Policy Metaphors Research Articles

A Flawed Policy Metaphor: An Empirical Test of Earlier Academic Promise and Later STEM Outcomes

A Flawed Policy Metaphor: An Empirical Test of Earlier Academic Promise and Later STEM Outcomes

“Living with HIV” – Changes in HIV and AIDS Metaphors in South African Educational Policy

ABSTRACT Health metaphors are commonly used in a variety of contexts. While war metaphors are common in medicine, there are also other conceptualizations and other metaphors employed in different contexts. In policies, metaphors can play an important role in framing thought and discourse, and have an important effect, and even more so in educational policy. In this article, we analyze the two South African policies regarding HIV and AIDS in the educational context – the first policy from 1999, and the one that replaced it in 2017. The focus is on identifying and categorizing the metaphors directly related to HIV and AIDS. We identified 29 such metaphors in policy 1, and 71 in policy 2, using the principles from the MIPVU, and thematic discourse analysis was used to categorize the metaphors into themes. The most prominent changes in the metaphors from policy 1 to policy 2 regard the focus of the imagery, as well as the conceptualization of HIV itself. These are then interpreted in the Southern African context.

The art of illusion as government policy. Analysing political economies of surrealism

ABSTRACT This article advances a critical approach to the analysis of social policy texts drawing on the philosophical perspectives of hyperrealism, surrealism, ethics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on official government texts and speeches on the continuing development of Singapore’s education policy, the paper examines the way metaphors of flexibility, diversity, choice, and opportunity are used within an evolving ideological context that work to continually produce truth conditions as justifications for inequality. In doing this, the analysis foregrounds a functional aspect of policy metaphors as divisive mechanisms of neo-liberalism through associating individuals with the appearance of discriminatory forms of economic materiality which does not in fact exist in reality.

A Study on the Policy Metaphor in the Policy Process of Autonomous Private High School

A Study on the Policy Metaphor in the Policy Process of Autonomous Private High School

Beyond health: five global policy metaphors for civil registration and vital statistics

Beyond health: five global policy metaphors for civil registration and vital statistics

Unpacking the politics of natural capital and economic metaphors in environmental policy discourse

ABSTRACTEconomic metaphors – including natural capital, natural assets, ecosystem services, and ecological debt – are becoming commonplace in environmental policy discourse. Proponents consider such terms provide a clearer idea of the ‘value’ of nature, and are useful for ensuring the environment is given due attention in decision making. Critical discourse analysis highlights the ideological work language does; the way in which we think, write, and talk about the environment has important implications for how it is governed. Consequently, the widespread use of economic metaphors is politically significant. This article discusses how metaphors have been analysed in environmental policy research, surveys the use of prominent economic metaphors in environmental policy, and considers the politics associated with such terms. The uptake of various economic metaphors represents a form of reverse discourse, varies in politically significant ways, and narrows the terms of environmental debate.

Gender, Political Rhetoric, and Moral Metaphors in State of the City Addresses

Politicians and leaders use metaphors and frames in political communication to provide citizens with meaning, persuade, and promote emotional reactions. At the same time, a large body of scholarship documents the propensity for female leaders to “speak in a different voice” when in political office. Research to date on policy metaphors, however, rarely compares male and female leaders’ use of metaphors or evaluates the use of these metaphors in local politics. Using State of the City addresses from 16 cities to evaluate the connection between policy agendas, metaphors, and mayoral gender, I find that male and female leaders emphasize similar issues in their speeches, but use different frames to present these issues, with female leaders using more nurturing framing than do male leaders. In addition, while both male and female mayors emphasize economic development as the central issue in their speeches, female mayors use more inclusive framing in these discussions.

The Distributed Cognitive Economics of Reform: A Framework

We present an enriched cognitive approach to the political economy of reform based on the notion of distributed cognition. Our aim is to describe the origination causation of economic reforms highlighting the interactions between people, artefacts as well as internal and external representations. In particular, we ask how reformers are able to turn a cognitively ill-defined situation into a cognitively well-defined situation. The proposed framework, we tentatively call ‘the distributed cognitive economics of reform’, emphasizes three key messages: First, economic reforms are creative processes largely driven by self-organized innovation and acts of public entrepreneurship. Second, the cognitive distance between individuals both enables and constraints cooperation and, most importantly, learning. Third, reformers’ ability to communicate to a wide range of audiences is crucial in times of reform. In consequence, successful reformers often rely on policy metaphors as primary means to manage high levels of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Presenting post-1978 Chinese economic reform as a case study, we argue that the notion of distributed cognition can improve our understanding of economic reform processes. JEL: B41, B52, P41, Z18

Leadership as dance: a consideration of the applicability of the ‘mother’ of all arts as the basis for establishing connoisseurship

This article follows the lead of several researchers who claim there is an urgent need to utilize insights from the arts, aesthetics and the humanities to expand our understanding of leadership. It endeavours to do this by exploring the metaphor of dance. It begins by critiquing current policy metaphors used in the leadership literature that present a narrow and functional view of leadership. It presents and discusses a conceptual model of leadership as dance that incorporates key dimensions such as context, dance and music and includes Polyani’s concept of connoisseurship. This article identifies some of the tensions that are inherent in both notions of dance and leadership. The final part of the article discusses the implications the model raises for broadening our understanding of leadership and school leadership preparation programmes. Three core implications raised here are (i) making space for alternative metaphors in leadership preparation programmes; (ii) providing opportunities to students of leadership to understand through alternative learning approaches and (iii) providing opportunities for engagement in alternative research agendas.

Using Political Metaphors to Understand Educational Policy in Developing Countries: The Case of Ghana and Informal Communities

This article suggests that one needs to consider education as inherently political to better understand some of the problems in education policy in developing countries. It suggests that using political metaphors as a discursive framework can enhance the understanding of some of the limitations of formal schooling in developing countries. Political metaphors can be an alternative approach to the predominant market metaphors in education policy and can provide valuable insights for future research and policy that go beyond current approaches. By using Ghana as an example, this article focuses on the implications that strong informal communities and markets can have for formal schooling in developing countries.

The role of ‘social exclusion’ and other metaphors in contemporary British social policy: a cognitive critical approach

This paper addresses the pivotal role played by the selective deployment of key metaphors in the construction of political positions within the arena of British social policy-making. Drawing on a corpus-based analysis of speeches and reports covering a 10-year period of the New Labour government, evidence is presented to show how metaphors are used to create an ideologically vested narrative of societal ills and policy solutions that stretches across different genres and over time. The effect is to place problematic groups discursively outside society (the ‘socially excluded’), pathologise their behaviour, specify their route back into the mainstream, and delineate society's obligation to those on the outside. A methodology known as critical metaphor analysis is adopted that combines corpus-based modes of analysis with the theoretical insights of conceptual metaphor theory in order to shed light on the workings of ideology in particular discursive contexts. Linguistic metaphors are identified and grouped into four superordinate metaphor domains: CONTAINMENT, MOVEMENT, DISEASE and CONTRACT. The analysis reveals the close conceptual interaction between these domains and explains the effects produced by their discursive instantiation as motivated by a process of ideological change within the Labour Party. In seeking to foreground the workings of ideology in discourse, the paper also aims to highlight the profoundly important role of key metaphors in facilitating the Labour Party's ideological transformation and therefore to argue for the importance of attention to language cognition in critical forms of political discourse analysis.

Collaboration Talk: The Folk Theories of Nano Research

The nano initiative in the US and elsewhere encourages and promotes various forms of multi-stakeholder activities, such as industrial collaborations. Forming part of the discourse of expectations around emerging technologies, collaboration is an important resource holding together different practices of knowledge production. In the conversations between policy and science, collaboration becomes a measurable entity and a measure in itself, figuring in the evaluations of the performance of individual faculty and research centres; however, the policy metaphor of ‘collaboration’ stands for a variety of different forms and shapes of interactions between university and industry. From a discourse analysis perspective, ‘folk theories’ of nano collaboration help to explore the dynamics of the university/industry boundary in the scientific organisational discourse as in a recent series of interactions with scientists, university officials and technology transfer officers in a number of US universities. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual ‘nano’ cases into university regulations and procedures? How are these practices and experiences discussed in terms of collaboration? Assessments of value of collaboration ranged between polarised views, raising questions about occasions, audiences and communities of assessors invoked in the construction of acceptable accounts of nano collaboration. Metaphors and analogies were used to mobilise specific meanings in the discourses of the innovative potential of emerging fields. As such, assessments of the potential of terms pertinent to the emerging discourses, such as collaboration, would be better based on the assumption of shared meanings, not fixed and given, but actively achieved.

Toll Booths on the Information Superhighway? Policy Metaphors in the Case of Net Neutrality

Scholars have argued for centuries that metaphors are persuasive in politics, yet scant experimental research exists to validate these assertions. Two experiments about the issue of federally regulating the Internet were conducted to test whether metaphors confer a unique persuasive advantage relative to conventional messages. The results of these studies confirm that an apt metaphor can be a powerful tool of persuasion. Moreover, the evidence suggests that metaphor-induced persuasion works particularly well for politically unsophisticated citizens by increasing assessments of message quality. Ultimately, this research concerns how individuals make sense of politics and how policymakers can use what we know about human cognition to convey their platforms to the general public.

Managing Meaning: The Use of Metaphor in Criminal Justice Policy

This paper takes an unorthodox approach to the study of policy, by analysing the use of metaphors in policy documents. Policy language presents an important topic of study because the policy text is an increasingly important technique of governance, aiming at one level to satisfy desires for transparency and public consultation, and, at another, to translate law and norms into technical rules of everyday practice. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) provides the methodology for exploring the role metaphors play in policy texts. While metaphor is, outside of linguistics, commonly treated as an optional linguistic ornament used to convey an unfamiliar concept in terms of a familiar one, CMT claims metaphors are ever present features of language and fundamental to knowing. Analysis of metaphors in a key (Scottish) criminal justice policy text provides a case study for analysing how metaphors assist understanding a new category of offender – the serious violent and sexual offender. Equally important, the paper considers the possibility that the means of controlling such offenders – risk management – is itself a metaphor.

Public health metaphors in Australian policy on asylum seekers

To analyse the way in which a public health metaphor has been incorporated into Australian political practice to justify the exclusion or mistreatment of unwelcome non-citizens, giving particular attention to recent asylum seekers. Starting with a personal experience of working in an immigration detention centre and then drawing on media reports and published scholarship, I critique political rhetoric and policy on asylum seekers, arguing that the significance of a public health metaphor lies in its effectiveness in persuading the public that refugees and asylum seekers are a moral contaminant that threatens the nation and has to be contained. Acceptance of the metaphor sanctions humanly degrading inferences, policies and actions. Public health professionals therefore have a responsibility to challenge the political use of public health and associated metaphors. Substituting the existing metaphor for one that is more morally acceptable could help to redefine refugees and asylum seekers more positively and promote compassion in political leaders and the community.

Policy Frames, Metaphorical Reasoning, and Support for Public Policies

This article evaluates the predictive value of a new theory for understanding public support for alternative solutions to policy problems, which we call policy metaphors. A policy metaphor represents a particular form of cognitive framing that makes use of commonly understood social institutions and judgments about their effectiveness to form “archetypes” against which proposed solutions to new policy problems are compared. We test the extent to which both understanding of and preference for particular policy frames predicts the nature and strength of policy choices by a representative sample of the American public. After controlling for factors that past research has shown to be important in understanding public opinion, including general partisan and ideological attitudes, self-interest, political values, and emotions, the cognitive frames specified by the general theory of policy metaphors are shown to strongly predict public support for hypothetical solutions to three different policy problems. These frames also predict support for President Clinton's 1993–94 health care reforms after controlling for those same conventional predictors. Most importantly, we demonstrate that these cognitive frames help constrain the beliefs of even the least politically aware members of the general public. Discussion centers on the implications of this new approach for understanding public opinion.

‘GOOD GOVERNANCE’: THE PLIABILITY OF A POLICY CONCEPT

1. Introduction For well over a decade, the notion of 'good governance' has served a s a general guiding principle for donor agencies in demanding from recipient governments adherence to proper administrative processes in the handling of development assistance and expecting them to put in place effective policy instruments towards that end. At the present time, however, donor references to the 'good governance' notion aimed at inducing reforms in the institutional environment of recipient countries appear to have had their longest day. Instead, changing donor preferences for new kinds of relations with aid-receiving countries are giving rise to a different use of the 'good governance' notion, notably to have it serve as a pre-condition to qualify for aid relationships. The present paper explores the conditions under which the idea of 'good governance' first became adopted as a donor policy metaphor and how successively it is being transformed into an instrument of 'selectivity'. Particular attention will need to be given in this regard to successive shifts in the relevant policy thinking within the World Bank. As a background, it should be recalled that around 1989-90, all of a sudden, the 'good governance' notion became prominent on the international aid front. First launched as a donor discourse, it came just as unexpectedly as the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened only slightly earlier, and in fact the two developments do not appear to have been entirely unconnected. Until that time, aid agencies and other development institutions had generally not been approaching their program relations with counterparts in terms of criteria of 'good governance'. Nor had, for that matter, the term 'governance' constituted a significant part of the vocabularies used in, say, political science courses at European or American universities in the decades before. For a long time the word had had a somewhat obscure dictionary existence, primarily carrying legalistic connotations, as in respect to bodies having Boards of Governors, whose institutional role required a designation rather grander than 'administration', less business-like than 'management', and with their 'political' concerns handled discretely but firmly. But then suddenly, the notion of 'good governance' was there, now used to refer to the way in which whole countries, or cities or provinces for that matter, were being 'governed' or to be governed. Contextually, rather than intrinsically, it soon transpired that any references that were made to it somehow pertained to states and other entities in the South, and later to the countries emerging from the former Soviet bloc, rather than in Western Europe or North America from where the concept was being (re-)launched. Moreover, with the adjective 'good' added to it, it became unmistakably clear that the concept of 'good governance' could be used to invite judgment about how the country, city or agency concerned was being 'governed'. It enabled the raising of evaluative questions about proper procedures, transparency, the quality and process of decision-making, and many other such concerns (Doornbos 1995). The way these issues were at an early stage looked at from a donor perspective could be gleaned from a World Bank Staff Paper as follows: Since poor countries generally have fragile polities and weak systems of accountability, with few autonomous institutions and little countervailing power to that exercised by the government at the center, external agencies are potentially key political players capable of exerting considerable influence in promoting good or bad governance. In raising the shortcomings of a country's governance, external agencies are calling into question its government's performance. Clearly, this goes further than a critique of a particular program or project (generally regarded as a legitimate concern of a financing agency), to touch on the ability of a regime to govern effectively in the interest of its citizenry (Landell-Mills and Serageldin 1991:13). …

On metaphors on the position of women in academia and science

In research and science policy on women in academia, various metaphors are often used to crystallize the complexities of women's position and persistent inequalities there. Although research has gradually shifted from a "women as a problem" perspective towards problematizing academia, metaphors focusing on women abound. Metaphors in this field are explored in terms of their focus and approach to power, resistance, agency and change. Many metaphors depict women's position in academia as static rather than dynamic. Very few include references to women's agency and resistance. A more critical approach towards metaphors in both research and science policy is advocated.

On metaphors on the position of women in academia and science

In research and science policy on women in academia, various metaphors are often used to crystallize the complexities of women's position and persistent inequalities there. Although research has gradually shifted from a "women as a problem" perspective towards problematizing academia, metaphors focusing on women abound. Metaphors in this field are explored in terms of their focus and approach to power, resistance, agency and change. Many metaphors depict women's position in academia as static rather than dynamic. Very few include references to women's agency and resistance. A more critical approach towards metaphors in both research and science policy is advocated.

On metaphors on the position of women in academia and science

In research and science policy on women in academia, various metaphors are often used to crystallize the complexities of women's position and persistent inequalities there. Although research has gradually shifted from a "women as a problem" perspective towards problematizing academia, metaphors focusing on women abound. Metaphors in this field are explored in terms of their focus and approach to power, resistance, agency and change. Many metaphors depict women's position in academia as static rather than dynamic. Very few include references to women's agency and resistance. A more critical approach towards metaphors in both research and science policy is advocated.