Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- one Forty years of public management reform in UK central government: promises, promises …
- two Political anthropology and civil service reform: prospects and limits
- three Just do it differently? Everyday making, Marxism and the struggle against neoliberalism
- four Performing new worlds? Policy, politics and creative labour in hard times
- five Weathering the perfect storm? Austerity and institutional resilience in local government
- six Complex causality in improving underperforming schools: a complex adaptive systems approach
- seven Toward policy coordination: alternatives to hierarchy
- eight Governing local partnerships: does external steering help local agencies address wicked problems?
- nine All tools are informational now: how information and persuasion define the tools of government
- ten The politics of engaged scholarship: impact, relevance and imagination
- eleven Reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies
- Index
ten - The politics of engaged scholarship: impact, relevance and imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- one Forty years of public management reform in UK central government: promises, promises …
- two Political anthropology and civil service reform: prospects and limits
- three Just do it differently? Everyday making, Marxism and the struggle against neoliberalism
- four Performing new worlds? Policy, politics and creative labour in hard times
- five Weathering the perfect storm? Austerity and institutional resilience in local government
- six Complex causality in improving underperforming schools: a complex adaptive systems approach
- seven Toward policy coordination: alternatives to hierarchy
- eight Governing local partnerships: does external steering help local agencies address wicked problems?
- nine All tools are informational now: how information and persuasion define the tools of government
- ten The politics of engaged scholarship: impact, relevance and imagination
- eleven Reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies
- Index
Summary
Just now, amongst social scientists, there is widespread uneasiness, both intellectual and moral, about the direction their chosen studies seem to be taking. This uneasiness, as well as the unfortunate tendencies that contribute to it, is, I suppose, part of a general malaise of contemporary intellectual life. Yet perhaps the malaise is more acute among social scientists, if only because of the larger promise that has guided much earlier work in their fields, the nature of the subjects with which they deal, and the urgent need for significant work today… Not everyone shares this uneasiness, but the fact that many do not is itself a cause for further uneasiness among those who are alert to the promise and honest enough to admit the pretentious mediocrity of much current effort. It is quite frankly my hope to increase this uneasiness, to define some of its sources, to help transform it into a specific urge to realize the promise of social science, to clear the ground for new beginnings… my conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodological’ pretensions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues. These inhibitions, obscurities and trivialities have created a crisis in the social studies today without suggesting, in the least, a way out of that crisis. (Wright Mills, 1959)
The publication of the first edition of Policy and Politics in 1972 (the ampersand was inserted some time later) was very much in line with C Wright Mills concerns (set out above) about the direction of the social sciences and the need to retain a sense of interconnectedness, accessibility and vision. Indeed, among the contributors to the first edition were a political scientist, a social administrator, an econometrician, an economist and a historian, and their articles all contained references that drew extensively on the literatures of other disciplines. Two of the articles employed qualitative research methods, whereas three offered the results of quantitative techniques; they all, however, located the specific results of their studies within the contours of much broader debates and social concerns (and did so in a broadly engaging and accessible manner).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Policy and PoliticsReflections on Contemporary Debates in Policy Studies, pp. 203 - 230Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2014