ABSTRACT
This chapter argues in support of policy research, which acknowledges the complexity and contestability of policy creation and application, or, as some would call it, implementation. Stephen Ball says policy in two ways: policy as text and policy as discourse. The notion of policy as discourse draws upon the work of Michel Foucault in recognising how collections of related policies exercise their own power through their production of truth and knowledge. Bowe and Ball introduced the contexts of policy making, which they argue make up a policy cycle. A policy and its makers create regimes of truth within which a policy operates. These regimes lead to a need to understand the wider policy context and systems and how these are informed by and confined by regimes of truth. Policy is given to educational practitioners who implement it. The implications for policy research of the policy cycle are an awakening to the complexity of policy formation and practice.
