Book Review: Governing Narratives: Symbolic Politics and Policy Change

How is public policy implemented, and what informs its implementation by public administrators? Debate in the academic literature over policy development and implementation issues is long standing; a major consensus is that policy making is accomplished rationally, by calculating benefits and risk. In spite of challenges to this consensus, developing a coherent counterapproach has proven extremely difficult. The persistent scholarly search for new explanations of the differences between policy making and implementation processes has recently yielded to what is described in the academic literature as the narrative approach (Lindquist, 2009; Pepper & Wildy, 2009). New books attempt to explain how it can help policy makers, scholars, and students of public policy and administration understand options in the process of policy development and implementation. Sandford Borins, of the University of Toronto, not long ago published his renowned book—Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives and Innovating with Integrity—which explains the repercussions of storytelling for the development and implementation of public policy. Partly through expanding the role of narratives, or storytelling, on policy analysis and implementation, Hugh T. Miller’s new book, Governing Narratives: Symbolic Politics and Policy Change, has enhanced our understanding of the importance of policy discourse from a narrative perspective. It has, further, added a significant voice to those speaking for the limitations of rationalism in policy making and implementation. According to Miller, the narrative approach seeks to “get beneath, around, and behind the way the media, society, lobbyists, public relations consultants, and people in government discuss public policy” (p. 18). As Miller himself rightly points out, the essence of the approach, and the purpose of the book, is to cast doubt on the “modern image of a rational, autonomous, intentional actor”: the scientific approach, in other words, to policy analysis that has dominated the field since the era of scientific management government and the emergence of the economic idea propounded by classical policy analysis scholars. Miller replaces that actor with “a decentred subject whose personage is inscribed by childhood experiences, family practices, and educational background, and many other cultural influences (p. xi). ” It is a way to understand what and how policy discourses are shaped, and attends to what may be described as the idiosyncrasies of the personalities involved in advancing any course of action. Such a decentered subject, he notes, is not a product of the rational school of thought, but is, rather, “a product of the inscriptions accumulated through socialization and experience, by cultural symbolization, and genetic inheritance” (p. 14). The preface sets the tone of the book. Thereafter, Miller proceeds to demonstrate the importance of narrative’s governing of the policy making and implementation spheres by examining some critical concepts: he describes them in Chapter 1 as Words/Action. Here he draws the attention of the reader to critical issues in narratives, such as symbolic communication (p. 3), 482749 ARP43610.1177/0275074013482749American Review of Public AdministrationBook Review research-article2013