This paper combines interpretivist approaches to policy with human geographers' critical approaches to scale. A key argument made by post-structuralist human geographers is that scale does not have an ontological existence but is instead an epistemological concept through which actors make sense of their social worlds. It is argued that this distinction has tended to be overlooked in the way social scientists use categories of scale to explain things with rather than examining how actors construct and use scalar categories in their work. This paper suggests that critical studies of policy can be enriched by human geographers' interest in scalar practices, which involve scale being deployed as a way of interpreting and strategically constructing meanings of policy. These issues are discussed through drawing on empirical insights from a study which explores the scalar practices of policy actors involved in implementing the academies policy in England's schooling system.
