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This is the first of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and examines the problems of policy research from an epistemological perspective. Focusing on the empiricist and technocratic aspects of policy analysis, the discussion first offers a critique of the neopositivist premises that have shaped and guided the enterprise; then, drawing on the theories of social constructivism and practical discourse, it sets out the foundations of a value-critical postempiricist framework for policy inquiry, emphasizing the need to integrate empirical and normative inquiry. The analysis shows the way in which what is understood as ‘science’ is influenced by the socio-historical context in which in emerges, and that social meanings and value judgements are built into scientific practices otherwise described as ‘value neutral’. In particular, it shows that in a world of multiple realities there is no ‘objective’ reality in which a scientific social science can anchor itself, rather, social science –– like science generally Vis a social activity and its products are based more on consensus than proof in the traditional understanding of the term. Towards this end, postempiricism offers a craft-oriented discursive or deliberative approach to policy science, one that better explains what social scientists are already doing; in this view, the analyst functions as an interpretive mediator between the available analytical frameworks of social science and the competing local perspectives. The chapter closes with a discussion of the problem of relativism traditionally associated with intepretivist approaches.

This is the third of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the narrative form of discourse and narrative analysis, an emerging and promising orientation in policy analysis. The social meanings uncovered by the interpretive analysis described in Chapter 7 are typically embedded in a policy narrative, designed to portray the fuller picture of a policy problem and the potential solutions. Built around interpretations, the narrative represents the policy situation, and offers a view of what has to be done and what the expected consequences will be. While there is a fair amount of conceptual overlap between the concepts of discourse and narration, narrative analysis is used in this discussion to refer to the analysis of stories. The first two sections of the chapter examines the general features of a narrative story, emphasizing its uses in both the social sciences and everyday social contexts, and discusses the basic epistemological issues involved in the production of a narrative text. The second three sections survey two prominent approaches to narrative discourse analyses that have emerged in the field of policy analysis per se: those of Stone and Roe. The last section examines how the logic of good reasons underlies the rationality of the narrative.

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.

This is the second of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the role of interpretation in policy analysis. While empiricists have sought to restrict the focus on meaning to the observable dimensions of social reality, the interpretive orientation requires the social scientist also to pursue the unobservable. Because language is able to carry and transmit meanings among people, access to the realm of meaning often can be gained through the study of communication (both spoken and written), but such meanings are generally only indirectly made available through such communications, so it is necessary for the analyst to move beyond empirical methods (such as content analysis) to an interpretive reconstruction of the situational logic of social action. This involves inferring other people’s meanings by identifying patterns that emerge through an examination of the verbal and non-verbal messages they give about their beliefs and experiences. Narratives, for example, are a way of making the subjective dimensions of verbal actions more accessible, and the social world is in significant part organized and interpreted through narrative exchanges in their various forms. The different sections of this chapter look at interpretative policy analysis, interpretative frames, methodological strategies, policy analysis as ‘thick description’ (an approach for exploring and discovering the meanings embedded in the language and actions of policy actors), the objectivity of interpretation, validity as credibility, and social meaning and the question of causality.