The policy process is initiated, researched, refined, driven and implemented by individuals. While the policy cycle outlined in Chapter 4 provides an overview of the process of new policy formulation, this view of the policy process under emphasises the role that individuals play, either on behalf of themselves or on behalf of an organisation, and it therefore overlooks the importance of both the motives and constraints of those individuals. Policy is in fact made through a set of complex interactions between state and non-state actors. Institutions and processes also play an important role in creating the sorts of policy sub-systems (Howlett & Ramesh 2003: 53) within which individuals have the potential to drive, delay, prevent or modify the passage of a policy from idea to implementation.

This chapter begins by outlining the key actors in the policy process and the web of relationships between them, which are understood variably as policy communities and policy networks. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the wide range of policy instruments available to policy makers, discussing the fact that different policy actors may have different degrees of access to different policy instruments. This suggests that at times the choice of instrument is a function of the sort of policy that actors, or a coalition of actors, is seeking to change.

What should ministers do? Should ministers focus on fixing urgent problems or invest in solving future ones? Should they listen to the experts or should they listen to the voters? Should they deliver a budget surplus or invest in infrastructure? The answers to all of these questions will depend on the advice ministers receive and the way they weight different forms of evidence. How effectively this advice can be put into practice will depend, at least in part, on what consideration has been given to implementation issues during the formulation of the policy. And what improvements are made to future iterations of the policy will depend on the quality of evaluation of the policy. This chapter is concerned with the different aspects of policy work, with a particular focus on the forms of advice that a minister may receive and the ways in which conflicting types of advice might be resolved.

The role of those who give advice to ministers, be it an adviser, a concerned interest group or a constituent writing to a member of parliament, is complex and multifaceted. But one aspect of the relationship between policy advice and policy making is relatively straightforward: only members of parliament can vote on legislation. In relation to the authoritative choice model of policy making that was outlined in Chapter 1, the distinction is clear – advisers advise and members of parliament decide. That said, there are few, if any, members of parliament who would not seek a wide range of expert advice before making a complex policy decision.

Public policy is not made in a void. It is both created and constrained by the political context in which it is developed. To understand how policy is made and where different types of policy work happen requires a developed understanding of the context provided by political institutions. This context is itself a dynamic field, as political institutions and political processes change over time in response to changes in social and cultural values, and changes of government.

This chapter outlines the foundational features of the Australian political system, focusing on the capacity for executive dominance and the role played by the parliament in constraining that capacity. It then considers recent debates about ‘reinventing government’, which concern the size of government and the proper focus of government activity, and the implications of this reinvention for the place of citizens in the policy process. It concludes with a brief discussion of the historical context that underpins Australian political institutions, and the values associated with this history that remain a component of the contemporary policy context.

Thus far in this book we have considered definitions of policy, the political context in which policy is made, and the ideological and economic forces that influence and constrain policy work. In this chapter we build on the discussion in the introduction that considered policy as authoritative or authorised choice and policy as structured interaction to look at some theoretical approaches to understanding how policy is made. The most influential of these approaches is what is known as the policy process model. In the first half of this chapter we provide an outline of this model and address its uses and shortcomings for those engaging in policy work. In the second half of the chapter we outline some of the key theoretical tools that are needed in order to develop a richer understanding of the policy process.

Both the theory and the practice of policy work are central to the broad field of ‘policy studies’. The various sub-fields of policy studies have together produced a vast ocean of theoretical and empirical literature. It is only possible for us to dip our toe into that ocean here, but in doing so we will provide an overview of the key theoretical concerns that have preoccupied the field.

In Chapter 2, we set our task as understanding how a single individual's verbal move could get picked up by others and eventually make it into public discourse: how we connect what happens at the Jones's breakfast table on Saturday to the gender order. The first step of this voyage is in the actual structure of verbal activity – how what happens at the Jones's breakfast table is structured so that things actually get said and heard. Verbal activity, from presidential addresses to shouted epithets, is a vast and highly structured system of human engagement. Conventions for carrying on verbal activity differ from culture to culture, and learning how to engage in this activity is a central part of growing up. Whether we are part of a culture that considers children to be human only once they begin to engage appropriately in the give-and-take of interaction, or part of a culture in which adults hold babies up and wave their hands for them – “say bye-bye” – growing up involves learning a great deal about when and where and how to talk. Thus an investigation of the gendering of talk begins with careful attention to the many ways in which talk is constrained.

Human discourse is an ongoing project of meaning-making, and the extent to which an individual or a group or category of individuals actually contributes to meaning depends on their ability to get their contributions heard and attended to. This means being in the situations and conversations in which different kinds of verbal activity take place, being able to get one's ideas into those conversations, and having those ideas heard and taken up by others. And within those conversations, what kind of room is there for people to develop styles or strategies, and for these styles and strategies to contribute to social differentiation? From debate to gossip, from flirting to heart-to-hearts to sermons, gender unfolds in what activities we engage in, and how we actually perform and view those activities.

We map our world by categorizing its contents and its happenings – putting together diverse particulars into a single category – and relating the categories they create. One of the basic things language does is allow us to label categories, making it easier for them to figure in our shared social life, to help guide us as we make our way in the world. Gender categories like those labeled by man and woman, girl and boy play a prominent role in the social practices that sustain a gender order in which male/female is seen as a sharp dichotomy separating two fundamentally different kinds of human beings and in which gender categorization is viewed as always relevant.

Gender categories do not simply posit difference: they support hierarchy and inequality. We have practices, both linguistic and non-linguistic, that tend to conflate the gender-specific category labeled man with the generic category of human being, for which English also sometimes uses the same label, as in book titles like Man and his place in nature. We also have labeling and other categorizing practices that tend to derogate women as women and to either overlook or disparage gender and sexual minorities. And both men and women are mapped onto a variety of other socially important categories, many of which interact significantly with gender. Gender also interacts with just which parts of the terrain get mapped, which categories get noticed, elaborated, and labeled. This chapter explores some of the complex ways in which categorizing and labeling – along with controversy over categories and their labels – enter into gender practice.

The development of the study of language and gender

The beginning

In 1973, Robin Lakoff published an article entitled “Language and woman's place,” which created a huge fuss. Two years later, she published a book with the same title, which included the original article and another piece entitled “Talking like a lady.” There were those who found the entire topic trivial – yet another ridiculous manifestation of feminist paranoia. And there were those – mostly women – who jumped in to engage with the arguments and issues that Lakoff had put forth. Thus was launched the study of language and gender in the US.

It is important to see Lakoff's article in its historical context, as it was part of the second wave feminist movement. 1972 was the year that Title IX was passed, guaranteeing women equal access to educational benefits. Even by 1970, 39 percent of graduate students were women yet only 18 percent of faculty at research universities were women. As female graduate students became increasingly engaged with feminism, they became impatient with aspects of scholarship that seemed to suffer from a narrow white male perspective. What did it mean that social theory had been written primarily by people who had lived their lives in one restricted and privileged corner of society? The sheer fact that there had been no serious study of gender before women began to do it is evidence enough that a homogeneous research population can have serious intellectual consequences. Since the serious study of gender itself was only just beginning at the same time as the study of language and gender, the field has undergone rapid changes and many of the theoretical struggles in gender theory have been played out on the language front. In what follows, we provide an overview of the major developments from the publication of Language and Woman's Place to the present, locating them in the broader context of gender theory and social theory more generally.

A lot has happened in the study of language and gender in the decade since we published our first edition – there have been big changes both in the gender and sexual order, and in the study of language and society. We tried in the first edition to do justice to all kinds of diversity as well as diversity's companion, change. With this edition, we have gone further beyond English-speaking white middle-class people and gender-conforming heterosexuals, and beyond those who happened to populate studies of earlier decades, most of whom are now at least middle-aged. In a field that draws on so many disciplines and approaches, there is no possibility of comprehensive coverage. We have tried instead to articulate a framework growing from our own research programs and then to find relevant work from other scholars to help us develop a fuller picture. Because gender is above all an ideological construct, we encourage our readers to question the foundations of their beliefs about gender and about how it emerges in language use. We hope that readers will take away a robust ability to appraise claims they hear about language, gender, and sexuality, and be better equipped to articulate and explore questions in this area, recognizing that definitive answers are probably not in the cards. This book is very much a collaborative effort. As in all our joint work, our names are listed alphabetically.

Like the first edition, this one is structured around the use of language in gender practice rather than around the linguistic resources themselves. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to gender and pays more attention than in the earlier edition to some of the complex connections of gender to sexuality. Its basic message – that gender is socially constructed – is unchanged, but new research and continued thinking have helped us develop our picture of how that happens. Chapter 2 sets the stage for the rest of the book by offering a quick overview of research on language and gender, with attention to some of the pitfalls. In Chapter 3, we present the linguistic resources on which people draw in constructing gender and sexual identities, and we conclude the chapter by considering gender in grammar, i.e., places where a language's grammar constrains how a speaker (or writer) invokes gender.

Assertiveness remains a hot topic for self-help books and websites. On amazon.com in late February 2012, a search for “assertiveness” in the self-help category brought up 6,055 titles, “assertiveness in women” yielded 1,170, and “assertiveness in men” had 424 offerings. In Figure 6.1, the online advice on assertiveness is aimed at women and in particular at women who are ambitious in their careers, although the author says that both sexes should find her advice useful. In Figure 6.2 the focus is on how to reduce interpersonal conflict, maintaining good interpersonal relations while not being a “doormat.” Both these sites give advice on how one can pursue one's agendas without jeopardizing the perception that one is “nice” and concerned about others. In Figure 6.3, the site offers tips clearly aimed only at men, where the goal is heterosexual dating success.

A quick look at book titles and the like suggests that the samples shown in Figures 6.1–6.3 are not atypical, with assertiveness for women often stressed in contexts of succeeding at work and for men in contexts of “making it” with women. Both sexes are sometimes targeted on general interpersonal relations issues, though women seem to get more of this. Women do indeed get counseled on assertiveness in heterosexual relations, but the emphasis there is on “just say no” and similar campaigns for stopping sexual harassment and date rape rather than on impressing potential male romantic partners. The message seems to be that women are deficient in their assertiveness in work and family contexts, and there is also apparently worry that some men need to unleash the assertiveness (domineeringness?) women are said to find sexually appealing in men.

In the early 1970s some feminists told a story that went something like this:

Lots of those who heard this were perplexed. The story didn't seem to make sense. The boy's father had been killed, after all. The point, as many readers undoubtedly already realize, was to highlight the assumption that the surgeon was a man and thus the failure to realize that a mother might be a surgeon.

The word surgeon does not require maleness to correctly apply to someone. Because there is no contradiction in saying “she is a surgeon,” maleness would not be considered part of the meaning of surgeon on most linguistic theories of semantics. Nonetheless the word does, even four decades later, evoke a male stereotype. Such “meaningful” but non-semantic associations with a word are called “conceptual baggage” in McConnell-Ginet (2008). Covert gender and sexual ideologies of various kinds are loaded into conceptual baggage. They lurk in the back rooms of language use and shape how we make sense of the world, often without our explicitly examining them.

We are surrounded by gender lore from the time we are very small. It is ever-present in conversation, humor, and conflict, and it is called upon to explain everything from driving styles to food preferences. Gender is embedded so thoroughly in our institutions, our actions, our beliefs, and our desires, that it appears to us to be completely natural. The world swarms with ideas about gender – and these ideas are so commonplace that we take it for granted that they are true, accepting common adage as scientific fact. As scholars and researchers, though, it is our job to look beyond what appears to be common sense to find not simply what truth might be behind it, but how it came to be common sense. It is precisely because gender seems natural, and beliefs about gender seem to be obvious truths, that we need to step back and examine gender from a new perspective. Doing this requires that we suspend what we are used to and what feels comfortable, and question some of our most fundamental beliefs. This is not easy, for gender is so central to our understanding of ourselves and of the world that it is difficult to pull back and examine it from new perspectives. But it is precisely the fact that gender seems self-evident that makes the study of gender interesting. It brings the challenge to uncover the process of construction that creates what we have so long thought of as natural and inexorable – to study gender not as given, but as an accomplishment; not simply as cause, but as effect; and not just as individual, but as social. The results of failure to recognize this challenge are manifest not only in the popular media, but in academic work on language and gender as well. As a result, some gender scholarship does as much to reify and support existing beliefs as to promote more reflective and informed thinking about gender.

Introduction

A language is a highly structured system of signs, or combinations of form and meaning. Gender is embedded in these signs and in their use in communicative practice in a variety of ways. Gender can be the actual content of a linguistic sign. For example, English third-person singular pronouns distinguish so-called neuter (it) from masculine and feminine (she/her/her; he/him/his). The neuter pronoun is mainly used for inanimates, but we will see later that it is occasionally used for animals and even people. Perhaps more surprisingly, the masculine and feminine forms are sometimes used for inanimates (Curzan 2003) and sometimes masculine is used for a female person or animal, feminine for a male (see McConnell-Ginet [forthcoming]). The suffix -ess transforms a male or generic noun into a female one (heir; heiress). Lexical items, as well, refer directly to male and female (as in the case of male and female; girl and boy). In other cases, the relation between a linguistic sign and social gender can be secondary. For example, the adjectives pretty and handsome both mean something like ‘good-looking,’ but have background meanings corresponding to cultural ideals of good looks for females and males respectively, and are generally used gender-specifically, or to invoke male- or female-associated properties. Consider, for example, what pretty and handsome suggest when used with objects such as houses or flowers. And although it is positive to describe someone as a handsome woman (it seems to accord her a little extra class) the description a pretty boy is generally not considered a compliment. There are many means by which we color topics with gender – by which we invoke gender and discourses of gender even when we are ostensibly talking about something else. At the same time, the resources that the language offers constrain us to some extent in how gender figures in our talk. English obliges us to specify whether a person is male or female when we use a third person singular pronoun (he, she, it), whereas Chinese does not.

Up until now, we have talked separately about different aspects of linguistic practice, all of which can be thought of as constituting a conventional toolbox for constructing gendered personae. In this, the final chapter, we will consider how people assemble the various resources in this linguistic toolbox to fashion selves. Each person uses the toolbox in their own way, mixing and matching linguistic resources. Some of this may be automatic – the product of long-ingrained habit – and some may be quite consciously strategic. The outcome is a communicative style, which combines with other components of style such as dress, ways of walking, hairdo, and patterns of consumption to constitute the presentation of a persona. It is in this process of fashioning selves that we do gender, and that we bring about change.

What is style?

Style is sometimes thought of as the external wrapping inside which the meaningful substance is found. People think that how it is said is distinct from what is said. But style is a combination of what we do and how we do it. You hear of people with “pushy” or “passive,” “friendly” or “obsequious” styles. What doctors say in the course of treating patients contributes as much to making them seem like doctors as the white coat and casually draped stethoscope. A tough guy's talk about his exploits is as much of his style – as big a part of his threatening demeanor – as his studded leather jacket. Of course, it's easier to buy the jacket or put on the lab coat than it is to treat patients or beat people up, and one could make those sartorial moves in order to give the impression that the other actions follow. But the sartorial moves will only work to the extent that (1) the social types already exist so that people know how to make the connection between the clothing and the activity, and (2) the performer can convince the audience that the content matches the form. Styles do not stand alone but signal social distinctions – the tough guy's persona distinguishes him from a “sissy” and a doctor's style distinguishes her from a patient, a nurse, an orderly. And the debutante is not a doctor, a tough guy, or her maid.