Fast Policy

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Fast Policy

We inhabit a perpetually accelerating and increasingly interconnected world, with new ideas, fads, and fashions moving at social-media speed. New policy ideas, especially “ideas that work,” are now able to find not only a worldwide audience but also transnational salience in remarkably short order. Fast Policy is the first systematic treatment of this phenomenon, one that compares processes of policy development across two rapidly moving fields that emerged in the Global South and have quickly been adopted worldwide⎯conditional cash transfers (a social policy program that conditions payments on behavioral compliance) and participatory budgeting (a form of citizen-centric urban governance). Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore critically analyze the growing transnational connectivity between policymaking arenas and modes of policy development, assessing the implications of these developments for contemporary policymaking. Emphasizing that policy models do not simply travel intact from sites of invention to sites of emulation, they problematize fast policy as a phenomenon that is real and consequential yet prone to misrepresentation. Based on fieldwork conducted across six continents and in fifteen countries, Fast Policy is an essential resource in providing an extended theoretical discussion of policy mobility and in presenting a methodology for ethnographic research on global social policy.
Fast Childcare in Public Preschools

Fast Childcare in Public Preschools presents an ethnographic examination of the implementation of fast-policy management models and the efforts of teachers to use these to improve their work organization, and the frictions this brings. Using examples from Swedish public preschools, the book focuses on essential areas of the Lean management model in particular, bringing to life concepts relating to the care and education of children. The book draws on international childcare policy and public reforms, exploring the assignments that preschools are set and argues that separating the pedagogical and the organizational as suggested by proponents of management models is not possible. This book considers Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s work on ‘fast policy’ and ‘model power’ and analyzes the tensions between the easy-to-use and difficult-to-use in management models. The model form of Lean’s management model rendered it difficult to align with existing childcare policy, pedagogical models, and the organization of a preschool. The book explores the utopian dimension of a modern project in pursuit of efficiency and speed in relation to the Lean model and the preschool teachers’ work, by asking, ‘what are the wider societal implications of the Lean project in preschools?’ Fast Childcare in Public Preschools will be of great interest to cultural anthropologists, qualitative sociologists and political scientists, and organizational researchers interested in the anthropology of policy.
Digital Timescapes

Digital technologies are having a profound effect on the temporalities of individuals, households and organisations. We now expect to be able to instantly source a vast array of information at any time and from anywhere, as well as buy goods with the click of a button and have them delivered within hours, while time management apps and locative media have altered how everyday scheduling and mobility unfolds. Digital Timescapes makes the case that we have transitioned to an era where the production and experience of time is qualitatively different to the pre-digital era. Rob Kitchin provides a synoptic account of this transition, charting how digital technologies, in a wide range of manifestations, are reconfiguring everyday temporalities. Attention is focused on the temporalities associated with six sets of everyday practices: history and memory; politics and policy; governance and governmentality; mobility and logistics; planning and development; and work and labour. Critically, how to challenge and reorder digitally mediated temporal power is examined through the development of an ethics of temporal care and temporal justice. Conceptually and empirically rich, Digital Timescapes is an essential guide to our new temporal regime. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Human Geography, and History and Memory Studies, as well as those who are interested in how digital technologies are transforming society.