ABSTRACT
Contemporary policy narratives have their legacies in the pioneering work of Walter Lippmann in the early twentieth century, who with Edward Bernays developed the modern public relations industry. Most fundamentally, the crisis is a crisis of what counts as narrative and biographical ’truth’–just witness the contemporary issues of ‘false news’, ‘post truth’ ’truthiness’ and ‘lies’ in the D. J. Trump and Brexit campaigns, the Trump-Russia investigations and Brexit negotiations. A government policy can only be delivered through the prism, as it were, of people’s lived narratives where the sunlight–or indeed, Enlightenment Reason–is distorted or diverted in a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Policy narratives can harmonise or resonate with teachers’ own work-life narratives or be contested or resisted. Ivor Goodson’s strategy then, in the case of professionals such as teachers, is to explore policy narratives in their relation with work-life narratives across a range of contexts.
