Assembling and Dissembling: Policy as Productive Play

Source: Educational Researcher, 41 (5), June 2012, p. 157-162.

The authors examine educational policy by focusing on the ways in which actors “play” or selectively follow, negotiate, and appropriate cultural instructions and rules.

The authors outline a framework that situates assemblage, a notion utilized in actor-network theory, within the critical cultural study of policy.
Treating policy assemblage as a dynamic cultural form, they argue, provides a way of revealing the complexities of sociomaterial connections inherent to policy implementation.

The authors pay particular attention to what happens when disparate actors join together to perform policy-directed tasks.
It is within these heterogeneous and hybrid linkages that policy negotiations and controversies can become productive play.

The authors briefly discuss the dynamic composition of productive policy play.