Ideas, Coalition Magnets and Policy Change: Comparing Variation in Early Childhood Education and Care Policy Expansion across Four Latecomer Countries

Himmelweit, Samuel Mohun; Lee, Sung Hee

doi:10.1017/gov.2022.35

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 69 publications

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“…Current research on polysemy and the impact of ideas [1,3,11,23,30,33] tends to approach ideas from a psychological/cognitive perspective. Thus, work on the role of polysemy in policy change often takes ideas to be subjective beliefs [3], relating them to the core and secondary beliefs of policy actors emphasised in the Advocacy Coalition Framework [30,33,56]. The studies mentioned in this paper that have explicitly drawn upon cognitive psychology to understand the impact of ideas on policy making further reflect this tendency.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polysemy and the Sociolinguistics of Policy Ideas: Resilience, Sustainability and Wellbeing 2000 – 2020

Gupta

2023

Preprint

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In policy studies there is a concern with understanding how new ideas affect policy making. Central to this is the issue of how ideas become collectively adopted by policy actors. The policy paradigm perspective – the classical way of understanding collective adoption – has faced criticism for overestimating the coherence of adopted ideas and not paying sufficient attention to the micro-scale cognitive processes at play during collective adoption and how these are conditioned by macro-scale organisational processes and structures.This paper provides a sociolinguistic account of the collective adoption of policy ideas that explicitly relates micro-scale cognitive processes (interpretation, attention allocation) to macro-scale organisational structure (division of labour). Drawing on relevance theory, it argues that implicit in the diffusion of an idea within policy circles is an organisationally coordinated interpretive process which results in multiple versions of the idea adapted to the division of labour of government.Supporting this is an empirical analysis of the collective adoption of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing by the British government during 2000 – 2020. Using a dataset of policy documents (~85 million tokens) published by 12 British central departments, I use BERT to automatically extract the different senses expressed by occurrences of ‘resilience’, ‘resilient’, ‘sustainable’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘wellbeing’. I examine how these senses contribute to changes in the use of this vocabulary, the contents of these senses, and the distribution of these senses across the 12 departments. Through this, I examine senses that express versions of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing adapted to particular departmental functions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polysemy and the Sociolinguistics of Policy Ideas: Resilience, Sustainability and Wellbeing 2000 – 2020

Gupta

2023

Preprint

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Polysemy and the sociolinguistics of policy ideas: resilience, sustainability and wellbeing 2000–2020

Gupta

2024

J Comput Soc Sc

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In policy studies, there is a concern with understanding how new ideas affect policymaking. Central to this is the issue of how ideas become collectively adopted by policy actors. The policy paradigm perspective—the classical way of understanding collective adoption—has faced criticism for overestimating the coherence of adopted ideas and not paying sufficient attention to the micro-scale cognitive processes at play during collective adoption and how these are conditioned by macro-scale organisational processes and structures. This paper provides a sociolinguistic account of the collective adoption of policy ideas that explicitly relates micro-scale cognitive processes (interpretation, attention allocation) to macro-scale organisational structure (division of labour). Drawing on relevance theory, it argues that implicit in the diffusion of an idea within policy circles is an organisationally coordinated interpretive process which results in multiple versions of the idea adapted to the division of labour of government. Supporting this is an empirical analysis of the collective adoption of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing by the British government during 2000–2020. Using a dataset of policy documents (~ 85 million tokens) published by 12 British central departments, I use BERT to automatically extract the different senses expressed by occurrences of ‘resilience’, ‘resilient’, ‘sustainable’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘wellbeing’. I examine how these senses contribute to changes in the use of this vocabulary, the contents of these senses, and the distribution of these senses across the 12 departments. Through this, I examine senses that express versions of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing adapted to particular departmental functions.

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Shifting landscapes in early childhood education

Murray

2023

International Journal of Early Years Education

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Ideas, Coalition Magnets and Policy Change: Comparing Variation in Early Childhood Education and Care Policy Expansion across Four Latecomer Countries

Cited by 6 publications

References 69 publications

Polysemy and the Sociolinguistics of Policy Ideas: Resilience, Sustainability and Wellbeing 2000 – 2020

Polysemy and the Sociolinguistics of Policy Ideas: Resilience, Sustainability and Wellbeing 2000 – 2020

Polysemy and the sociolinguistics of policy ideas: resilience, sustainability and wellbeing 2000–2020

Shifting landscapes in early childhood education

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