Abstract
How does one come to subscribe to one policy narrative and not another? This chapter articulates a process of “identification-with” that evokes past experience in referent groups where common understandings and conventions picked up in social life are associated with a policy narrative. These associations and identifications are malleable over time. One may unsubscribe to a policy narrative, and one’s commitments to a narrative can vary in intensity of emotional commitment and value resonance. Narrative subscription also depends on context, whether historical, cultural, or situational. Change of context can bring about a change of aspect.
This chapter is a revised version of a previously published article: Miller, Hugh T., ‘Narrative subscription in public policy discourse’, Critical Policy Studies, 13:3 (2019), 241–260. © 2018 Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham.
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Notes
- 1.
Boscarino (2016, 281) would call competition among narratives “frame contestation.” Framing, used as a verb, leads to an appreciation of perspective in analyzing policy discourse. Many scholars have successfully showed how interest groups frame issues such as gun policy (e.g., Merry 2016). But frame, as a noun, does not work as well as narrative in stabilizing meaning in a unit of analysis. Its boundaries are vague and its scope is indeterminant.
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Miller, H.T. (2020). Narrative Subscription. In: Narrative Politics in Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45320-6_3
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