Communication Currents

In late 2011, major news sources and online media across the United States ran headlines claiming, “Congress says pizza is a vegetable.” While the federal policy did not actually declare that pizza should be classified as a vegetable, Congress did make it easier to count the tomato sauce in pizza as part of a healthy school lunch. What made this policy particularly troubling for critics was that it slowed down the momentum that had been building since 2004, when the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act encouraged schools to serve healthier foods.

Food policies provide rules and resources for individuals, families, and institutions (like schools, hospitals, and restaurants) to make food choices. For me, food policies also give us important insights about routine communication practices. How we choose what to eat is one of our most everyday decisions, and how we talk and write about food helps to shape those choices. My study used food policies in Arizona as a case study to develop better communication models for designing and analyzing policy.

At the start of the 2006 school year, Arizona school districts started work on using both federal-level and state-level food policies to help their students develop healthier habits. The 2004 Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act asked school districts to develop a local wellness policy. This policy needed to focus on things like nutrition and physical activity, and schools were asked to consider input from parents, teachers, students, administrators, and the public. At the same time, school districts were also expected to use the Arizona Nutrition Standards (AZNS), which was a policy established at the state level to improve the nutritional value of school meals in Arizona’s K-8 schools.

Both policies relied on communication practices including dialogue and participation to design and implement their plans for healthier eating. Using the AZNS and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act as an opportunity to study policy from a local to a national level, I developed the Circuit of Policy Communication as a model for building better policies that uses input from multiple stakeholders. By stakeholders, I mean the various individuals and groups who play a part in constructing and enacting a communication practice. In the case of the policies for this study, that meant teachers, parents, students, school administrators, food service directors, food vendors, lunchroom workers, and other members in the community. Researchers from organizational and health communication often support an approach to communication that is team-based or considers voices from diverse backgrounds. They have also recognized that many of these approaches assume that the average person knows how to work in a team, or that the average policymaker knows how to manage multiple voices.

I developed the Circuit of Policy Communication as a way to show how policy operates as a communication practice. In other words, policy communication involves some fairly routine ways of discussing, writing, and enacting policy texts. The communication strategies that make up the Circuit of Policy Communication were selected to help multiple stakeholder groups begin to work with policy. There are five parts to the model: Reflexive Policy Writing, Navigating Policy Webs, Managing Paradox, Addressing Ambiguity, and Attending to the Unintended. These five parts are arranged as a circuit to show how each element is related to the other. Although you are free to start at any point on the circuit, the relationships between each point are necessary to analyze work with policy communication. Let’s take a look at each of the five parts. 

We’ll start with Reflexive Policy Writing. Being reflexive means having the ability to locate ourselves in our work, speak critically about our own actions, and take responsibility for what we commit to paper. The idea of being reflexive throughout the policymaking process was inspired by the food service director who led a local wellness policy committee for one of the largest districts in Arizona. She repeatedly gave the members of this committee the chance to think about the long-term effects of their policy choices and she asked members to question why they made those choices. This practice was important, because it helped members to realize that policy is more than just words on a page. Policy is something that you must actively do. 

Next on the circuit is the idea that policies do not exist in isolation. The creation of a new policy is shaped by older policies, and it will inevitably frame future policies. Therefore, it is important to consider the process of Navigating Policy Webs.Policy webs are the spaces where different policy texts come into contact with one another. For example, policy stakeholders in Arizona couldn’t choose between the Arizona Nutrition Standards and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization to set the tone for their food practices. On the contrary, schools had to figure out how to use both policies.

Managing Paradox is another important point on the circuit. Many of the people who participated in this study noted how work with policy often placed them in sticky situations or forced them into what they felt was a paradox. Paradoxesare a type of contradiction that defies logic. In communication studies, they are often framed as situations where the pursuit of one goal undermines the pursuit of another. For instance, if the goal of your policy is to encourage healthier eating standards for students andinclude student input in the design of a policy, what do you do when a student says that he only wants to eat junk food and drink soda? Working with policy means that we confront these tensions and find collective ways to work through them.

Closely related to paradox is the strategy of Addressing Ambiguity. Finding the words that best capture the spirit and meaning of a policy change is a pretty tricky process. Sometimes, policies require that their language is strategically ambiguous enough to promote change while still allowing individuals to make their own choices. Strategic ambiguity is the process of using intentionally indirect, vague, or abstract language as a way to open up multiple interpretations of a text. This can have both positive and negative outcomes, as the search for the perfect word can take a group closer or further away from their policy goals. By addressing the ambiguity of language, policymakers might better understand how to manage some of the paradoxes and tensions that surround their policy changes. 

Finally, where policies lead, unintended consequences inevitably follow. By unintended consequences, I mean the ways in which policies are used, manipulated, and worked around as they are put in practice. Stakeholders cannot possibly foresee every potential outcome of their policies. However, they can look more closely at the language of their policy to think about how people might work around it. For example, during one of my observations at an Arizona school, I noticed students walking away from a lunch line with fistfuls of chocolate chip cookies. While the AZNS had made policy changes to limit the portion size of this a la carte item, they did nothing to limit how many single items a student could buy. In other words, they did not anticipate how students could work around their policy changes by simply buying more. 

The point of organizing these five communication strategies in a circuit model is to show how the relationships between these concepts are also important. Each point in the circuit is connected to the other four. As such, when you’re talking about policy webs, you’re often also taking about reflexivity, paradox, ambiguity, and unintended consequences. For instance, take the previous example about the students with a fondness for chocolate chip cookies. This is not only an example of unintended consequences, but also one of managing paradoxes and addressing ambiguity. Policymakers were not completely oblivious to the idea that students might work around policies designed to promote healthy eating. At the same time, they did not want to create a paradoxical policy that undermined an individual’s right to make his or her own food choices. Therefore, they crafted a strategically ambiguous policy that focused on portion sizes and encouraging healthy eating as opposed to one that limited choices. As such, an unintended consequence of their policy was students who chose a lot of cookies. It is these types of relationships that allow the Circuit of Policy Communication to make rich contributions to our understanding of policy and its ties to communication.

So, do unintended consequences, paradoxes, and pizza as a vegetable mean that we have little hope of building a better food policy? I like to think that we still have a chance when it comes to food policy change – especially for our nation’s public schools. Programs like First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign and higher school food standards from the US Department of Agriculture have made sure that the momentum hasn’t stopped completely. What we genuinely need is to promote the communication resources and strategies that will help more people work with and do policy.