In the 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu, comedian Hari Kondabolu examines The Simpsons’ character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. The character is an Indian immigrant store clerk who, until 2020, was voiced by White American actor Hank Azaria. For Kondabolu, the problem with Apu is that he’s a racist caricature. An example of ‘brownface’, the character amplifies ethnic stereotypes: he’s a foreign-born workaholic shopkeeper who has a funny accent, too many children, and a wife from an arranged marriage. As Kondabolu puts it, Apu sounds like ‘a White guy doing an impression of a White guy making fun of my father’.

Apu has plenty of sharp lines and witty rejoinders in the show. But his catchphrase, the joke he’s most known for, isn’t really a joke. It’s an ordinary sentence turned into comedy by Apu’s over-the-top intonation: ‘Thank you, come again!’ It’s also the line that a heckler shouts at Kondabolu midway through his stand-up set, a shocking scene that opens the documentary. Apu exudes sweetness and charm in The Simpsons, yet his catchphrase has become a subtle insult, a way of implying that South Asians are servile and obsequious. This is why Kondabolu wants to get rid of Apu once and for all:

Kondabolu acknowledges that The Simpsons was a pioneering comedy show when it first aired in 1989. It broke new ground by satirizing middle-class American ideals such as the traditional nuclear family, the work ethic, and small-town Christianity. But Kondabolu reminds us that some of the show’s funniest and best-loved characters, characters who are quietly subversive in their own way, also reinforce offensive stereotypes about minority groups. ‘Thank you, come again!’ is the punchline of a joke that’s on Apu and that’s on Brown people like Kondabolu.

The Laff Box was invented in the 1950s by sound engineer Charley Douglass. Its purpose was to add pre-recorded laughter to TV sitcoms in post-production. The contraption was played like an organ, with over 30 buttons for different types of laughter and a foot pedal to control the length of the response. The Laff Box was typically used to enhance the reaction of a studio audience that wasn’t laughing enough. In some cases, it even replaced the need for a live audience altogether – just think of classic sitcoms like M*A*S*H or The Munsters where the laughs seem to roar out of nowhere.

Douglass’ invention demonstrates that laughter can ignite and spread without any initial spark, ex nihilo. The Laff Box, and its digital equivalent, tells us that we’re not necessarily laughing at the jokes in TV shows. We’re laughing because other people are laughing too, like a comedy version of Pavlov’s dog. This becomes clear in edited clips of popular sitcoms uploaded on YouTube that have had their laugh tracks removed. Instead of laugher, we hear a few seconds of eerie silence after a mediocre one-liner or a moment of limp slapstick. Stripped of artificial yuks, cheesy sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother strike us as hopelessly awkward and unfunny. Sometimes laughter is enough; jokes are optional.

Yet there’s another turn of the screw. We find ourselves laughing at YouTube videos like ‘Big Bang Theory But Without the Laugh Track *CRINGE*’ or ‘How I Met Your Mother Except the Laugh Track is Wind Sounds’ precisely because they’re so awkward and unfunny, in the same way that we laugh at a joke when it falls flat. As comedy connoisseurs, we look down on any show that needs to use canned laughter to force a chuckle out of its audience. We know better and prefer our sitcoms to be smart and sassy, sitcoms that let the viewer spot the jokes for themselves. TV shows like Parks and Recreation and Veep don’t patronize their audiences with fake laughter, but allow humour to rise organically from audio-visual cues. By contrast, The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother deserve our ridicule because they’re seemingly unaware of just how unfunny they really are, an uncomfortable truth that’s exposed by eliminating their laugh tracks.

In a scene from the 2006 version of Casino Royale, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is being held captive in an abandoned ship. In the shadows lurks Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), who is trying to reclaim the hundred million dollars he lost to the British secret agent at a high-stakes poker game. Bond is naked and strapped to a Bentwood chair whose seat has been ripped out, helpless as Le Chiffre taunts him with a length of rope that’s knotted at one end in a ball. The tension mounts as Le Chiffre starts swinging the rope towards the exposed underside of the chair. Suddenly he whips the rope into Bond’s testicles, and then again – harder this time. Bond screams as the rope strikes him once more. Le Chiffre comes close to Bond’s face and demands the money. Bruised and bloodied, Bond stares defiantly back at Le Chiffre: ‘I’ve got a little itch, down there’, he whispers, with a hint of camp insolence. ‘Would you mind?’ Angered, Le Chiffre lays into Bond again, who starts shouting through the pain: ‘No, no, no – to the right, to the right, to the right!’

The scene is shocking in its violence. But just as striking is Bond’s reaction to the torture. Instead enduring the agony through gritted teeth, Bond turns his predicament into a joke. This is a far cry from the wisecracks found in earlier Bond movies, such as sexual innuendos (‘Keeping the British end up, sir’) and puns about dead henchmen (‘Shocking, positively shocking’). In Casino Royale, Bond is rebooted as a different kind of character: intense, brutal, and deadly serious – save for this one moment of unexpected levity. How are we to understand the joke? Bond is utterly powerless, tied up and broken down. Yet Le Chiffre’s torture techniques are rendered useless with a twinkle of humour.

The torture scene from Casino Royale distils a contemporary myth about the relationship between jokes and freedom. The myth tells us that, even in the direst of circumstances, we’re still able to make jokes. In fact, we ought to make jokes. Making light of our situation, especially when we’re at the mercy of those who rule over us, is a way for us to claw back some of our dignity and autonomy.

In the autumn of 2011, thousands of protesters in multiple cities across the world – from Australia to Mongolia – put up tents to occupy prominent sites in cities to protest against the international financial system. Under the slogan of ‘We are the 99%’ they were particularly responding to the financial crisis and austerity measures. Our own research on the Occupy movement shows that these protests attracted many people who were new to organising for change. However, the camps also attracted experienced SCMs who had participated in multiple causes. Life history interviews with SCMs like Mike, a man in his forties, who participated in Occupy London, illustrate how the involvement in SCOs is embedded in everyday lives.

We interviewed Mike, who came from a working-class background, in November 2011. He remembered that during his childhood and youth, his mother supported the Labour Party and was involved in the Greenham Common protests of the 1980s against the stationing of cruise missiles during the Cold War. He was socialised into attending marches and direct actions and started to become aware of different movements through going to protests at an early age. He remembers meetings of SCMs while he was growing up and that his mother hosted members of the Polish Solidarność (Solidarity) movement. They were staying with Mike and his mother on an exchange basis at the beginning of the 1980s, when Solidarność was starting to take shape to bring about changes in communist Poland. Mike went to university, and at the time of the interview was self-employed and had several children. He told us that fatherhood was his main motivation for being politically active. He was concerned that his children would not have the same opportunities that he has had and was concerned about their economic situation and the state of the environment. Before getting involved in Occupy, he had participated in various campaigns organised by several environmental SCOs. He had been involved in Camps for Climate Action and had also run a local environmental campaign. When he realised that his local environmental campaign got bigger, he approached larger and more established organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace because he felt that he did not have enough experience to deal with the significant campaign that he envisioned. However, he stressed that he preferred being independent from organisations.

The Coalition of Labour Union Women (CLUW), which was formed in Chicago in 1974, to give voice to women in the male-dominated US labour movement (which we introduced in Chapter 1) is also a good case through which to introduce our chapter on the interaction between different SCOs. As we already noted, the founding members of the organisation came from a variety of backgrounds. Many had been long-standing trade union members, others came from the second-wave women’s movement and wished to improve the working conditions of non-unionised women, some were also involved in the civil rights and student movements and other causes. What united them was the desire to improve women’s working conditions, but founding members disagreed about the best strategy. Given the low unionisation rate of women and female-dominated sectors of the labour market, initially there was some debate whether this would be best achieved within the context of the trade unions or in an autonomous organisation. The view that CLUW would have more impact acting within the framework of the trade union federation AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) prevailed. This decision meant that founding members decided that the best strategy of supporting (non)unionised women was from within the labour movement. In order to do this, they sought to unionise women who had not yet joined trade unions, bringing women into union leadership positions, and by adding women’s issues on the agenda of trade unions. These efforts are characterised by collaboration with other organisations (trade unions, women’s organisations) and conflict within the organisation. Through solving the internal conflicts, CLUW became a bridging organisation between the women’s movement and the labour movement by framing ‘women’s issues’ (day care, pay equity, sexual harassment, reproductive rights) as ‘workers’ issues’ (pay, working conditions) and ‘workers’ issues’ as ‘women’s issues’ (Roth, 2003).

While CLUW represents a successful example of an SCO that was able to bridge women’s and labour issues, this is not always the case.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the global justice movement (GJM) came to prominence around the world. It first grabbed the attention of journalists, academics and the public through large and oftentimes disruptive summit hopping demonstrations that coincided with meetings of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G20, G8, and G7. But a closer examination of the movement reveals, behind the scenes, multiple repertoires, strategies, and tactics tailored to specific grievances localities and settings. It is for this reason that Tarrow (2005) referred to the participants involved in these apparently global mobilisations as rooted cosmopolitans. While some of the SCMs associated with the GJM came together for big international demonstrations, they and many of their counterpart SCMs were rooted to locally situated concerns and shaped by more localised sets of geographically and historically variable contexts.

Some scholars consider the GJM as a ‘movement of movements’ (della Porta and Mosca, 2005; Cox and Nilsen, 2007) because it brought together a range of causes including environmentalism, humanitarianism, workers’ rights, and other struggles for equality. Together, the SCOs involved in the GJM used a range of strategies to seek justice for people and the environment across the globe. A useful way of thinking about the GJM is as a call for, in Paul Kingsnorth’s words, ‘one no, and many yeses’. This means that while the GJM universally rejects neo-liberal forms of capitalism that generate injustices (the ‘one no’), there were multiple ways to take action to begin to redress these injustices (the ‘many yeses’). These ranged from marches, occupations and riots through to hacking and reconnecting electricity supplies, reclaiming land, guerrilla gardening, and helping others in need.

The GJM provides a useful lens to examine the repertoires, strategies, and tactics of SCOs, and to illustrate how social change efforts are multi-faceted and shaped by geographically and historically variable contexts. It also shows the ways in which SCOs work together strategically (and sometimes less strategically) in chains of interacting strategic repertoires. This does not only apply to the GJM as we will show in this chapter.

Bureaucratic organisations are often expected to run according to rules (Crozier, 1964; Weber, 1974). Political science research has offered optimistic views regarding political control of the bureaucracy by focusing on how to control bureaucrats rather than on whether to control them. An extensive literature on political control of the bureaucracy discusses mechanisms of delegation and accountability from inside and outside the bureaucracy and highlights the role of principals rather than that of agents (for example, McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984; Epstein and O’Halloran, 1999; Huber and Shipan, 2002; Lee, 2020). However, what actually happens on the agent side of the principal–agent relationship, particularly on the front line, seems to deviate from the political control arguments.

In reality, public employees on the front line are in a position where they intrinsically exert discretion in policy implementation. Lipsky’s (1980/ 2010) seminal work suggests that the discretion granted to street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) and their relative autonomy from principals create room to be filled by their own decisions which, in turn, are influenced by street-level factors. Although elected politicians do play a role in changing agency policies and influencing policy outcomes (Scholz and Wood, 1998; Lewis, 2008; Lee and Park, 2020), public administrative research has provided limited evidence of political influences on the actions of SLBs (Brehm and Gates, 1997; Riccucci et al, 2004; Riccucci, 2005). In a word, since Lipsky’s observation of SLBs’ behaviour, this view has been well accepted by subsequent research.

The main question is, then, what affects SLBs’ decisions? An extensive literature on SLBs’ implementation of policy has examined a variety of factors, ranging from bureaucrats’ attitudes and knowledge concerning their tasks (Sandfort, 2000; Meyers and Vorsanger, 2003), the characteristics of the implementing organisations (Lynn et al, 2001; Hill and Lynn, 2004; Brodkin, 2007; 2011), to contextual factors related to workloads and external pressures (May and Winter, 2009). Regarding political factors, although their influence over SLBs’ implementation is found to be relatively muted, it is still important to understand why there is variation in the extent to which SLBs respond to their elected politicians across individuals in a given institutional context.

Introduction

Since 2010, behavioural public policy has spread inter-and transnationally. In more than 100 countries, expert units focusing on nudging and other behaviourally informed tools are translating insights from behavioural sciences into policy interventions. Existing interpretations of the behavioural movement and its impact on public policy vary considerably (John, 2013; Whitehead et al, 2014; John and Stoker, 2019; Strasheim and Beck, 2019).

To move beyond very general explanations, this chapter focuses on two specific approaches to expertise and public policy. Since the mid-1990s, research on ‘epistemic communities’ has provided a deeper understanding of actor collectives and the influence of knowledge, beliefs and learning in the policy process. More recently, the concept of ‘instrument constituencies’ (Voss and Simons, 2014; Howlett and Mukherjee, 2015; Beland et al, 2018; Simons and Voss, 2018) has stirred a fruitful debate on the different ways collective agency at the science– policy nexus can be conceptualised. After developing typologies and criteria that help to sharpen the distinction between both concepts, recent studies have started to explore the overlaps between both (Howlett and Mukherjee, 2015; Sturdy, 2018; Zito, 2018). Wondering how ‘clean the conceptual break is’ (Zito, 2018: 52), some scholars are highlighting puzzling cases in which instrument constituencies cannot be clearly distinguished from other types of collective entities.

Behavioural expertise and public policy is one of these puzzling cases at the margin between both concepts (John, 2018; Mukherjee and Giest, 2020). ‘This community’, as Zito (2018: 51) has recently observed, ‘is particularly interesting as it is at the border between EC and IC approaches’. Behavioural expert networks seem to be oscillating between two opposed modes of collective action: as epistemic community, they generate and distribute validated knowledge about the cognitive systems of citizens, based on the consensual belief that the heuristics and biases in individual behaviour pose a core challenge for policy making. As instrument constituency, they bring together a great diversity of different actors and worldviews, unified only in practices of using this knowledge for developing nudges and other behaviourally informed tools and translating these designs into varied areas of policy making. By focusing on a case that seems to be shifting between epistemic communities and instrument constituencies this chapter aims at highlighting the analytical potentials and limits of each concept.

The end of the Cold War, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, and the end of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) between 1989 and 1991, had far-reaching consequences for SCOs around the world. In Europe, these developments encompassed the enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include CEE countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, among others, as new member states. The consequences for SCOs, including those addressing gender equality in CEE countries, were significant.

A historical look at European women’s movements (Roth, 2017) illustrates the ways in which various political and gender regimes enable and constrain the work of SCOs. As we noted in the Introduction to our book, gender equality movements around the world have been able to achieve significant gains with respect to political, economic, and social rights. Nevertheless, gender equality has still not been achieved at the beginning of the 21st century. Neo-liberalism, as well as the end of socialism, changed the context in which SCMs addressing gender equality in the CEE countries could mobilise. Their activism was shaped by several factors. First, the end of state socialism ended repression and surveillance. This enabled groups that previously met in a clandestine manner around kitchen tables, like the participants of the East German women’s peace movement (Miethe, 1999; 2000) to, instead, organise openly. Second, people in the former socialist countries were confronted with high unemployment and a massive dismantling of the socialist welfare state. Third, CEE countries that, during the Cold War, had provided assistance to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America then became recipients of ‘aid’ focused on strengthening and restoring democracy and civil society. We are putting ‘aid’ in inverted commas to draw attention to the deeply unequal relations between those who deliver and those who receive aid (see Roth et al, 2024). That means that aid is not necessarily oriented at the needs of aid recipients. We discuss humanitarian assistance further later and in the following chapters. Much of this ‘aid’ was delivered by Western SCOs, notably women’s NGOs and political foundations that supported the projects of their CEE partners (Wedel, 2001; Roth, 2007).

Let us start with a couple of examples of SCOs and SCMs. Members of the Coalition of Labour Union Women (CLUW), an organisation that was founded in Chicago 1974 and which bridges the US women’s and labour movements (Roth, 2003), have been involved in a range of social movements simultaneously and successively. Some of the ‘founding mothers’ who were born in the 1920s and 1930s were long-standing trade unionists who were also involved in the civil rights movement marching with Martin Luther King and supporting the women’s movement and the struggle for the Equal Rights amendment. In contrast, some of the ‘rebellious daughters’, who were born in the 1940s and 1950s, had been involved in the farmworkers’ movement, supported the Black Panthers, and were involved in various feminist organisations including a feminist healthcare collective that provided abortions. The ‘political animals’, were involved in community organisations and the Democratic Party, and became union members after starting to work in the public sector. Finally, the ‘fighting victims’ became politicised after they had received support through their union at the workplace. While each of these four types came to CLUW on a different trajectory, what was important to all was to frame ‘women’s issues’ as ‘workers’ issues’ and vice versa while also fighting for racial justice. Many felt that supporting the Democratic Party was an important strategy in addition to participating in strike action and engaging in lobbying at the local, state, and national levels.

Our second example is based on our knowledge of environmentalists, derived from our in-depth interviews with environmental activists and participant observation in environmental organisations. Jo thinks of their self an environmentalist. For the past 15 months they have worked as a conservation volunteer with a county-wide branch of a national conservation organisation in the UK. They spend one weekday every week (outside of the school holidays) working with a small group of other conservation volunteers removing invasive species, planting trees, opening up spaces to allow cattle to graze, and managing ponds. Jo has always been a nature lover, but since volunteering began to appreciate the gravity of the environmental and climate crises through their communications with others. They now attend annual climate change marches, and have, more recently, joined a network that engages in civil disobedience to raise the profile of the climate crisis. At the previous annual climate change march, they encountered a counterdemonstration.

Introduction

A growing interest among policy makers and researchers in the application of behavioural insight to public policy has led to the development of a wide range of behavioural public policy interventions, designed to improve the health of populations by changing behaviour of individuals, groups, communities and/ or populations, implemented at policy level and delivered via legal, fiscal, educational, regulatory, environmental or interpersonal methods. Such interventions draw on diverse fields including psychology, social science and behavioural economics, have been implemented in many contexts including health (Jepson et al, 2010), tax (Hallsworth et al, 2017) and the environment (Schultz et al, 2007; Nomura et al, 2011), and have targeted citizens, professionals, politicians and policy makers (John et al, 2019). Behavioural insights implemented by governments and other agencies have diffused across the world (Afif et al, 2018; John 2019).

With such a plethora of research activities and methods, researchers in the field need better guidelines to work out what they are reading and researching, to locate studies and to plan their own. Guides and templates provide such simplifications, and help the review of the literature too. They also satisfy a general human demand for lists and categorisations. They can be useful for researchers in helping them carry out projects and write papers so that they are clear about what they are doing. They can help locate their study in the literature and help the presentation of the study design and results. In practical fields the use of lists has become common. In medicine, for example, it is now routine for surgeons to follow elaborate checklists to avoid mistakes and to avoid leaving out essential steps or leaving items in a patient’s body. They were resisted at first as intrusions into professional judgement, but over time practitioners have got used to and value them. In a similar way, researchers are getting used to such lists, and many we review here have been going for some time. The question is less about whether to use a list or not, but which list to use. In the conclusion to this chapter, we review whether behavioural public policy researchers could use one overall reporting template for experiments that pulls in other lists.