5.1 Narrative policy analysis

Narrative policy analysis is a methodology employed to understand complex policy debates where there is uncertainty, complexity and confusion surrounding an issue. The methodology uses tools from literary criticism in order to understand the relationship between different narratives surrounding the issues, and to seek a meta-narrative which suggests a reframing of the situation from which progress can be made by more conventional analysis. As a method for analysing policy it is suitable in situations where conventional policy analysis fails.

As we saw in the Brown and Duguid extract in unit 3, ‘stories’ provide an important basis for research, or narrative analysis. There are many different forms of narrative analysis, and it is becoming an increasingly popular research approach. This is based on the view (Bruner, 1991 quoted in Brown, 1998) that people, faced with the necessity of “constructing and representing the rich and messy domain of human interaction,” tend to “organize [their] experience and [their] memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on”. This may be to make sense of events, as a guide to action, social/cultural, knowledge producing, or political. Roe noted that ‘stories’ may be: scenarios (stories with a beginning, middle and end) or arguments (with premises and conclusions). Narratives may be analysed through discourse analysis of ‘texts’ or through ethnographic study of interview material.

An interesting study using an ethnographic approach to narrative was carried out by Brown (1998). He did a longitudinal study of the implementation of information technology in part of a large acute hospital with the support of an external software company called Delta. This involved a two phase data collection strategy with 11 formal semi-structured interviews being conducted in phase one, and 15 in phase two. Interviews lasted 60-90 minutes and 24 of them were tape recorded. These interviews were complemented by dozens of informal conversations, and a variety of supplementary documentary materials “reducing the possibility of systematic error and incompleteness”.

It became apparent that the different groups involved (the ward, the laboratory, and the implementation team) were telling very different stories (see Table 4). While all groups espoused a common goal of improving patient care in relation to the implementation project, the narratives surfaced latent motivations which were much more concerned with the groups preserving their autonomy and discretion over tasks. Narratives were used not only to make sense of what had happened, but also to legitimise the interests of the different groups. This perspective has much wider applicability and relevance than the context studied.

In this section the complexity of policy and policy processes have been explored. The aim has been to challenge and widen narrow ideas of what policy is, and to think about the relationship of policy with research. An image of policy and research as two interdependent systems has been presented. The section concluded with the presentation of narrative policy analysis, a method that has been applied to issues where the policy arena has been identified as complex and the policy debate as strongly contested and stuck.