Dvora Yanow is a policy and organizational ethnographer and interpretive methodologist whose research and teaching are shaped by an overall interest in the communication of meaning in organizational and policy settings. Currently visiting professor in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Political Science Department, University of Amsterdam, she held the 2005-2010 term Strategic Chair in Meaning and Method in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam). Her present research investigates state-created categories for race-ethnic identity, immigrant integration policies and citizen-making practices, policy frames and framing, and research regulation policies and practices, on the policy side ; organizational and science/technology museums, on the methodological side; and spatial and practice studies, on the organizational side. Her recent books include Constructing « Race » and « ethnicity » in America : Category-making in Public Policy and Administration (Armonk, N.Y., M.E. Sharpe, 2003 ; winner of the 2004 Aspa and 2007 Herbert A. Simon-Apsa book awards) and the co-edited Interpretation and Method : Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (Armonk, N.Y., M.E. Sharpe, 2006) and Organizational Spaces : Rematerializing the Workaday World (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2010).
Attention to metaphors and their analysis have in recent years increasingly come out of the realm of poetry into the realm of social and other sciences. This book review, along with the book itself, could well be read in this context. There are two distinct approaches to such an analysis. One concerns the use of [...]
‘The whole business of peer-reviewed journals has no effect on the external world and is just a Rube Goldberg machine designed to get people tenure.’ James C. Scott (2007: 385) ‘Accountability has turned to . . . bean-counting.’ Chester E. Finn, Jr., former Us Assistant Secretary of Education, on current schools policy (quoted in Dillon [...]
