Responding to the Troubled Families Programme: Framing the Injuries of Inequality

Content Provider	Scilit
Author	Sayer, Andrew
Copyright Year	2016
Description	Government initiatives such as the Troubled Families Programme present a difficult problem for social scientists: how to discuss the policies without accepting and appearing to legitimise the problematic framing of social problems that they embody. The programme is characteristically neoliberal in its silence on structural inequality and in its targeting of certain families as deficient and wholly responsible for their situation. Like so many such programmes, its primary addressee is arguably not merely those targeted by the policies but the wider electorate. The paper discusses the dilemmas of challenging the policy's framing. First it makes some general points about the different characters of political and academic discourses, before examining some key features of the framing of TFP, its conceptualisation of social causes of problems and individual responsibility, and how social scientists might respond. It then draws upon the work of George Lakoff to comment on how the impact of policy and political discourse depends on the kinds of value systems it invokes, before concluding.
Related Links	https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76961696.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/8284100A29333C5DB48DE188A6F5CDC2/S1474746416000373a.pdf/div-class-title-responding-to-the-troubled-families-programme-framing-the-injuries-of-inequality-div.pdf
Ending Page	164
Page Count	10
Starting Page	155
ISSN	14747464
e-ISSN	14753073
DOI	10.1017/s1474746416000373
Journal	Social Policy and Society
Issue Number	1
Volume Number	16
Language	English
Publisher	Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Publisher Date	2016-09-09
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Social Policy and Society Political Discourse
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Sociology and Political Science Political Science and International Relations