Resumen de Policy, policing and the ecology of social norms: ethnographic monitoring revisited

Jan Blommaert

• The book under review here represents an attempt towards paradigmatic change in the study of language policy. The attempt – characterized by the editor in terms of Hymes' “ethnographic monitoring” – consists of a series of shifts in objects, assumptions and methodologies. Policy research consists of work on a variety of distributed objects, organized along different scales and operating on a variety of levels and in a variety of modes. This review article organizes these shifts along three axes: (a) understanding language policies as ideological complexes; (b) incorporating history and globalization as crucial “contexts”, enabling a different kind of generalization about dynamic systems; and (c) the introduction of vertical processes of stratification and layering alongside horizontal processes of distribution and presence. Taken together, these shifts offer a new program for ethnographic monitoring.