Dvora Yanow

From Policy “Frames” to “Framing” Theorizing a More Dynamic, Political Approach

The concept of frames or framing, especially cast as “frame analysis,” has an established history in public policy. Taking off from the work of Donald Schön and Martin Rein, we develop the idea of policy analytic framing, the more dynamic of the two terms, in ways that strengthen what we see as its promise for a more process-oriented and politically sensitive understanding of the activities it is used to characterize. We argue that such an approach needs to engage the following aspects of the work that framing does: sense-making; selecting, naming, and categorizing; and storytelling. In addition, frame theorizing needs to engage not only the way issues are framed but also the intertwining of framing and frame-makers’ identities, and the meta-communicative framing of policy processes.

Book Review: Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction

In the dizzying series of ‘turns’ in social theorizing, one of the more recent is the so-called practice turn. In his ambitiously conceived Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction, Davide Nicolini seeks to give an account of both what a practice orientation is a turn away from and what it turns toward. The theoretical scope of the book is ambitious, and in my reading Nicolini succeeds in presenting a range of approaches to the study of practices. Were I to have the opportunity to teach a course on practice theories – note the plural, one of Nicolini’s main points – this book would likely be its backbone (with one hesitation, to which I will return). I have already recommended it to researchers looking for a good overview of the topic. It is a clear demonstration of the continued utility of books, and not just journal articles, for disseminating scholarly knowledge. UK REF policy-makers, take note. On the historical account of the flow of these ideas, Chapters 1 and 2 are Nicolini at his best, synthesizing vast amounts of disparate literature in a way that can shape an entire field of study. His history traces the idea of practice, in the form of phronetic praxis, to Plato and Aristotle; observes its disappearance into modernist science’s privileging of ‘pure’ theory at the hands of thinkers from Galileo to Kant; and traces its resurgence in the work of Marx and the phenomenological thinking of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, up to present-day theorists. Coming from the tradition of direct immersion in what people do – in the form of ethnographic observation, initially, as a practitioner-participant of community organization and later influenced by Donald Schön’s ‘keep your hands dirty with the data’ approach to professional practices – I would never have thought to look to some of these sources for the origins of ‘practice theorizing’. And so I found this an interesting and, for me, unusual genealogy of ideas. The book then takes up six varieties of practice theorizing, pretty much covering the theoretical landscape in devoting a chapter to each: Bourdieu, Giddens, and ‘social praxeology’; theories of community and of learning; activity theory; ethnomethodology; phenomenologically-inspired theorizing, in particular in the work of Schatzki; and theories that focus especially on language. How Nicolini handles the latter illustrates the character of all of these chapters. Facing the breadth of language-centered theories and approaches, Nicolini gives an overview that explains the bases for their differences and then takes up three examples, each requiring an extensive command of the literature in its own right: ethnomethodological conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and mediated discourse analysis. It is this same wide scholarly reach that marks each of the first 572590OSS0010.1177/0170840615572590Organization StudiesBook Review research-article2015