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On 3rd May 2019, my doctoral thesis was passed without corrections by examiners Dave Marsh and Tim Heppell. I would like to thank Stuart McAnulla and Richard Hayton for their three and half years of dedicated supervision. The full manuscript is now available online through the following link:
Jack Newman thesis – Ontological Social Policy Analysis
What is ontological social policy analysis?
There are some big philosophical questions out there, and most of us have given some thought to them at one point or another. Do I have free will? Why is society the way it is? Am I in the Matrix? We might think and even talk about such questions at times, but for the most part, we ignore them in our everyday lives. However, these questions never go away – our answers to them are our assumptions. Assumptions are the ideas we hold but only occasionally think about. We unavoidably operate on the basis of assumptions; if we did not, we would be trapped in permanent doubt and probably wouldn’t get much beyond ‘does anything really exist?’
The assumptions we make about existence and what it means to be a human being are “ontological assumptions”; they are ontological assumptions because ontology is the philosophy of existence and being. You may think that science has done away with all this speculation, but all scientific research relies on its own set of ontological assumptions. This is not a critique of the scientific project, it is merely the acknowledgment that before we can get to anything we might call “fact”, “truth”, or “knowledge”, we first have to make certain assumptions. This is widely recognised in academia, and most researchers now accept that ontology is an essential aspect of their research.
In my thesis, Ontological Social Policy Analysis, I take this argument forward by one crucial step. I argue that academic researchers should not only be reflecting on their own ontological assumptions, they should also be reflecting on the ontological assumptions of politicians and policy-makers. More importantly, we need to ask: ‘what ontological assumptions underpin political discourse (everything politicians say, write, and produce) and public policy (all of the rules and programs they set in motion)?’ In other words, an important way of scrutinising public policy is to ask what assumptions it implicitly makes about the nature of human beings, society, and existence as a whole. My thesis develops a framework for the analysis of those assumptions, focusing on social policy in particular. Hence the title Ontological Social Policy Analysis.
I will conclude this first blog post with an illustrative example. When the Conservative Party were developing the ideas that eventually became universal credit, they made a number of contradictory ontological assumptions. On the one hand, they argued that changing the work-incentives of the benefits system would lead to mass behavioural change. This relies on the assumption that individual actions are determined by the economic context. On the other hand, they argued that the unemployed had chosen a lifestyle of worklessness. This relies on the assumption that every individual is the product of their own free will. My thesis identifies these and many other assumptions through the application of the ontological social policy analysis framework.
Further Reading
Newman, J. (2019) Ontological Social Policy Analysis: An investigation into the ontological assumptions underpinning the social security reforms of the UK Coalition Government 2010-2015. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.
> Especially pages 9-17 and pages 253-256
Marsh, D., Ercan, S., and Furlong, P. (2018) Ontology and Epistemology in Political Science. In: Lowndes, V., Marsh, D., and Stoker, G. (eds.) Theory and Methods in Political Science. 4th Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whitworth, A. (2016) Neoliberal paternalism and paradoxical subjects: Confusion and contradiction in UK activation policy. Critical Social Policy. 36(3), 412–431.
See also, Rachel Dobson’s Policy Ontologies project (this is not connected to my own work, though I think Dobson’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in these ideas)
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Dr Jack Newman - Research Blog 