Life and organisational categories do not mix.
With policy making as with public services,
you can either start with the boundaries and categories of the bureaucracy, or
you can start with the lives of members of the public. There is no neat mapping
of one onto the other.
In Wales, policy increasingly calls for
starting with the lives of members of the public; any method of organisation of
services continually frustrates this call. The significance of the call is that
any policy making or public service that begins within an administrative
category (eg ‘health’ or ‘social care’) is going to interpret people’s lived
experience in the light of that category’s values and ways of operating. Reorganisation
can never result in complete and seamless joining up of the different
categories.
I do not know the solution for Wales as a
whole, although having a single key worker or service coordinator as a buffer between
your life and public services seems a helpful start.
In research, academic disciplines are the equivalent
of organisational categories of public services and public policy-making.
If one starts with the lived experience of
members of the public, there are challenges in mapping the research to an
academic discipline. This is problematic if part of being an academic is to
know one’s field. The researcher who begins with lived experience is forced to achieve
at least entry level understanding of multiple academic fields (and be viewed
as only having entry level status within that field), or gain greater depth of
knowledge and understanding of fragments drawn from multiple academic fields.
The alternative, as with public services, would be to challenge the premise
that social life should be understood through the trammelled vision of professional,
organisational or bureaucratic categories.
As a
not-yet-academic, my personal challenge is this: How do I write a thesis that begins
with lived experience? How do I construct
and mark the boundaries of what I want to claim as my academic field? What is
adequate academic knowledge for the field I am constructing?
As a member of the
public, my personal challenge is this: How do I support public services and
policy making to find a way to implement their desire to make services and
policies revolve around my life, rather than make my life fit into their pre-existing
categories?
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