ABSTRACT
Much of the literature associated with cultural studies can be interpreted as policy analysis. This is because, historically, cultural studies has been centrally concerned with the exploration and criticism of various strategies and programmes of action and obligation, organized both discursively and institutionally. The forms of power as exercised by state and private institutions, the forms of conduct they proscribe and the accommodations and resistances they meet are part and parcel of cultural studies’ very orientation. That orientation almost constitutes a policy in itself. In this context policy tends to be understood in terms of its consequences and outcomes, and in terms of the actions of those affected by it, as they exert some measure of influence upon the process. Cultural studies has adopted a determinedly ‘bottom-up’ policy towards all this, so as to foreground negotiations to the institutions and structures which formulate and design everything from texts to the built environment to administrative programmes. Policy programmes per se were not of so much concern as were their negotiation by their intended subjects; whether the ‘wild’ viewers in media analysis (see Ang, 1991), the recalcitrant students destined for careers as labourers in the pedagogic analysis of Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977), or particular subcultural, ethnic and gender identities formed in response to social planning, media logics, or prescriptive forms of moral and social conduct (Gillespie, 1989; Hebdige, 1979; Dyer and Baehr, 1987).
