpretive and non-interpretiveorientation.

Instructive here, and an appropriate note toconclude on, is the experience of the specialissue itself: prompted by the establishment ofan Australian chapter of the Europe-based In-terpretive Policy Analysis movement, the grouphas since been brought under the umbrella ofthe Australian Political Studies Association’sPolicy Studies Research Group, such that itstands neither completely alone nor has beenentirely absorbed into the broader scholarly net-work. This, we suggest, is as an apt an analogyas any for the uncomfortable, unsettled placeof interpretation in the study of Australian pol-itics and policymaking that the various contri-butions within the special issue convey.

Endnote

1. As an aside, we had hoped the collectionwould include a contribution reviewing the sig-nificance of Bacchi’s work, as one of the mostprominent Australian scholars working in thisbroad field, but sadly it was not to be. Thecollection is poorer for this omission but forsome of Bacchi’s recent work see Bacchi (2009;2012) and Bacchi and Eveline (2010).

References

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the prob-lem represented to be? Australia: Pearson.

Bacchi, C. 2012. ‘Why study problematizations?Making politics visible.’ Open Journal of Politi-cal Science 2(1): 1–8.

Bacchi, C. and J. Eveline, (Eds.) 2010. Mainstream-ing Politics: Gendering Practices and FeministTheory. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press.

Bevir, M. and R.A.W. Rhodes. 2010. The Stateas Cultural Practice. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.


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Introduction: Interpretation in the Study of Australian Politics and Policy