A volume entitled Language policy risks promising more than can be delivered, even in a book like this of some 290 pages. The main reason is simply that the scope of language policy studies has extended over the years to include a very wide range of domains and levels: for example, family language policy, language policy in business and commerce, in the military, in religion, in local government, in schools, and in supranational organisations (such as the EU). And such studies take in a very wide range of locations and countries—from New Zealand to Nepal, from South Africa to Singapore. The term language policy also has an ambiguous denotation referring on the one hand to policy-making and planning activity, often but not only the province of politicians, and on the other to a relatively young academic discipline.

Given this very wide scope, this book necessarily, and sensibly, has a narrower focus than the title might suggest in that it deals predominantly with language policies in education and in schools, with issues concerning multilingual education for minority groups in the United States featuring prominently. Also, as befits a volume in a series called ‘Research and practice in applied linguistics’, the book's main focus falls on the academic discipline of language policy studies, on its research methodologies and theoretical frameworks. It can be read, then, as a guide to doing research in the field of language policy in education.

The book's overarching argument is that language policy (LP) takes place at a variety of levels—macro, meso, and micro (the onion layers of Ricento & Hornberger's (Reference Ricento and Hornberger1996) metaphor), and that actors at these levels enjoy a degree of freedom or agency in creating, interpreting, appropriating, or implementing policy. Thus, language policies may emerge ‘bottom-up’ as well as ‘top-down’, with the former in particular often taking an implicit form and becoming manifest in micro-level practices, in classrooms for example. For this reason there is a fairly strong commitment to ethnography in the investigation of LP processes (e.g. those of creation and interpretation) alongside such established approaches as the discourse analysis of policy texts. Based on this foundation, the book is organised into four parts: Part 1, ‘Laying the groundwork’; Part 2, ‘Findings’; Part 3, ‘Researching language policy’; and Part 4, ‘Resources’.

Chapter 1 offers, as is customary, a number of definitions of LP from well-known scholars in the field (e.g. Hal Schiffman, Bernard Spolsky, James Tollefson), and goes on to distinguish between explicit vs. implicit, top-down vs. bottom-up types of LP. Somewhat surprisingly, the key distinction between status, corpus, and acquisition planning (introduced by Kloss Reference Kloss1969 and elaborated by Cooper Reference Cooper1989) is held over till chapter 2, which discusses conceptual frameworks, starting from Einar Haugen's early language-planning scholarship and moving on to more recent approaches such as critical language policy and the ethnography of LP. These sections are helpful, even if not all the authors of the twenty-two ‘ethnographies of language policy’ listed would recognise their work as such. More substantively, what one misses here is some overview of major geopolitical developments that have set new challenges for LP and that constitute the sociopolitical context of recent change in LP theory, practice, and research. Some of these developments could be brought together under the label ‘globalisation’ (a term not mentioned in this volume nor in the short index), and might include such LP-relevant phenomena as increased migration to the richer industrialised countries, the emergence of English as a global lingua franca, the dominance of US-led neoliberal economic policies, mobility, increased levels of language endangerment, and the construction of supranational communities or organisations (e.g. the EU).

Chapter 3, which opens Part 2, introduces a set of example studies dividing into ‘longitudinal’ studies and article–length reports spanning a wide range of settings—Wales, Laos, Mozambique, China, Sweden, France, Israel, and the United States. The purpose is not to explore specific LP issues, which would be very difficult with such a diverse collection, but rather, as Johnson explains, to illustrate the variety of work undertaken under the LP umbrella and the range of theoretical and methodological approaches adopted, which here include ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and corpus applications. In this aim the author is largely successful: the discussion of each study is illuminating and the concluding summary draws together some useful observations—highlighting, for example, how macro-level policies may be creatively re-interpreted at the local level by agentive individuals. That said, given the importance of context for understanding the motives, constraints, processes, and outcomes of language policy-making, it is somewhat frustrating (to this reviewer at least) that space is not found for a more in-depth discussion of a specific LP issue in a specific setting.

Drawing on the LP literature, chapter 4 presents twelve ‘findings’ (‘generalisations’ might be a more apt label) that spell out many of the key arguments of the book as outlined above. Some of the ‘findings’ are informative and revealing (e.g. ‘Finding 10: National language policies are not necessarily ideologically consistent’), a few verge on the obvious (e.g. ‘Finding 3: Governing bodies use language policies for control’), and one is most appropriate to states with a federal structure like the United States (‘Finding 9: Meso-level policies matter’).

Part 3 (comprising chapters 5, 6, and 7) moves explicitly to the central focus of the book—research methodologies in LP. In chapter 5 there is a discussion of research approaches supplemented by brief examples of their application in the boxes that appear on almost every page. Particular prominence is given to an exposition of the concepts, methods, merits, and drawbacks of ethnography and critical discourse analysis. Chapter 6 continues by outlining strategies for engaging in what Johnson refers to as ‘language policy action research’. Particularly helpful here is a list of potential research questions (covering policy creation, interpretation, and appropriation) and the examples from South Africa and New Zealand of engagement in ‘action research’ and policy advocacy. Chapter 7, like the preceding chapter, is one of methodological guidance. It outlines potential research projects, questions and data collection methods (e.g. participant observation, interviews, textual analysis). The advice offered is often quite specific: for instance, in ‘Example Project 7.7’ the suggested research question is ‘how does the computer and technological business development impact the linguistic ecology of Bangalore?’, and the suggested research procedures include interviews with city officials and linguistic landscape analysis. Part 4 gathers together a very helpful list of LP research resources—books, journals, organisations, and websites.

As implied above, the main strength of this book lies in the thoroughness and clarity of its exposition of research approaches in LP in education. The potential of ethnography for researching the many interfaces between macro and micro levels of policy is particularly well illustrated. Also useful for the student, though they also sometimes interrupt the flow of argument, are the boxes scattered through the text explaining key concepts and supplying informative quotes and examples. Johnson is refreshingly open about many of the omissions and exclusions inevitable in a shortish book on so wide a field. And, on the whole, he also writes clearly, though there are a few lapses into the obfuscating and indigestible prose that sometimes disfigures social science writing for students. The following is an example.

There are some other weaknesses. Though the book gives due recognition to the importance of context, there is, as mentioned previously, no detailed examination of particular LP challenges in specific locations, and no mention of the major world developments (e.g. globalisation) that have contributed to a shift in disciplinary emphasis from nation-building to such issues as the education of linguistic minorities, bilingual education in support of language revitalization, and linguistic justice, to mention but a few. The LP cases offered as examples are thinly contextualised, and as a result the student reader may fail to appreciate how LP in education, as in other domains, is influenced, constrained, and sometimes undermined by the range of historical and sociopolitical factors at play in any given location, whether this be South Africa, Wales, or the Philippines.

Every book bears to a degree the imprint of the author's background, which in this case is evident in the plethora of examples from education in the United States and in the intellectual presence of North American based scholars such as Nancy Hornberger, Thomas Ricento, Tollefson, and Teresa McCarty. Nonetheless, there are still surprising omissions, and not only in content. For example, there is no mention of the well-regarded work of Wright (Reference Wright2004), of the several language planning volumes on Europe, Africa, and Asia edited by Robert Kaplan and Richard Baldauf, or of the invaluable resource of Spolsky's (Reference Spolsky2012) Cambridge handbook of language policy. Writing a book on language policy is clearly no easy task, and here Johnson has produced a useful, if not entirely satisfying, resource for students and scholars.