Applied Cultural Theory: Tool for Policy Analysis

Abstract

More than ever before, in our late or postmodern condition of civil societies and polities, governance implies the active creation of shared, or, at least, congruent political and policy frameworks. For policy analysis this means that culture matters. The challenge is to intelligently and creatively cope with pluralism and diversity. One important way of doing this is develop a kind of policy analysis that pays attention to cultural differences more than current practice, which frequently violates even existing precepts to take culture into account. This is by no means easy, for it takes some counter-intuitive assumptions to see that the proposal makes sense. After all, from a cultural perspective, public policy making appears to invent and impose a unitary, supposedly consensual governance culture on the many different cultures “out there” in society (Van Gunsteren 2002). Yet, taking cultural difference seriously and making it an ally instead of an enemy is the only sensible response for a policy analysis profession in tune with its times. The thesis of this chapter is that we need grid-group cultural theory to do a better policy analytic job. Group-grid cultural theory speeds up and facilitates acting on precepts already in the toolkit of analysts; and it suggests a couple of new ones. In a sentence, applied cultural theory offers the policy analyst an approach to his job, responsive to the needs of modern governance systems.

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