The problem trap: implications of Policy Archaeology Methodology for anti‐bullying policies

Abstract

James Scheurich argues that practices of policy – normalized over time through repetition – serve three purposes. They structure social problems for which policy is designed to address; construct certain people, implicitly or explicitly, as problem individuals; and shape policy solutions. Following Foucault, he offers what he calls Policy Archaeology Methodology as an approach to policy analysis that emphasizes how particular social problems (but not others) are socially constructed in certain ways within certain political and social contexts. The purpose of policy archaeology as a mode of analysis is ‘to investigate … the grid of conditions, assumptions, forces which make the emergence of a social problem … possible’. Drawing from his method of inquiry, I identify, through examination of policy documents, how the problem of bullying in schools has come to be understood in certain ways (the dominant narrative) and how policy solutions are constrained and limited accordingly, thereby confounding their purpose. I suggest that Scheurich’s perspective provides a way of addressing bullying that accounts for complexity in ways that current approaches mostly do not even consider.

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