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There is a growing concern that citizens are becoming alienated from an increasingly remote and commercialised policy-making process and that frontiers of policy are expanding. Through policy, the individual is categorised and given such statuses and roles as 'subject', 'citizen', 'professional', 'national', 'criminal' and 'deviant'. People are classified, shaped and ordered according to policies, but they may have little consciousness of, or control over, the processes at work. The study of policy, therefore, leads straight into issues at the heart of anthropology: norms and institutions; ideology and consciousness; knowledge and power; rhetoric and discourse; meaning and interpretation. Anthropology of Policy argues that policy becomes an increasingly central concept and instrument in the organisation of contemporary societies and that it now impinges on all areas of life so that it is virtually impossible to ignore or escape its influence.
