Dynamics of hegemony: Mapping mechanisms of cultural and political power in the debates over workfare in New York City, 1993–1999

• Published in: Poetics (Amsterdam) Vol. 38; no. 6; pp. 625 - 648
• Main Author: Krinsky, John
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.12.2010
• Subjects: Crosscultural Analysis; Debate; New York City, New York; Political Power; Political Systems; Power; Respect; Sociology of Culture; Workfare
• ISSN: 0304-422X; 1872-7514
• DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2010.09.001

This article analyzes debates over workfare in New York City in the 1990s in order to shed light on three related questions with respect to policy debates in general. How should we understand the creation of meaning in policy debates? How should we understand the different power that actors and their claims may have in shaping the boundaries and terms of these debates, and how is this power related to the question of meaning? And finally, if we are to understand policy debates as changeable, how do we account for changes in the power of actors and claims within them, and in the meanings that they enable? In order to focus on the interactions among multiple actors, claims, and institutional settings I turn to structural analysis of culture and the network-analytic techniques associated with it. By breaking down more than ten years of claim-making into eight periods and by coding actors, their claims, and the contexts in which they make them, I look at how actors, claims, and settings combine to produce variously contested and settled meanings of political claims, and at changes in the power actors and claims have in setting the terms of political debate as a whole.