1,721,259 research outputs found
Approaches to gender mainstreaming: What's the problem (represented to be)?
No full textIntroduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline Previous chapters have made reference to the need to rethink policy as a creative (productive or constitutive) process. The major purpose of this chapter is to clarify what this means and to illustrate the usefulness of this way of thinking about policy for studying gender mainstreaming and gender analysis. The specific focus is ‘gender proofing’ in Ireland and ‘gender impact assessment’ in the Netherlands. The underlying proposition in thinking about policies as productive, or as constitutive, is that policies and policy proposals give shape and meaning to the ‘problems’ they purport to ‘address’. That is, policy ‘problems’ do not exist ‘out there’ in society, waiting to be ‘solved’ through timely and perspicacious policy interventions. Rather, specific policy proposals ‘imagine’ ‘problems’ in particular ways that have real and meaningful effects. Hence, to understand how policies operate requires that we ask of policy proposals ‘What's the Problem represented to be?’. This question forms the starting place for Bacchi's (1999; 2009a) novel method of policy analysis (elaborated below), captured in the acronym WPR. The proposition that ‘problems’ do not ‘exist’ ‘out there’ in society does not ignore or downplay the full range of troubling conditions, including the subordination of women, that characterise social relations. Instead, it insists that how ‘problems’ are represented in policies – how they are discursively produced – affects the particular understanding given to those conditions at points in time and space, and that these understandings matter.Carol Bacchi and Joan Evelin
Power, resistance and reflexive practice
No full textIntroduction: Joan Eveline and Carol Bacchi This chapter examines the primary organising processes which produce the meanings of policy statements. It outlines and inspects the social power circumscribing these policy statements, the relations of power and resistance involved in such statements, and their effects on those subject to the policy. The previous chapter outlined how the WPR approach concentrates on the constitutive effects of existing or proposed policies, showing how the characterising of policy ‘problems’ within those policies or proposals (what the ‘problem’ is represented to be) ‘shapes’ (or constitutes) people as particular kinds of subjects. This chapter pursues the point that policies elicit subjectivities, rather than determine them (Dean 1999: 32). It highlights the always-incomplete nature of subjectification processes, emphasising that the subjects of policy are always more than the products of policy regulation, whether explicit or implicit, as is the case in problem representations. In this view political subjects, both those who ‘do’ policy and those to whom it is ‘done’, are both subjected and resistant to policy discourses. A particular focus of this chapter and of the book is how ‘doing’ policy both produces and enables the subjectivities of those who analyse and develop it, including ourselves as researchers. The influences of feminist poststructuralism and recent organisational theory shape the propositions in this chapter. It was prompted by our wish as authors to fill a gap in our earlier and later chapters.Joan Eveline and Carol Bacch
Poststructural interview analysis: Politicizing "personhood"
No full textThis Appendix introduces a new poststructural approach to interview analysis. It outlines seven closely related processes that address the following questions:
• precisely what is said in the interview?
• how was it or is it possible to say those things?
• which networks of relations (discursive practices) are relevant to the interview topic?
• what do the selected “things said” produce as “subjects”, “objects” and “places”?
• how do the interviewers and interviewees problematize “what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live” (Foucault, 1986: 10)?
• which “things said” put in question pervasive ways of thinking?
• what political consequences follow from interviewers’ selection and distribution practices?Carol Bacchi and Jennifer Bonha
University-public sector research collaboration: mine the space, never mind the gap
No full textIntroduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline This chapter offers additional reflections on the ‘learnings’ that emerged from the Gender Analysis Project. With a particular focus on the South Australian experience, it outlines how the shared practice of collaborative discussion within the project's reference group (which consisted of the university research team; representatives of the industry partner, Office for Women; and representatives of the three participating agencies) encouraged reflexivity among participants. Reflexivity here refers to an ability and willingness to examine one's own presuppositions and to take on board novel perspectives. Becoming reflexive, we argue throughout, is a subjectivising effect of the practices in which we engage. Practices that focus on shared, interpersonal exchange and discussion promote the production of reflexive modes of being and thinking. That is, practices that foster a heuristic approach (learning by doing) in tough interactions with similarly committed but questioning colleagues, can promote reflexivity. The Gender Analysis Project in South Australia brought together feminist researchers and policymakers, mainly women, who shared a commitment to redressing gender inequality, although not everyone would have agreed about what exactly this entailed. The concept of ‘mining the space’ in the title refers to the determination of group members to work through differing perspectives and to overcome blockages within an institutionally sanctioned space. The chapter describes how the regular meetings of the reference group set up to oversee the project created the space and time required to examine and debate the contested meanings of gender and gender relations.Catherine Mackenzie and Carol Bacch
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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