Documentary and Network Analysis

A number of documents were drawn on in order to develop a deeper understanding of the policy itself, the development of the NPG and the way in which it operated. The

documents included publicly available information from the Scottish Government website, various versions of minutes from meetings of the NPG and its sub-groups and draft reports.

While much of this information was publicly available, the table below provides

information about the details of the documents, the process by which they were obtained and the way that the information was used within this research.

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Table 5 List of documents used in analysis

Document Method of obtainment Purpose in research

Original membership of the

NPG work plan Publicly available: Scottish Government website

This provided the aims and objectives of the NPG and the three sub-groups and offered some insight into the

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Draft NPG report Provided by an interview

participant This was the final draft of the NPG Report prior to the

Draft sub-group two report Distributed at a sub-group two consultation event at University of Glasgow

This provided an overview of the intended direction of sub-group two.

Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT) and the concept of translation (Callon, 1987), I understand each of these documents as ‘tokens’ (Edwards, 2009; Gaskell & Hepburn, (1998): as static translations of the original policy agenda set out in TSF. Each document, although somewhat different in nature, contains an element of the original policy idea, which has been modified, mobilised and presented in a different format. The sub-group remits are the most obvious token, as they have been developed directly from the

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recommendations and were presented to the sub-groups as ideas to be ‘implemented’. The sub-groups were not working from the original recommendations in the Report, but from the remit points that had been developed by the civil service. In Chapter 5 I argue that the translation of recommendations into remit points must be understood as the first stage of policy translation. Minutes from meetings of the NPG and sub-groups can also be

understood as ‘tokens’, as they provide a snapshot of the policy in a moment of translation, which is then fed back into the process to inform its continued translation. Even group membership lists can be viewed as ‘tokens’ if we consider that design of the NPG and its sub-groups was shaped by a key objective within the Report: the need to develop and strengthen partnership in Scottish education. The act of policy translation is incredibly complex, and this highlights the multiple forms that the ‘token’ can take.

It should be noted that data obtained from these documents was not subject to the same rigorous analysis process as the interview data. The documents were initially read in order to develop a broader overview of the policy process. They provided a structural and political context within which the interview data could be understood, and helped me to gain insight into the official discourse surrounding the establishment of the NPG. The use of additional sources of data also allowed me to look for disconnects between official documents, minutes of meetings and the interview data obtained from my interview participants.

In Chapter 4, I provide an overview of the structure and membership of the NPG, which was informed solely from the analysis the documents detailed in Table x. The majority of documentary evidence was used to develop a picture of the ‘public image’ of the NPG, or the version of the policy process that has purposefully been made visible. This provided some insight into the interests of the Scottish Government. Although this image does not align with findings from the interview data, what emerged from initial analysis of official documents was important because this is the image that the Scottish Government have purposely made visible to the public and the members of the NPG. This can be taken as the representation of the way in which they have positioned themselves within this space.

The membership lists and minutes mentioned in the table above were used to create a network map of the different institutional and individual actors invited to participate in the process. This method is a simplified form of ‘network ethnography’, which is increasingly being used by researchers to trace contemporary policy networks (e.g. Ball & Junemann, 2012; Hogan, 2016; Shiroma, 2013). Network-ethnography is a methodological approach that can be used to map the emergence of new policy networks (and changes within

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existing ones), tracing the way in which they grow or shrink as new actors emerge in multiple educational spaces. Recent network ethnography educational research tends to focus on the emergence of new policy networks that are made up of actors from government, philanthropy, and business (Lewis & Lingard, 2015; Hogan, 2014). Ball and Junemann (2012) use network diagrams to provide a spatial representation of the plethora of public and private agencies that have influence over the direction of educational reform in England. This approach is particularly useful for highlighting the traction of global edu-businesses in local policy contexts and identifying the spaces where they influence as mapping does not need to be confined to one specific context.

The ANT translation model of change (Latour, 1987; Gaskell & Hepburn, 1998; Callon et al., 1986) argues that as a policy moves through a network, the actors that it comes into contact with translate it. While this idea is developed in Chapter 2, it is important to note that the extent to which the policy agenda is distorted, and the way in which it changes, depends on the interests of these actors and their level of participation in the network. The identification of these interests is a crucial step in an ANT analysis of policy translation. I therefore use ‘policy ethnography’ techniques to map the complex web of institutional interests that exist within policy networks, which is required in order to answer the first of my core research questions in the thesis:

‘Who or what was included in or excluded from the spaces of policy translation?’

There are, of course, a number of limitations to the application of ‘network as method’, many of which centre on an inability to capture the more ‘social’ elements of networks, such as the distribution of power and network relations. I accept these limitations, but argue that the use of interview data allows me to move beyond this representational image and explore the relational and social aspects of the policy network.