There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policymaking has progressively reached into the structure of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into the systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining, or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested, and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Furthermore, anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. As the contributors to this volume identify and analyze these policy worlds new possibilities for a reciprocal understanding of the positioning of academics within systems of knowledge and power are opened up.<BR><BR>“An outstanding contribution to the anthropological understanding of public policy… A very polished, coherent project, ably edited.” · Susan Greenhalgh, University of California, Irvine<BR><BR>“The volume represents an emergent subfield of anthropology coming of age in some ways; it will teach very well indeed and will certainly prove an invaluable book to think with and through… I was consistently impressed by the quality, coherence, and interest of the articles in themselves. Each was substantively fascinating, methodologically thought-provoking, and clearly linked to the others.” · Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz