This book is about irrationality and policy failures. It argues that policy failures are not rational in the sense of a policy action plan that led to an error of implementation or lack of success, followed by decision-making, coping and learning. Policy failures are rational in that they entertain an image of rationality, a mythology almost, that hides or normalises their inherent irrationality. Failure irrationality is not so much about policy failures being illogical, ad-hoc or unfair; instead, it comes from the observable evolution to other forms, the autonomisation of failure. Failure is today endowed with a life of its own.
This is the first book that combines failure curiosity in social sciences with literature and films that explore human absurdity, existentialism and quietism. Rendering the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett central to its analysis, it provides a comparative recent history of three public policies in Poland: migration, abortion and disability. In an age of gridlock and polarization in policy domains, this book provides a crucial disruption to the linear and policy outcome focus of traditional policymaking literature. It argues that irrationality is not a fixable institutional hazard, but rather the contemporary manifestation of a new failure ecology, acoustics, and even skin.
Examining policy failure and success, this book sheds light on the social, political, and emotional consequences of the process of not achieving an outcome in policymaking. It will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, policy studies, political science, emotion/affect studies, and failure studies.
PART I. Irrationality: Endowing Failure with a Life of its Own;
1.
Irrationality, quietism, and failure going on;
2. Obsession, the skin of
policymaking;
3. Eligibility, the production of judgement;
4. Abeyance, the
creation through stillness; PART II. All that Failure: Policymaking in
Poland;
5. Failure ecology;
6. Migration policy and the escalation of
political beef;
7. Abortion policy and the complacency surrounding violence
against women;
8. Disability policy and the control of silence; Conclusions
Adriana Mica is a Romanian-born sociologist living in Poland, the founder and leader of Failure Lab at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She has published (authored or co-edited) several books on unintended consequences, ignorance, and crises which reflect the political ecologies of Central and Eastern Europe and her fascination with the irrational, rather eccentric and absurd social processes. She is a co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Failure (2023), currently moving in the direction of developing a general theory of the taste and sound of failure, which will also bridge social sciences, policy studies and literature.
Mikoaj Pawlak leads the Chair of Sociology of Norms, Deviance and Social Control at University of Warsaw, Poland. He studies how migration and response to migration are organised and how competition among scholars is being constituted. His book Tying Micro and Macro (Peter Lang, 2018) helped to recontextualise the levels of analysis in social sciences in Poland. He is a co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Failure (2023), currently working on a book concerning the ambivalent perceptions of bureaucracy.
Pawe Kubicki leads the Department of Social Policy, and is also acting chair of the Academic Council on Political and Administrative Sciences at SGH Warsaw School of Economics. His research focuses on the critical area of policy failure, exploring its causes, consequences, and potential mitigation strategies. A co-editor of Routledge International Handbook of Failure (2023), his current work spans disability studies and public policy cost analysis.
