The poststructuralist tool for policy analysis, ‘What’s the ‘problem’ represented to be?’ (WPR), has been developed since the 1990’s by Carol Bacchi (e.g. Bacchi, 1999; 2009; 2012; 2025). The approach draws on Foucauldian notions, with governmentality as an important analytical lens, and focuses how governing takes place by means of ‘problem representations’. Consequently, WPR directs our attention away from a problem-solving paradigm towards a problem-questioning perspective, focusing how policies and other proposals do not solve problems but instead create ‘problems’ through problem representations (Bacchi, 2025). WPR has been employed in several fields of research, and within Library and Information Science (LIS), the approach has been used to study digital competence in teacher education (Hanell, 2018), the construction of reading and readers (Lindsköld, Hedemark & Lundh, 2020), public library policies on weeding (Van der Veer Martens, 2022), digital participation in heritage collections (Jansson, 2023), digital libraries in times of crisis (Kjellström, 2024), and perceptions of public libraries (Nissen & Kann-Rasmussen, 2025). 

Notably, the scope of WPR has recently been broadened to include ‘entities’ such as buildings as objects of study, apart from conventional textual policy documents. Since buildings and infrastructure, for example, can function as ‘practical texts’ or ‘guides to conduct’ that govern relations between people and objects, they can be understood as proposals or directions for change, and consequently as ‘problem representations’ that can be interrogated and analysed using WPR (Bacchi, 2025). This widened scope of WPR draws our attention to what different ‘entities’ represent, and arguably present interesting opportunities for conceptual exchange between document theory and policy analysis. The purpose of this contribution is to explore how document theory and policy analysis can inform each other, when ‘entities’ such as buildings are included in the analysis. To this end, the notions of governmentality and documentality are discussed as complementary theoretical perspectives in a tentative conceptual exploration of library buildings as policy proposals. 

Moving beyond an understanding of documents as evidence, Frohmann (2012) proposes the concept of documentality to capture the agency of documents (see also Buckland, 2014). Following this tradition, Hansson (2025) discusses how documents can be understood as reifications of social acts that simultaneously represent and legitimate power and tentatively defines a document as “an inscribed reification of social acts with an informative potential of institutional value.” (p. 33). Combining these insights with previous LIS studies (e.g.  Buschman & Leckie, 2007), the library building can be said to represent (and legitimate) certain practices and values, for example related to democracy and Bildung, and it also connects the user to a certain political system. Each time the library user uses his or her library card, the user becomes a part of the library institution’s social function and its ideology (cf. Day, 2024). The library building, understood as a policy proposal, governs people as they become library users, regulated by the affordances offered by the materiality of the facilities, that is, the documentality of the library as a building.

References 

Bacchi, C. (1999). Women, policy and politics: The construction of policy problems. Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446217887 

Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be?. Pearson. 

Bacchi, C. (2012). Why study problematizations? Making politics visible. Open Journal of Political Science, 2(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojps.2012.21001 

Bacchi, C. (2025). What's the Problem Represented to Be?: A New Thinking Paradigm. Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032678382  

Buckland, M.K. (2014). Documentality beyond documents. The Monist, 97(2), 179-186. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44012677

Buschman, J. E., & Leckie, G. J. (Eds.). (2007). The library as place: History, community, and culture. Libraries Unlimited.

Day, R. E. (2024). Documentation to documentality in the works of Michael Buckland. Journal of Documentation, 80(3), 606-617. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2023-0066

Frohmann, B. (2012). The documentality of Mme Briet’s antelope, in Packer, J. and Wiley, S.B.C. (Eds), Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, Routledge, 173-182.

Hanell, F. (2018). What is the ‘problem’ that digital competence in Swedish teacher education is meant to solve? Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 13(3), 137-151. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1891-943x-2018-03-02 

Hansson, J. (2025). Bibliographic Classification: From Mimetic Representation to Isomorphic Documentality. MIT Press.

Jansson, I. (2023). Challenging the problem of un-democratic participation: From destruction to re-construction of heritage. Journal of Documentation, 79(2), 509-526. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2022-0025  

Kjellström, Z. (2024). Digital libraries in crisis: The case of the national emergency library. Alexandria, 34(3), 94–108. https://doi-org.proxy.lnu.se/10.1177/09557490231198877 

Lindsköld, L., Hedemark, Å., & Lundh, A. (2020) Constructing the desirable reader in Swedish contemporary literature policy. Culture Unbound, 12(2), 256–274. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.20200527c 

Nissen, A.S.E., & Kann-Rasmussen, N. (2025). The public library “for all”? A typology of the ranging notions of “for all” in public libraries in Norway and Denmark. Journal of Documentation, 81(1), 285-300. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2024-0109  

Van der Veer Martens, B. (2022). The pragmatics of weeding. Journal of Documentation, 78(2), 284-301. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2021-0003