Serial and comparative analysis of innovation policy change

Much of the existing literature on innovation policy analyzes policy change as an outcome of rational, cognitive processes, where the availability of new information prompts policy-makers to rethink and revise their policies. This paper aims to broaden this perspective by building a new methodological approach, Serial Comparative Analysis (SCA), to the analysis of policy change. SCA is proposed as an analytical perspective that sheds light on the social and political complexities of policy-making, and thus allows for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of policy change. SCA builds on the archaeological approach to discourse, and basic methodological principles of ethnographic inquiry. By conceptualizing a policy domain as a discursive formation, SCA provides insights into the socio-historical conditions under which a specific policy emerges, forms and transforms. While other methodological approaches may adopt the presumption that policy change is a causal outcome of new information used in policy-making, SCA views policy change as something that is discursively constructed and negotiated in specific institutional and historical settings. In doing so, SCA brings to light the rules that organize the truth-values of policy discourses in particular contexts, and elucidates how changes in these rules bring about changes in policy.