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This is the last of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the dialectics (logical structure) of policy argumentation. Approaches are examined to discursive policy analysis and policy argumentation with an emphasis on the integration of empirical and normative inquiry. The discussion is oriented around a particular line of development in the argumentative turn, namely, a dialectical communications approach based on the informal or good-reasons logic of argumentation. In particular, the productive capacities of the communications model are emphasized, namely, its ability to generate ways of thinking and seeing that open new possibilities for problem-solving and action, or, in the language of Habermas’s critical theory, its ‘communicative power’. The different sections of the chapter look at argumentative discursive policy practices, the communications model of argumentative policy analysis, the search for rational procedures in argumentation, the logic of policy arguments (practical discourse), policy argumentation as practical reason, policy argumentation as communicative interaction (the role of analytical discourses), and critical rationality as undistorted communication.

The preceding chapters have covered the theoretical and epistemological support for citizen participation in policy-making. In this final chapter, the implications of this for the conduct of policy analysis are addressed, in particular the role of policy analysts as facilitators of deliberative practices. The different sections of the chapter are: Communicative Policy Analysis in Critical Planning Theory – the conduct of policy analysis, in particular the role of the policy analyst as facilitator of deliberative practices; Communicative Theory: Replying to the Critics – of the communications model; Policy Epistemics – for discursive policy analysis; and The Curriculum: Participatory Training and Qualitative Inquiry – the implications of a discursive, participatory approach for the policy analysis curriculum.

This chapter discusses two new approaches to the analysis of narrative: critical narrative analysis and contextual discursive analysis. It examines each approach in relation to its theoretical orientation, central question, major concepts, and orientation to method. Each approach is illustrated with the work of the scholar who developed the method. Critical narrative analysis draws on psychosocial studies, constructionist theory, and psycho-analytic theory. The commonalities and divergences between critical narrative analysis and psychoanalysis are noted. Contextual discursive analysis emphasizes, by way of comparison, the societal genres and cultural stories on which discourse depends and, drawing on Kristeva's concept of the abject, on the ways in which individuals seek to represent what they cannot say symbolically. The limitations and strengths of each method are also reviewed.

Applying a discursive approach to categories, this chapter examines video data which is extracted from the discussion section of a panel presentation titled “Japanese American Contemporary Experiences in Hawai'i,” which took place at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i in 2003. It specifically investigates how participants who are often categorized as Japanese or Japanese Americans in Hawai'i use a variety of categories or references to themselves and others and how their orientation to the meaning of categories may instantiate their (subcategories of) ethnicity. My analysis is mainly concerned with how they deploy emergent categories to interactively position themselves and co‐participants, constructing and negotiating “who‐we‐know‐we‐are” (Schegloff 1972) at the moment of interaction.

This chapter outlines a mix of biographical and discursive methods, showing how they can be used to look at people's accounts of their care relationships. It suggests a number of particularly useful tools to expand insight into exploring what works well within the relationship, and what the difficulties might be. Mixing biographical approaches with discourse analysis offers a way of understanding histories that does not prioritise beliefs or other internal cognitive states – since from a social constructionist/relativist stance these can never be known.

This chapter considers the influence of the national minority discourse on the politics of democratisation. It analyses relevant texts produced within the Council of Europe that preceded the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) and identifies issues which might have contributed to dislocation or destabilisation of the politics of democratisation. The chapter examines the concept of state sovereignty by subjecting it to a late-modern discursive analysis that questions the feasibility of setting boundaries in a globalising world.

This chapter provides a synthesis and critical discussion of research on news values in both journalism/communications studies and linguistics, starting with Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge’s classical study of ‘news factors’. It also introduces a new approach to news values: discursive news values analysis (DNVA), which focuses on how news values are constructed through discourse (language, image, and so on). This section of the chapter clearly explains the use of the term ‘news values’ and examines it from different dimensions (material, cognitive, social, discursive). It distinguishes news values from both newswriting objectives and news selection factors. The scope of DNVA is also usefully delimited.

This concluding chapter revisits and reflects on each of the previous chapters. A special focus of the reflection is on the avenues for further research that these chapters may have opened up for discursive news values analysis (DNVA). Such avenues include the application of DNVA to different types of news (e.g. national, regional, alternative, citizen, ‘popular’, ‘quality’, etc.) and the combination of DNVA with analysis of genre structure in the analysis of complete texts. Other opportunities for further research consist of the application of the DNVA frameworks for linguistic/visual analysis to news agency copy and media releases, including comparison with published stories that arise from them.

This chapter tackles five key findings regarding the way in which foreign policy decisions vary, namely, that variations in foreign policy decision-making within presidential administrations are common; agents within presidential administrations hold power at different times; agent interpretations of interests are heavily influenced by the forms in which information is provided or made available; both principled and cognitive ideas have the capacity to yield ineffective policy; and the president, ultimately, makes the final decision. The chapter summarizes the cases cited throughout the book, re-emphasizing how ideas were repressed and displaced. Moreover, the chapter underscores the value of incorporating and extending the use of discursive institutionalist analysis beyond US foreign policy decision-making into other, broader areas of inquiry within the field of security studies.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of EU policy itself. Discourse analysis is utilized to provide a detailed examination and critical assessment of the ways the EU has addressed violence against women. This chapter provides a temporal analysis across multiple generations of EU policies in order to understand the ways gender violence has evolved as an issue. It also addresses EU institutions and actors as unique sites of discourse, making comparisons across institutions regarding the different ways they address violence against women. Included in the analysis is attention to references to international instruments, the roles and responsibilities attributed to EU institutions and to member and candidate states, the framing and scope of violence against women, and recommended measures.

This chapter talks about developments found at the level of the European Union (EU). It presents a discursive analysis of a selection of policy documents of the EU that are relevant in the context of activation policies. One of these is the documents that were produced in the context of the Lisbon Strategy and the European Employment Strategy (EES). The chapter also considers the political status and the paradoxical rhetoric of European discourse.

This chapter explores the opportunities that discursive news values analysis (DNVA) offers for diachronic/historical and cross-cultural news research. The aim of the chapter is to inspire future research by other researchers adopting the approach of DNVA. Through illustrative analyses, the chapter shows how these are both promising areas for applying and developing DNVA in other contexts. This includes a brief look at linguistic examples from The Washington Post (1877‒1907) and photographs from the The Sydney Morning Herald in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also compares a sample of front page news about a hostage-taking in Sydney in 2014 as published in newspapers from Argentina, Bolivia, Spain, Brazil, Portugal, Austria, Germany, Canada, and Sweden.

This chapter explores newspaper responses to the London meeting of G20 leaders in May 2009 and the mass demonstrations against them. We trace both consensual and alternative explanatory discourses in newspapers over the same twelve days analyzed by Bennett and Segerberg (chapter 4). But rather than content analysis, our methodology is textual, narrative and discursive analysis of standard generic items in newspapers as well as through our discussion of the layout of contiguous items on the page. By discussing the contrasting “kettle” and “performance” logics of action, as misinterpreted, we argue, in both The Times’ reporting and in Bennett and Segerberg’s connectivity analysis, we draw attention to the detail of an empirical newspaper case study in explicating issues of theory and methodology which we first introduced in chapter 1. We draw attention to occasions of uncertainty, ambiguity, and outright opposition to the prevailing neoliberal consensus in The Times, as well as to both support for and dismissal of the demonstrators against neoliberal globalization in The Guardian.