Temporality and Policy, Theory and Practice: Understanding ‘Complex Needs’ as a Travelling Concept

This conference paper draws on the authors’ case-study example of responses to homeless adults with complex needs in the global Western North, which uses critical and cultural approaches to policy-making to demonstrate processes of neoliberalisation in contemporary social welfare provision. The example demonstrates that contemporary responses to complex needs creates and delimits new spaces, new dynamics, new relationships and new and desired behaviors at individual and institutional levels, within and beyond the central- and local-state. These elements are constitutive of new sets of norms, rules, practices and potentially new organizational forms. Such forms refer not just to material-entrepreneurial developments but also to evolved conceptions of what it means to be a welfare practitioner, work in contemporary institutional settings and provide ‘helping’ interventions under neoliberal governance. These dynamics are conceptualised as ‘new markets of vulnerability’. To theorise new markets of vulnerability, ‘complex needs’ is defined as a travelling concept that moves across different geographic locations and fields of knowledge/expertise within and beyond homelessness policy. This argument draws on the sociology of translation (Clarke et. al. 2015; Singleton and Law, 2013), Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005), Boundary Object Theory (Leigh-Starr, 2007) and psychosocial, cultural, critical feminist and race approaches to governance (Hunter, 2015) to demonstrate the empirical and theoretical significance of human actors, institutions and relations, and their investments and commitments. These diverse intellectual approaches understand policy as a heterogeneous assemblage of subjects and objects, structured through historic, contemporary and future relations. Clarke et al. (2015) gesture to this when they describe policy as “objects, narratives, practices, families, gods, places, ancestors, ghosts, technologies, ambitions, temporalities and institutions” (p. 160). This expansive reading is provocative and deliberate, capturing how policy is constantly undergoing dynamic processes of formation and assembly, and finding intellectual power in refusals to build temporal or spatial boundaries around space, place, scale, human agency and identity (Stubbs, 2005, p. 81). These approaches have become persuasive to policy scholars across critical policy studies and critical social policy. Yet what these rather abstracted theories look like ‘in practice’, and in writing projects specifically, remains a central challenge for policy scholars. The paper identifies what these barriers are as well as future lines of inquiry. It acknowledges a fundamental empirical quality to policy translation, insofar as the task at hand is to track and trace processes of formation and assembly; to understand how policy moves and the ways that it is reworked and reformed through this movement. But it establishes that disaggregating policy qualitatively and often anthropologically is not a benign exercise. It argues that understanding how “flows flow, how they are interrupted and how they come (differentially) to rest at particular places and times” (Clarke et al. 2015, p. 25) foregrounds power spatially and temporally in two interrelated ways; working firmly against a totalizing, ‘top-down’ and cynical view of power, and establishing how institutions are enacted via everyday material, affective, relational, discursive, symbolic and cultural practices. References Clarke, J., Bainton, D., Lendvai, N. and Stubbs, P. (2015), Making Policy Move: Politics of Translation and Assemblage (Policy Press, Bristol). Hunter, S. (2015), Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance? (Routledge: London). Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social, An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Leigh-Starr, S. (2007) Living Grounded Theory: Cognitive and Emotional Forms of Pragmatism, in Bowker, G., Timmermans, S., Clarke, A., and Balka, E. (2015) Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star, London: MIT Press, pp. 121-142 Singleton, V. and Law, J. (2013) ‘Devices as Rituals’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(3), pp. 259–277.