We began a reconsideration of policy by setting out our intent to ‘disturb some of the comfortable ground’ (Chapter One). The rationale for the endeavour was based on theoretical, methodological and practical concerns including:

• • changes in the wider landscape of social sciences, despite certain ongoing divisions of academic labour that confine some forms of study;

• • radical shifts in how policy is informed, formed and implemented;

• • the sense that much policy-related and policy-relevant research practice is exploring new questions, requiring a different conceptual apparatus to that currently available.

While the need to reassess policy in a sustained theoretical and practical manner was evident, the questions through which this reassessment could be conducted, and the range of perspectives that we could bring to bear on the analysis, was large. Hence, the themes of meanings, politics and practices were developed to shape and inform the work of all our contributors to a reconsideration of policy. While presenting a view on the changing form of politics remains important in policy work, analyses of meanings and practices are central to making better sense of those changes.

Rather than take ‘policy’ as a given, chapters have sought to expose the various occurrences and constructions of the term. In covering a range of positions including, realist, institutional, practice-focused and constructivist, the different authors have utilised the idea of ‘policy’ in differing ways. Indeed, these very labels serve to highlight the diversity of interests that underpin current work in policy studies, and they lead us to explore what differing perspectives can offer – in particular, if brought into close proximity, as here. The issue we attempted to address in this collection links into both the centrality of power and decision making, and developments in how this is understood. Thus, we each engaged with our tripartite division of meanings, politics and practices, while appreciating the problematic nature of these very distinctions. By employing these categories, we have enabled some issues to become visible whilst others have faded from view. Only by bringing multiple perspectives together, however, can we appreciate the range of interconnections and contradictions with which policy studies should engage.

To continue our ‘disruption’ of what are often taken as ‘givens’, our reconsideration of policy will now begin to extract themes that cut across the work already presented, primarily in order to provoke yet further thinking.