Creating citizen-consumers? Public service reform and (un)willing selves

About the book: Postmodern theories heralded the "death of the subject", and thereby deeply contested our intuition that we are free and willing selves. In recent times, the (free) will has come under attack yet again. Findings from the neuro- and cognitive sciences claim the concept of will to be scientifically untenable, specifying that it is our brain rather than our 'self' which decides what we want to do. In spite of these challenges however, the willing self has come to take centre stage in our society: juridical and moral practices ascribing guilt, or the organization of everyday life attributing responsibilities, for instance, can hardly be understood without taking recourse to the willing subject. In this vein, the authors address topics such as the genealogy of the concept of willing selves, the discourse on agency in neuroscience and sociology, the political debate on volition within neoliberal and neoconservative regimes, approaches toward novel forms of relational responsibility as well as moral evaluations in conceptualizing autonomy

Rescaling the local: multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy. Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management. On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples

Joined up policy in practice? The coherence and impacts of the local government modernisation agenda

The last decade has witnessed a raft of new policies designed to transform the politics and performance of local authorities in the UK. Over the next three years, a specially commissioned themed section of Local Government Studies will explore the impact of these policies drawing on recent empirical studies by leading researchers in the field. This paper, the first in the series, sets the scene by tracing the evolution of key policies, analysing their objectives and assessing the extent to which they can, as central government has claimed, be seen as a coherent package of complementary policies. It concludes that whilst at first sight the links between policies within the Local Government Modernisation Agenda are not obvious, policies have become increasingly holistic. Local authority officers perceive them to be interacting in ways that contribute to the achievement of service improvement, more effective community leadership, increased stakeholder engagement, greater accountability and increased public confidence. However, the lack of ‘joined up’ working across Whitehall presents significant problems for councils and other agencies that are responsible for local service delivery and a continuing challenge for central government