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Subjectivist Approaches to the Study of Social Policy Making

ABSTRACT The relationship between different approaches to the study of social policy making is often ambiguous. An attempt to relate subjectivist approaches to others in order to establish their applicability and relevance to policy making requires the prior clarification of these relationships in the form of a typology. This is used to illustrate ‘category mistakes’ that occur in the literature on policy making as well as to make more explicit the differences and similarities between alternative approaches. The nature of subjectivist approaches is further explored and the limitations of such approaches illustrated in respect of a particular study of policy making. The difficulty of establishing connections between subjectivist accounts of policy making in terms of actors' constructions and meanings, and the tangible outputs of the policy process, is shown as an important problem from this study. The article then turns to the usefulness of subjectivist approaches, especially in testing assertions made about the nature of the policy process by alternative approaches, and concludes with some remarks about the epistemological status of subjectivist accounts.