Abstract
This introduction sets the scene for the five papers of the special issue on ‘Reflexivity in Global Social Policy’. It argues that a reflexivity lens can deepen a self-critical assessment of the field and its boundaries, and contribute to more conceptual and analytical nuance. The introduction reviews existing approaches that reflect on the key building blocks of the field – ideas, terminology, and theory – and makes a case for addressing the porous boundaries between scholarship and practice. It subsequently suggests the two notions of perspectivity and performativity to inform further reflexive analyses, before introducing the five papers and five forum contributions that constitute this issue.
Keywords
What is global social policy (GSP) and how do we know it? First of all, GSP is a relatively young scholarly field, in which scholars draw on a variety of traditions. As Deacon and Stubbs (2013) diagnosed 10 years ago, this includes ‘development studies, international relations and international organization theory, policy transfer and diffusion literature, global social movement studies, neo-Marxist concepts of hegemonic struggle, and (. . .) work on the ethnography of global policy’ (p. 8). While a similar diversity has been observed concerning the definition of the ‘social’ in social policy, due to the fact that ‘the systemic character of social policy is not (. . .) evident’ (Kaufmann, 2013: 97), these vague boundaries particularly reveal themselves from a global perspective, where a variety of different influences come together. In the absence of a clear-cut unifying framework or an undisputed disciplinary location, GSP is held together rather by its shared subject area: the influence of global structures and actors on national social policies, and supranational institutions of global social governance (Deacon and Stubbs, 2013: 6). Yet, as in every scholarly field, common ideas, concepts, vocabulary, methodologies, and taken-for-granted knowledge are repeatedly invoked by scholars contributing to GSP, lending it some stability.
GSP also entails strikingly blurry boundaries between scholarship and practice. Regularly, contributors to the field also act as consultants of international organizations (IOs) or participate in some other way in GSP practice. This journal is a case in point; since its foundation, it hosts the
The blurred nature of these lines of demarcation – both in relation to scholarly content and institutional boundaries, that is, between scholarship and practice – has led to attempts at theorizing and defining the boundaries of GSP more clearly. Deacon and Stubbs (2013), leading figures in GSP scholarship, have suggested that it is ‘the lack of critical distance between analysis and advocacy, which is, perhaps, the main problem’ (p. 7) in moving toward an inclusive conceptual framework that does not simply universalize existing understandings from the Global North or particular theoretical perspectives.
We do not want to ‘solve’ issues of definition by contributing to a new and universal theoretical framework. Neither do we intend to bridge or erect walls between scholarship and practice; porous boundaries can indeed also be an advantage. We welcome theoretical and methodological plurality in the field (see Yeates and Holden, 2022 for an overview). Our goal with this special issue is, rather, to argue for the value of an explicitly reflexive perspective that inquires into the core building blocks of our discipline. How we write and do GSP is the product of a number of decisions – decisions that continuously shape, reproduce, and revise the boundaries of the field. A reflexive perspective addresses the contingency behind these decisions as well as their consequences. Discussions in International Relations (IR) have demonstrated the value of reflexive perspectives, where a host of studies enact a reflexive view on the field’s methodologies, its normative biases, the role of theory, and the reflexive turn itself (Hamati-Ataya, 2012).
This special issue is intended as a space to explore the variety of forms that reflexivity can take, to instigate reflexive discussions about different components of GSP, and to put center stage all the reflexive practices that already pervade the field on a daily basis – in academia as well as the policy world. As scholars, we are taught to reflect on the choices involved in our methods, our theoretical perspectives and how our results come about; and both academics and practitioners within GSP often engage in these reflections, too. Dedicating an entire special issue to the theme of reflexivity is motivated by the central role these reflexive processes play for not only the transparency and quality of our findings but also for delineating GSP as a field. Our claim is that
With these prompts, this special issue serves as an invitation for the field to reflect on GSP’s conceptual and institutional boundaries. What our authors made of the invitation to contribute to this special issue demonstrates the variety of perspectives and forms that reflexivity can take, focusing on dominant ideas, specific groups of actors and their relationships, processes of knowing, and positionalities within the field. Some of them may be more controversial than others and some take rather unconventional forms. Readers might hence feel inspired to disagree with one or another. As guest editors, our aim was to facilitate such debates, conscious that the meaning, necessity, and content of reflexivity are far from uncontested. Precisely for this reason, this special issue can contribute to collective reflexivity, among the authors represented here and hopefully beyond. Finally, the issue also inquires into the different communication styles of GSP scholarship by asking in our concluding Forum: how to
Forms of writing are part and parcel of the field of GSP, contributing to the delineation of its boundaries. The Forum of this special issue thus inquires into the implications that different styles of writing have. (How) does the universalization of certain types of writing result in the exclusion of alternative forms of communicating knowledge? Whom might we reach or not reach depending on a particular style, and how is the practice of writing itself linked to GSP analyses and findings? If we accept the basic premise of the special issue, that knowledge is shaped by the perspectives of those that contribute to it (including social position, normative aims and relationship to the field – the sum of which we term ‘perspectivity’) and that it has performative effects, then, consequently, writing should also be considered political.
This introductory article proceeds as follows. We first present a short review of how scholars in the field of GSP have thus far reflected on its constitutive building blocks: ideas, language, and concepts. We then explain in greater depth why we consider the blurry boundaries between scholarship and practice as particularly relevant for reflection. We go on to suggest perspectivity and performativity as two angles from which to think about reflexivity, since they highlight the contingency of knowledge as well as its power effects. Finally, we present an outlook on the individual contributions of this special issue and discuss how they take up different components of the field of GSP to contribute to an overall collective practice of reflexivity.
Scholarship: the reflexive groundwork
As GSP researchers, we are embedded within orders and structures of accepted knowledge, which are continuously reproduced by their taken for granted utilization, while also being contested and subject to revision over time. There are certain core assumptions and guiding paradigms that accompany GSP research, which have left their mark on the collective identity of the field and which one buys into by contributing to it – wittingly or not.
First of all, this relates to the conceptual core of what is meant by ‘global’, which is crucial for the identity of the field of GSP even though its conceptualization varies and remains open for debate. While GSP shares the ambiguity of ‘the social’ (Davy et al., 2013) and of ‘policy’ (Clarke, 2023; Freeman, 2023) with (comparative) social policy scholarship, its understanding of ‘global’ has implications for how GSP differentiates its subject matter from other fields of social policy scholarship. Many GSP scholars use ‘global’ synonymously with the transnational level of actors, such as international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which are not usually investigated as crucial participants of the policy process in traditional social policy scholarship (Kaasch et al., 2019; Orenstein, 2005). Some scholars use ‘global’ in a geographical sense, promoting the inclusion of the Global South in analyses of social policy, rather than limiting perspectives toward the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) world (Leisering, 2019; Yeates, 2008: 10). Welfare in the Global South has often been marginalized in social policy scholarship due to the welfare state being seen not only as a product but also as a phenomenon found exclusively in the Global North. 1 Both meanings of the ‘global’ – transnational and concerning worldwide spread – are interconnected, as transnational actors are particularly active transmitters of social policies outside the OECD world (Martens et al., 2021; Schmitt, 2020). Even others understand ‘global as a distinct and emerging level of social reality’ or ‘global as universal’ (Tag, 2013: 25). Thus, discussions around this core term have not been sidestepped. However, as GSP studies come to be seen as an established sub-field of social policy scholarship, it is worth re-centering the ambiguity of the ‘global’ through a reflexive lens. As Miriam Tag (2013) alludes to, other fields of research within sociology and political science – such as world society and globalization theory (Meyer et al., 1997) or IR (Anderl and Witt, 2020) – have been very active in considering the diverse meanings of ‘global’ and its implications. These discussions could serve as an inspiration for further reflexive work within GSP.
Another key conceptual building block of GSP concerns ‘the social’. In comparative social policy scholarship, the emergence of certain aspects of social policy language, and its core concepts, have been scrutinized and reflected upon as historically contingent, identifying the ‘ideational baggage’ particular concepts may carry. Underlying this is the insight that ‘the emergence of new terms and concepts, such as “social insurance”, “welfare state” and “social security”, has played a key role in shaping both policy decisions and the political battles over them’ (Béland and Petersen, 2017: 21). For instance, Nowotny (1991) and O’Connor (2001) both demonstrate that how European societies have generally treated the poor has changed historically in accordance with changes in dominant social ideas. First, they were construed as a passive opportunity for showing one’s religiosity through charity, then seen as a nuisance to be excluded and disciplined in workhouses, and today are differentiated into those deserving of help and (social) assistance and those who are undeserving. This case shows that definitions by powerful actors, and an insertion into classifications and other administrative categories, ultimately shape perceptions and life chances. Statistics, for instance, may even come to define the identities of those who are counted. While this is not necessarily ‘oppressive’, when becoming positively reinterpreted as part of a group’s self-identity, it nonetheless shows the ordering power of authoritative and official knowledge (see, for example, Urla, 1993). This is particularly the case because social policy language has always been deeply tied to (state) institutions and professions, which further stabilizes its use (though not necessarily its meaning).
While considering transnational actors, GSP scholarship often implicitly assumes social policies were usually a state service by default, even if supported by IOs. Such an assumption might not only ontologically exclude social policy issues that are not part of the state, but also express an implicit promotion of the extension of state activity in this realm. Criticizing a state-centered institutional approach, Franz Von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet Von Benda-Beckmann (2000) thus explore the multiple possible means and practices of providing ‘social security’ in the Global South from an anthropological perspective. By putting aside the Northern idea of state welfare, the authors are able to observe and appreciate, but also evaluate and criticize, the variety of relationships that afford social security, which are characterized by reciprocity and the redistribution of resources. These include ‘social policies by other means’ – alternatives to state social policy that can be functionally equivalent (Seelkopf and Starke, 2019). On the one hand, while some informal types of social security might constitute such functional equivalents to public welfare, strengthening local and informal social security might also inadvertently stabilize problematic existing local power relationships or further disadvantage those already excluded. On the other hand, in some cases, formal social security might not provide much actual security at all, especially in contexts marked by relationships of dependence and/or weak and understaffed bureaucracies. Without idealizing informal social security relationships, Von Benda-Beckmann and Von Benda-Beckmann (2000) neither bemoan their destruction due to ‘modernization’ nor see them as a necessary but less effective step toward formal social security. Thus, their perspective promotes rethinking what follows from adopting our seemingly natural core concepts of social policy theory, and becoming attentive to actual realizations of social security irrespective of these being ‘formal’ or ‘informal’.
While, on the one hand, reproducing expectations that have largely been derived from European experiences of welfare states, some results of GSP studies might, on the other hand, also lend a justification for the further downsizing of state interventions, which is something that writers in the developmental state tradition might criticize. Such state retrenchment has been a trend since the neoliberal turn (Ortiz and Cummins, 2022). Depending on how states are portrayed in terms of their capacity, effectiveness or political ideology, GSP scholarship could contribute to legitimizing less state activity at the cost of weakening central bureaucracies and administrations. Emphasizing the importance of informal arrangements, for instance, is necessary from an analytical point of view (as these do matter in contexts of low state budgets) but should be done reflexively when it comes to implicit or even explicit normative suggestions. Even if unintended, highlighting the role of family networks or other ‘informal’ arrangements can give the impression that these are sometimes better suited for dealing with social problems, thereby potentially weakening demands for the state to provide social security as a social right. From the opposite direction, others might, however, find the notion of rights-based welfare states an imposition, or see the state as much more exclusionary than other structures.
At a more fundamental level, these inquiries into core GSP concepts are more than just theoretically relevant: by structuring relations between words and things, discourses shape the boundaries of what can be thought and done. In critical development studies, for instance, Aram Ziai (2013) and Arturo Escobar (1995) exemplify how words and language ultimately construct a hierarchical order between countries that serves to legitimize ‘development’ interventions by experts that are aimed at some form of ‘modernization’, based on ‘Eurocentric, depoliticizing and authoritarian implications’ (Ziai, 2013: 127). The discipline of economics, one could add, enjoys special authority and thus power to order the world, due to its perceived neutrality. Jana Bacevic (2019) argues that knowledge is the form through which neoliberalism governs, by defining what counts as valid and objective, whereby economics is deemed more ‘useful’ than other disciplines. But, according to her, even critical scholars who work within neoliberal structures are impacted by the same logics, which is ‘why it is perfectly possible for neoliberalism to thrive at the same time as its critique’ (Bacevic, 2019: 389). Applied to the case of GSP, these insights raise the question if, even if fundamentally critical of the global order and its colonial legacies, it is possible to engage in dialogue with mainstream discourse without reproducing the same world that one is critical of. In other words: is it possible to ‘step out’ of a reigning paradigm while still remaining relevant enough to shape the discourse?
Theories and knowledge are upheld by power asymmetries within research communities that can establish hierarchies and barriers to entry for those outside. GSP scholarship operates in contexts that are, for instance, shaped by the resource endowment of knowledge producers (ministries, think tanks, universities), political agendas (of governments, IOs, think tanks), and organizational collaborations (agreements between researchers) that make some forms of knowledge more visible and powerful than others. For the discipline of IR, Arlene B. Tickner (2013: 628) has pointed out that its ‘inner workings’ remain underexplored, including how ‘local’ experiences are translated into generalized theories, and with regard to the ‘core-periphery’ dynamic that continues to characterize the discipline. She investigates some of the mechanisms that uphold a division of labor in the social sciences whereby countries in the Global South serve as data repositories while theories are built in the Global North. These are related to citation and publishing patterns – dynamics which, according to Tickner (2013: 632–635), are epitomized most of all by the dominance of US academic institutions. The international division of labor is reinforced by a tendency of donors to fund primarily applied research in the global periphery, as it is mainly deemed in need of practical solutions and as less capable of abstract theorizing (Tickner, 2013: 637). While there is growing awareness of the need for and benefit of collaborating with researchers and research institutes in the countries of study, GSP exhibits the same unequal global structures that pervade academia in general, which means that it must continue to look for solutions to counteract the dominance of the Global North. And this academic structure, in turn, is linked to the above-named terminology and grammar of the field, as GSP research is predominantly based on concepts derived from the better-studied systems of the Global North (Midgley, 2013). Hence, while this hierarchy is without question an ethical problem, making the field more fully ‘global’ would also add analytical grip and conceptual nuance.
Practice: porous boundaries
As stated in the introduction, GSP is an academic field with close ties to the practices of social policy, that is,
At a basic level, scholars and practitioners draw on, and reproduce, a shared understanding and knowledge of global social processes and problems. Policy choices as well as analyses are based on an evolving and co-created body of knowledge, which lends analytical power to both practitioners and academics. As Bentley B. Allan (2017) argues, based on an analysis of the rise of climate change on political agendas, politicians and scientists co-construct problems, or ‘objects of governance’, rather than having a clear division of labor between using and creating knowledge. He shows that it was state agents who steered the development of scientific work about climate change, and uses this to posit that epistemic communities not only produce knowledge for the political field but that the production of this knowledge is interwoven with politics in the first place.
In the case of GSP, a similar intertwining can arguably be observed. IOs and bilateral development agencies are important shapers of scientific agendas by providing funding for the kinds of research that they deem relevant to inform their policies. While Allan (2017) argues that ‘[s]tate agencies are large, authoritative institutions with the resources to steer societal discourses and the development of scientific knowledge’ (pp. 140–141), a similar point can be made about IOs in the field of GSP. Their research often feeds not only directly into the political system of interest but also into a wider academic discourse. Especially in countries where academic institutions are severely underfunded, consultancies for individual researchers or teams of researchers, commissioned by IOs, offer opportunities for field research, meaning that a lot of what we know about social problems and policies in such countries has some connection to international governance agendas.
One important form of ongoing knowledge creation is monitoring and evaluation, which is not only done by the respective departments in social ministries but by international funders, who are interested to track and assess the ways in which their resources are utilized. Natalie Welfens and Saskia Bonjour (2023) state that these research activities, which might be sourced out to consultancy firms, are in themselves important for the construction of certain problem perceptions and the shared notion that, and how, those problems might be addressed; causal mechanisms are implied to exist between policies and outcomes. This serves to legitimate not only the respective policies but also the policy actors themselves.
In countries of the Global South, IOs play a particularly important role in shaping, or even ‘merchandising’ policies by connecting technical with financial aid (Adesina, 2020). Their legitimacy stems less from having been democratically elected by the host societies, and more from their technical expertise and capacity; they advise governments based on their own research findings and professional experience from other countries. To be able to ‘diffuse’ policies from one context to the next – a process in which IOs and their individual agents are key – these experiences need to be sufficiently abstracted to function as generalizable lessons. Hence, quantified knowledge is particularly influential as it reduces complexity, facilitates the production of policy scripts, and thus amplifies the capacity of scripts to travel to other sites (Bartl et al., 2019; Berten and Leisering, 2017).
Providing expertise and creating evidence on behalf of governments gives international agencies – and their subcontracted consultants – significant influence over how problems are defined and ultimately acted upon. In the global development apparatus, which has increasingly turned to social issues since the 1990s (Deacon et al., 1997), the World Bank has been shown to heavily influence common perceptions by funding projects and contributing to knowledge (being termed and self-identifying as a ‘knowledge bank’; Waeyenberge and Fine, 2011: 6). As Asunción Lera St Clair (2006) argues, the World Bank both produces and validates development knowledge – by not only creating data but also housing and supervising the journals through which development expertise is shaped. Critique is impeded by this development assemblage, in which the various nodes powerfully stabilize and strengthen each other. Numbers are hereby particularly influential due to their seemingly infallible nature, and lend credibility to the policies of that institution.
The large amounts of data collected and produced by IOs are often utilized by academics as well. Collecting their own ‘alternative numbers’ that could potentially counter these hegemonic depictions would require capacities that many individuals and smaller organizations do not possess. In many cases, information produced or mediated by the World Bank is thus taken as the epistemic foundation of research studies in GSP, too, even if simply out of pragmatic reasons, thus potentially reproducing the very biases and preconceptions inherent in the definitions and views underlying that (numerical) data. Besides the World Bank, the ILO acts as an important repository of knowledge and data, for example, through its database of labor statistics, which can be freely accessed. The concepts used to organize that data, in turn, are part of the common knowledge and shared vocabulary that connects the worlds of analysis and practice (Drubel, 2019) – concepts that may now appear self-evident, even if they have once been highly politicized and contested (Berten, 2019).
Concepts and knowledge produced in academic settings also enter the policy world. Miriam Tag (2013), for instance, has shown that IOs achieved the ‘institutionalization of early childhood as a global issue’ (p.36) by drawing on the positions and theories from epistemic communities. Such epistemic communities include ‘think tanks, international consultancy firms, research institutes, [as well as] governmental agencies’ (Yeates, 2018: 16), constituting the place where shared understandings evolve. Another example is the concept of ‘transformative social protection’ that was coined in an IDS Bulletin in 2007 to move beyond a narrow safety nets approach (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux, 2007), and which was later taken up and cited in the Zambian National Social Protection Policy of 2014. The policy highlights the four key dimensions of social protection conceptualized by the two authors of the IDS Bulletin and reads: This policy therefore pioneers a paradigm shift in Social Protection implementation in Zambia. The shift is based on the Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler transformative framework that champions a more comprehensive and integrated approach to Social Protection as a tool for sustainable poverty reduction (Government of the Republic of Zambia, 2014: 1).
These interconnections cannot be understood without placing them in the context of the larger turn toward evidence-based or evidence-informed policymaking that characterizes international development and social policy (Eyben, 2013; Head, 2015). This entails the importing of academic logics into the world of policy, where decisions are made on evidence that has to be based on sound methods and can gain legitimacy if generated by renowned researchers. These processes, by which policies are more and more based on technical recommendations instead of democratic contestation or ideological choices, have depoliticizing effects (Fischer, 2018), and are shifting power toward experts and researchers. At the same time, where the (potential) recipients of social programs are politically not well represented – due to a lack of voice, remoteness, or lack of influence – research findings fill some of this gap by establishing the needs and monitoring the experiences of individuals. Such data collection is often undertaken by researchers who are contracted by ministries and/or international institutions, who – through focus group discussions, surveys, or key informant interviews – then inform policymaking and policy reforms.
Researchers hired for policy-relevant analyses draw on their academic training and experience, and often work in both worlds simultaneously. Individual careers may move back and forth between academic institutions and international agencies, with authority and credibility being carried across this fluid boundary. One of the implications is the spill-over of power relations from one to the other; where, for example, established scholars from Northern universities become influential in the political sphere, too, due to their academic credentials and advantages. Globalized social policymaking thus becomes a site of asymmetrical power relations, not least because ‘transfer agents’ usually combine technical expertise with financial resources (Ouma, 2020: 128). The role of such individual floating ‘experts’ is an ambiguous one, as they often work in contexts with which they might not be overly familiar, thus potentially amplifying some bits of knowledge (the easily accessible ones, for instance) more than others.
Practitioners of course are not only those working for governments or IOs. In the field of GSP, work with communities and advocacy activities are also interwoven with research activities and draw on academic methods to inform policies. Driven, for instance, by the aim to work collaboratively with Indigenous communities, and co-produce rather than extract knowledge, activists may use their academic skills and connections to shape policy discourses. For instance, in a local food security initiative in rural South Africa, a group of individuals involved in the policymaking process have self-identified as ‘academic-practitioners’, who connect their identities as researchers with transformative political intentions (Arko-Achemfuor et al., 2019). To base political advocacy on scientific evidence has become a powerful practice, which NGOs and civil society groups draw on.
Overall, thus, the knowledge we hold about GSP is co-produced by academics and practitioners, and the worlds of research and policy are increasingly interwoven. Not only individuals may straddle them, but so do concepts, data, methods, and ideas. These blurry boundaries lend additional reason for the need to reflect on the field of GSP, its contingencies and effects; in other words, its perspectivity and performativity.
Perspectivity and performativity: components of reflexivity
We posit that the production of knowledge does not rest on an objective depiction of reality ‘out there’ but is always itself an intervention with potentially wide-ranging effects on the people and objects created and related to each other. As GSP scholars, we are involved in these epistemic practices. Established knowledge influences our perspectives, and our created insights that build on this foundation may reproduce biases and preconceptions. To study how GSP is known should thus always include reflexivity of our individual positions in the knowledge production system as well as our broader embeddedness in academia and practice. In this section, we develop an expanded understanding of reflexivity that goes beyond reflecting on ourselves as individual researchers – as much of the established literature on reflexivity assumes – to study rather from a reflexive point of view the GSP collective of which we are a part.
Commonly, reflexivity is thought of as turning the analytical gaze back onto oneself – in fact, the terms reflexivity and self-reflexivity are often used synonymously, with ‘reflexivity’ per se implying a focus on the ‘self’ (see, for example, Hamati-Ataya, 2012: 672). In the last couple of decades, anthropologists and qualitative researchers have, for instance, begun acknowledging that data and our knowledge of it are a product of our own biographies and interactions. This insight has changed the objective of research from delivering an accurate representation of the world (i.e. achieving objectivity) to becoming more reflexive and self-conscious of how research shapes what it observes (Finlay, 2003). This includes the questions how our conceptual apparatuses, our positionality as researchers, and our theoretical and ethical positions interact with our research object to affect not only our results but ultimately the ‘object’ itself (see also Soedirgo and Glas, 2020). From a feminist perspective, Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True (2008: 694) derive from this objective a four-fold differentiation of reflexivity as it relates to concrete research encounters: one’s epistemology (what counts as knowledge and what does not); the boundaries that structure one’s perception (for instance, with regards to informants’ identities, or between researcher and researched); one’s human relations (because identities and positions depend on each other); and one’s situatedness in a globalized research setting. Jessica Soedirgo and Aarie Glas (2020), furthermore, point out that humility, that is, accepting that one could be wrong, an interrogation of how others would read our positionalities, and how this shapes the research process, are core components of an ‘actively reflexive’ approach in political science. In sum, with regard to methods, methodology and data production or collection, most scholars would likely agree on the need for a certain level of reflexivity, even though the question of how to utilize reflexivity in practice has still not been conclusively settled (Finlay, 2003: 5).
While a researcher’s biography, personal characteristics and individual predispositions doubtlessly matter, individuals operate in and through structures, which likewise impact on their ability to reflect, and which have their own effects on research processes and findings. For a research agenda that takes reflexivity seriously, this collective dimension needs to be better illuminated to go beyond individual ‘navel-gazing’ (as important as that is, see above), and in the case of GSP would have to straddle the academic and policy worlds. In the GSP community, in our particular social positions, influenced by specific historical and disciplinary perspectives, we are always ourselves embedded in the reproduction of the boundaries of our field, and these have potential ramifications for making certain aspects visible and leaving others aside, may contain potential biases, and – overall – have implications for scholarship and practice alike.
For shedding more light on the component parts and the potentials of a more encompassing reflexivity that relates to a community of scholars, one can draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieu’s (2004 [2001]) research agenda was not only constantly infused with a (self-)critical perspective on the academy, but he also devoted an entire book to the ‘Science of Science and Reflexivity’. In it, he defines reflexivity as ‘the image sent back to a knowing subject by other knowing subjects’ (Bourdieu, 2004 [2001]: 4) and problematizes the purely ‘narcissistic’ reflexivity, which, in his view, has no practical effect (Bourdieu, 2004 [2001]: 89). Although he also undertakes a study of himself, he does so for developing a notion of a generalized ‘reformist reflexivity’ that includes social scientists at large. He writes: ‘[. . .] by taking science as the object of my analysis I am deliberately aiming to expose myself, and all those who write about the social world’ (Bourdieu, 2004 [2001]: 4). He goes on to argue that technical scientific competence and reflexive self-analysis cannot all be done by one person alone and that an interest needs to be developed to work together (Bourdieu, 2004 [2001]: 5–6). Bourdieu’s intervention thereby introduces a bridge: even self-reflexivity does not have to be limited to our own positionality but can offer a window into reflecting about an entire community of which we are a part. Ultimately, reflexivity must be done by all agents in a given field, argues Bourdieu (2004 [2001]), that is, the imperative for reflexivity has to be generalized and the instruments for doing so need to be spread, thereby instituting reflexivity as the ‘law of the field’ (p. 91).
Bourdieu emphasized the importance of a person’s structural embeddedness and applied his concept of habitus to capture how both, individual and social predispositions, play out through an individual researcher (Leander, 2002: 602). Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (2011) argues, drawing on Bourdieu, that ‘what needs to be objectified, therefore, are the social conditions that have formed the theorist and, in particular, how their relative position in the professional universe shapes their interests and investments’ (p. 816). Regarding scholarly communities as one such type of collective, these conditions can point in two directions: the incentives of the field (career-related, for instance) that might rule over ‘scientific’ motivations; and the position of the academy in relation to other social and political structures, including processes of dialogue whereby some knowledge becomes established and some marginalized (Eagleton-Pierce, 2011). The academy, in this view, usually reproduces wider societal structures and inequalities that are found beyond it (Leander, 2002). To illustrate this collective dimension of reflexivity further, we suggest reflecting on the constituent dimensions of knowledge production in terms of
The first, perspectivity, is a neologism that alludes to the fact that the insights we produce are influenced by our social position, normative aims and relationships to the field we study. Reflexivity, here, means to be aware of their impact on the kinds of knowledge that are accessible to us and the ways in which our experiences and motivations influence our interpretations. The second, performativity, is about the effects of our observations, our interpretations and our theories on reality. We argue that a reflexive perspective on the performativity inherent in GSP scholarship could make us more aware of the way knowledge of GSP issues affects both academia and policymaking. The ways in which we conduct research, our conceptual starting points and our methodological decisions have implications for the results generated; methods, for instance, are never just innocent tools but have ordering effects (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014). A reflexive perspective thus goes beyond a discussion of how to capture reality more accurately and arrive at more valid results. Instead, it needs to do justice to the performative nature of our research as ‘devices and acts’ that can reproduce or disrupt the world (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014). In sum, we, therefore, suggest the dyad of perspectivity and performativity to capture the many aspects of reflexivity that matter for GSP, which could be used as a starting point for others, who ask such meta questions about their research and its effects.
Situating the contributions
The individual contributions in this special issue demonstrate a variety of reflexive positions that can be adopted in the field of GSP, to collectively contribute to a critical assessment of its functioning, power structures, perspectives, and effects from within. They not only zoom in on different aspects of the field but also do so in very different forms, thereby furthering our imagination of how reflexivity might be practiced.
In a dialogical and encompassing reflection of the historical emergence and normative motivations of GSP, but also its blind spots and biases, Noémi Lendvai-Bainton and Paul Stubbs (2023) reflect on their own positionalities, discomforts and contributions in, and to, the field. Drawing on many years of personal experience since the early days of GSP, Lendvai-Bainton and Stubbs pose fundamental questions about its knowledge effects within academia and beyond. One of their arguments relates to the western bias of theories and visions that were diffused to Eastern Europe, with the manifold hierarchies that this entailed. They moreover identify imperial history and racism as largely overlooked by mainstream GSP, among other reasons due to its failure to see social policy in connection to debates about a just global order outside the field itself, such as initiatives for a New International Economic Order. With their critique, both authors not only reflect on the perspectivities that are reproduced by a western- and Eurocentric GSP but at the same time offer constructive ways forward by making visible a larger diversity of voices. By radically questioning the building blocks of the field of GSP, the authors show how scholarship, its concepts, theories and methods, shape the world that can be imagined, which both opens up and restrains possibilities for further research.
While Lendvai-Bainton and Stubbs offer reflections on the taken-for-granted notion of the ‘global’ in GSP, Richard Freeman (2023) takes apart the meaning of ‘policy’. He does this through adopting the perspective of a mentor who is in conversation with a young transnational policy entrepreneur. Almost like in a therapeutic engagement, the mentor tries to help the practitioner to make sense of what they do; at their micro-level encounters, ‘policy’ seems to consist of meetings, talking, and writing, but how do they all fit together? Through this example of an imaginary person working for an international mental health NGO, Freeman poses questions about the building blocks of GSP from the bottom up, aiming to trigger reflexivity in the reader, not least through the use of an unconventional style of writing. As the young practitioner is ‘learning by doing’, some taken-for-granted assumptions break down into their constituent pieces of daily banalities. They are subsequently put back together by the author in a reflexive interpretation of the imagined mentoring. Freeman’s article exemplifies that reflexivity is not something purely academic but accompanies all human activity.
With another focus on the individual human agents engaged in transnational policy work, Stephen Devereux (2023) centers his piece on a group of actors who are constitutive for GSP but are hardly ever studied in depth: development consultants. Within the context of social protection in Africa, Devereux’s article is rooted in interviews with 26 such agents to draw out their own reflections about their role as policy entrepreneurs. Often moving in both worlds, academia and practice, many of these individuals are aware of their own perspectivities as well as the performative power and non-neutral character of the knowledge they help to generate and spread. In the context of the diffusion of social protection policies across Africa since the 2000s, agents have assumed a multitude of strategies to influence governments in their choice of program designs and policy ‘solutions’, as Devereux distills from his interviews. It thereby becomes clear that while usually couched in technical terminology about ‘evidence’ and ‘impact’, the work of these agents was highly political, as holding advocacy events, creating new social protection groups, and using persuasive skills were all ways in which agents helped IOs to spread their own preferred versions of social protection on the continent.
As Devereux’s article demonstrates that all those experts doing the actual advising, negotiating, and evaluating are aware of the impact and political character of their endeavors, Justyna Bandola-Gill et al. (2023) point out that experts are engaged in reflexive practices in their daily working routines as well. The authors show how, in contrast to what might sometimes be implied by (critical) scholarship, those who practice GSP in IOs on a daily basis are not merely ‘reproducers’ of unquestioned knowledge and numbers. Instead, practitioners use different forms of reflexivity as practices to ‘qualify’ quantified data. Based on interviews with IO staff who navigate the quantified infrastructure of the sustainable development goals, the authors identify three forms of reflexivity that these experts utilize in their respective contexts to marry technical considerations with normative priorities. It is revealed that these practitioners are very aware of the limits of numbers but work with them nonetheless to pursue their own goals of social change and those of their organizations. Thereby, ‘qualification’ becomes a necessary practice without which quantified knowledge would not be able to exert its performative effects; reflexivity hereby becomes a tool, a daily practice in the experts’ work.
Just as Freeman, Devereux, and Bandola-Gill, Grek and Tichenor enter into dialogues across the (blurry) academia-practitioner boundary, so does the article by Bettina Mahlert (2023) touch on boundary work – in this case through zooming in on one core academic practice: writing, discussing and revising an article. Through tracing the history of her own journal article about ‘basic needs’, Mahlert unpacks some of the (sub-)disciplinary differences within GSP, and how these are related to their own respective readings of this well-known, yet controversial, concept. Describing her personal experience of presenting and discussing her article, her contribution in this special issue gives substance to the notion of collective reflexivity; as her article moved from one audience to the next, Mahlert benefited from nuanced and at times controversial reflections, which she fed back into her own understanding of that key concept. Different perspectives hereby resulted not only from different scholarly traditions but from geographic locations and self-understandings of the role of academics. Through this case study, she thus manages to shed some light on how conceptual groundwork is undertaken within a field as heterogeneous as GSP (and how it never ends).
Besides the five papers, this special issue contains a Forum with five shorter pieces by invited contributors. The Forum shifts attention to a specific component of knowing and practicing GSP: writing. As indicated above, some of the papers in this special issue defy a number of the standard expectations toward academic writing. To trigger a reflexive reaction in the reader, these articles deliberately adopt rather unusual formats compared with standard journal articles. As is well-known, to be considered credible, academic work has to conform not only to certain methodical approaches and procedures but also to accepted styles of writing. In journal articles, working papers, academic books, and book chapters, a fixed set of components are expected, despite some disciplinary variation. The shared assumption is that academic writing differs substantially from other forms of writing, such as poems, stories, journal entries, and various other genres. What these expectations mean for the field of GSP and its effects on the world is thus the focus of five Forum pieces by Daniel Béland; John Clarke; Rosina Foli; Katja Hujo; as well as Heidi Matthews, Luann Good Gingrich, and Joel Ong.
Conclusion
This special issue aims to show how a reflexivity perspective can shed light on the contingent character of the various building blocks of the field of GSP. The notion of perspectivities is helpful to highlight who has been able to shape our understanding of the field, which might leave alternative ways of worldmaking out, as Lendvai-Bainton and Stubbs argue. It also can be applied to micro-level studies of those who do GSP research, as highlighted by Mahlert, and of those concerned in policymaking, as depicted by Freeman. In the former case, perspectivity comes up as the reflexive perspective of the steps in which an article comes into being, managing to pry open the disciplinary differences that structure GSP as a field; in the latter case, perspectivity denotes the bottom-up view onto something that is commonly dealt with at a much more abstract level: policy. As for performativity, Devereux’s analysis of the many voices of social protection consultants makes clear that research, advocacy and policy ‘entrepreneurialism’ have real effects, and that those depend to a great extent on the skills, credibility, and positionalities of the agents involved. Bandola-Gill, Grek and Tichenor, finally, show how even seemingly technical practices such as quantifying become powerful (and thus political) by being performed from a qualifying and, indeed, reflexive angle. Both of these latter contributions make clear that reflexivity is not something that takes place only in academic meta-level discussions but pervades the practical field of GSP, too. In the Forum, finally, writing itself is unpacked to make visible some of the power effects of accepted norms and processes in the field. Uncovering the reflexive habits, which are already out there, as well as inviting new questions for collective reflexivity can hence further inspire mapping out, to borrow from Bourdieu (2004 [2001]), how reflexivity could be generalized to become the ‘law of the field’ (p. 91).
To sum up, this special issue is built on the acknowledgment of the manifold reflexive practices that are already present in the field of GSP, among both academics and practitioners. It takes this as a starting point to ask further questions about the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of reflexivity to continue a collective discussion about the contingencies, effects, potentials but also biases and exclusions of the field. The five papers assembled here, and the five contributions to the Forum, demonstrate that reflexivity can take a variety of forms and styles, each of which will trigger different responses in different readers. We believe that daring to pursue unconventional approaches and critical interrogations is fruitful for the further development of GSP, to advance its conceptual nuance, deepen the empirical understanding of social policy worldwide, and, not least, to further increase the diversity of visible experiences and perspectives in the field.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this introduction were presented at a number of virtual events between 2020 and 2022, among them a workshop as part of the
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author(s) received financial support from the State and University Library Bremen for the open access publication of this article.
