Paul Hoggett

Paul Hoggett
University of the West of England, Bristol | UWE Bristol · Centre for Psycho Social Studies

About

156
Publications
19,396
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Introduction
Although my 'day job' took me into urban sociology and public management I've always been interested in the interface between psychoanalysis and politics. I helped set up the Climate Psychology Alliance in 2012 and my work focuses on shame, ressentiment, denial, nihilism and, for light relief, on the nature of love.

Publications

Publications (156)
Chapter
Compassion plays a key role in politics. It is a key, perhaps the key, moral sentiment and perhaps along with anger at injustice (the focus of the previous chapter by Simon Thompson) it is central to what we might think of as “progressive” political struggles and campaigns. For example, Blair’s recent attempt to kick-start a concerted international...
Book
This timely book critically addresses the intersection between power, politics and emotions. Challenging traditional dichotomies which counterpose rationalist to non-rationalist epistemologies, it offers a sustained argument for a more complete and integrated rationalism and helps us understand emotions in contemporary social and political life.
Article
Full-text available
Chapter
In contrast to North America, where interest in the human actor as agent has been around longer, in Europe interest in human agency in the social sciences has been more recent, a consequence of the crisis and decline of structuralist and post-structuralist models of social action. However, both sides of the Atlantic appear to have in common a conce...
Article
This paper is a discussion of my own personal engagement with psychoanalysis and politics and political activism and the way in which they may, or may not fit together or converge. It is also about moving on and the way in which psychoanalytic ideas have increasingly played a more prominent role in both my research and writing. Ultimately I argue,...
Article
Paradoxically, the more powerful the USA has become the more that paranoia seems to mark its relation to itself and to others. In this article we argue that there is a connection between its denial of its own destructiveness, self-idealization expressed in the belief that America represents the end point of the civilizing process towards which all...
Article
The emotional and psychological aspects of joint working are examined in this article, providing a powerful explanation for the continuing difficulties in achieving joined-up government. Drawing on the sociology of community, psycho-dynamics of inter-group behaviour and theories of identity and difference, the author argues that New Labour's vision...
Article
This paper draws on recent research conducted by the authors to examine the nature of board/executive relations in three different kinds of Local Public Spending Body (LPSB). Big variations are noted, between and within sectors, in the way in which boards organize themselves and the degree of power they have in relation to executives. In all organi...
Article
Like Marxists before, greens are trenchant critics of the commodification of human life by consumer capitalism. They have been persistent advocates of less materialistic ways of living but, as such, have been easily dismissed as champions of frugal, small-scale community living. This essay argues that a society which fostered non-materialistic ways...
Article
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Article
English This article frames and highlights critical themes emerging from the contributions to this Best Value section: that Best Value possesses subtle, and not so subtle, political, organisational, strategic and governmental dimensions. Drawing on these themes we develop our own argument that, during Blair’s first term, Best Value was presented as...
Article
English Proponents of deliberative democracy claim that it can provide a fair, efficient and creative method of collective decision making. In practice, however, all groups, including those consulted within public spaces for deliberation such as consultative forums, are,in part, characterised by emotional dynamics that threaten to undermine such de...
Article
The recent concern to develop a radical but critical account of agency in social policy is to be welcomed. However this article questions whether the work of A. Giddens can provide an adequate foundation for such a project. Giddens's account of the welfare subject contains several weaknesses. It is voluntaristic and yet paradoxically it cannot offe...
Article
This article argues that the emotional life of community organizations and their members has been a neglected feature of the community development process and one that has been detrimental to their strength and vitality. After a brief review of the dominant rational-instrumental models of change within community development the articles sets out to...
Article
Foreword Acknowledgements Unreasonable Subjects Strangers to Ourselves? Conflict, Difference and Dialogue A Place for Experience Building Castles in the Sand: Racial and Ethnic Identities in Civil Society Finding Your Voice Mobilising Fictions The Internal Establishment Hatred of Dependency Ethical Foundations of Welfare Universalism Bibliography I...
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Full-text available
Using case study evidence from an investigation of `quality' initiatives and working practices in three offices within a District of the Benefits Agency (BA), this article examines the contradictory role of new public management on employees. Decentralised management, performance related pay, teamwork philosophies and the promotion of a `customer'...
Article
Local Public Spending Bodies (LPSBs) occupy an important position in the contemporary structures of governance in the UK. As exemplars of many of the diverse characteristics of the New Public Management, LPSBs inhabit the fuzzy space between the public and private spheres, both in terms of organizational structure and service delivery. One finding...
Article
Since 1989 processes of economic reform and restructuring in Eastern Europe have been a focus for considerable analysis. Less attention has been given to what might be called the ‘bottom‐up’ processes of economic transformation, that is the development of the small and medium shed business sector in Eastern European economies. This paper tries to r...
Article
Presents initial findings from research undertaken in 1996 for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation into the internal governance of further education corporations, housing associations and training and enterprise councils. Discusses the relationship between board members and senior officers in these organizations by focusing on the distinctions drawn bet...
Article
The impact of postmodernism on theories of social policy has called into question the established basis of welfare provision. Existing compromises between universalism and particularism, equality and diversity, have been unsettled. This paper re-examines the question of the appropriate balance between these values in light of the issues postmoderni...
Chapter
Full-text available
The chapter presents a comparative study of the development of the small firm sector in Bulgaria, Hungary, (North) Macedonia and Slovenia. We argue that differences in initial conditions and in the experience of market and quasi-market forms of economic relations, combined with associated differences in political and social attitudes towards the gr...
Article
This article looks at patterns of interaction and exclusion across ‘racial’ and ethnic boundaries within a variety of local ‘community initiatives’ in three areas ‐Bristol, Leicester and Tower Hamlets. This article is based upon seven case studies carried out over an eighteen month period as part of a Home Office research project that was concerned...
Chapter
Concern about quangos is not new but has again become a much publicised theme within contemporary debates on the nature of government. Whilst national and regional bodies such as the Housing Corporation and the various funding councils for education have a significant impact on the governance of localities, the focus of this chapter is on those loc...
Article
The way in which therapeutic models and language have been drawn upon to provide support for concepts of human flexibility and human resource development’ in the enterprise culture of the 1980s and 1990s is described. The use of humane managerial rhetoric to mask the practice of increasingly ruthless public and private-sector organisations, and the...
Article
The way in which therapeutic models and language have been drawn upon to provide support for concepts of human flexibility and ‘human resource development’ in the enterprise culture of the 1980s and 1990s is described. The use of humane managerial rhetoric to mask the practice of increasingly ruthless public and private-sector organisations, and th...
Article
Why and how do black people lose out in the provision of social housing? This was the question that we set out to examine, looking at the situation in two London boroughs with a declared commitment to anti‐racism in the late 1980s. Previous studies had focused on the role of officer discretion, and a popular strategy of ‘institutional hygiene’ had...
Article
This article seeks to share some of the "lessons' which have emerged from a study undertaken of community action within three multi-racial localities in Britain - Bristol, Leicester and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Within each of the three localities relations between various communities had to a differing extent become "racialised'. Ethnic...
Article
In the UK the management and organisation of the public sector has been undergoing dramatic changes for over a decade now. The organisational change processes include privatisation (eg. of what were the public utilities), deregulation (eg. of bus transport), competitive tendering (for both professional and non-professional services), the creation o...
Article
In this article we provide an account of the process of doing social scientific research — in this case an eighteen month study of 'multi-racial' community initiatives in three different localities in the UK. Given the transience of many such initiatives and the contested meanings that both 'race' and 'community' have acquired the experience of doi...
Chapter
In this chapter we examine the experience of the London Borough of Islington in developing a network of neighbourhood forums. It can be claimed that the council has gone further than any other local authority in the UK in attempting to improve the quality of public involvement in local government. While the bold steps taken by Islington are clearly...
Chapter
In Chapter 2 we argued that local authorities need to concern themselves as much with improving the quality of government as with improving the quality of local public services. In fact, these are not separate tasks because, ultimately, the quality of public services depends on there being a set of pressures for service improvement which reside out...
Chapter
Local government in the United Kingdom is currently undergoing a profound shift in the way it organises its activities and the way it relates to the public it serves. The changes of the 1980s and the 1990s have catapulted local government from relative obscurity into a highly visible role at the centre of national political debates. Indeed, it is p...
Chapter
Full-text available
Recent debates about the role, form and function of local government have tended to focus on local authorities as mechanisms for delivering services. Yet we have argued for some years that while local government does offer a range of ways of providing good quality service, it is about much more than service delivery (Hambleton, 1988; Hambleton and...
Chapter
In this book we seek to outline a vision of a responsive, flexible and above all democratic approach to organising public, and specifically local government, services. As we explained in Chapter 1, decentralisation may assume a variety of forms, but in the context of local government the dominant form will tend to be one which gives emphasis to spa...
Chapter
Local government in the UK is in deep trouble. In Chapter 1 we outlined the main dimensions of the current crisis and explained how the Thatcher government, elected in 1979, introduced a series of measures designed to undermine the power of local authorities, to slash central government financial support to local government and to introduce market...
Chapter
In this chapter, we assess the degree of organisational change achieved in Islington and Tower Hamlets and, where possible, the impact of this upon service delivery. Do the new arrangements constitute a radical departure from the traditional bureaucratic forms that Weber (1948) outlined? In classical terms, bureaucracies have been perceived as orde...
Chapter
The purpose of this chapter is to provide new ways of understanding the changing nature of management in local government. First we provide a context by examining the radically new approaches to the organisation of the production of goods and services which have emerged within both the public and private sectors during the last decade or so. Specif...
Chapter
In Chapter 6 we sought to extend and develop existing models of citizen participation and control to provide a framework from which to consider how, in practice, the balance between citizens and the local state could be shifted in favour of the former. Although the framework we offered may, to many readers, have seemed quite complex, in one crucial...
Chapter
In examining the forms of local democracy to have emerged in Islington and Tower Hamlets it is important to discern the particular meaning given to local democracy by the political groups in control of each borough — then we can examine the formal arrangements developed for participation and the functions they have performed. In the previous chapte...
Book
This book provides an authoritative and detailed examination of neighbourhood decentralisation in practice. It locates the drive towards decentralisation within the context of changing ideas about the nature of public service management and new demands by different groups of citizens for active involvement in decisions which affect their lives. It...
Article
The Kleinian tradition within psychoanalysis proposes that human development requires the existence of a benign social medium which is reliable and flexible enough for fear to be contained without being visited upon the other. Such a medium finds representation in a variety of psychological and social spaces, spaces where experience can be held ont...
Article
This paper examines the crisis of the bureaucratic mode of organisation within public and private sectors and the emergence of new forms of organisational control within which maximal operational decentralisation occurs alongside the further centralisation of strategic command. It is suggested that the new basic principle of post bureaucratic manag...
Article
Devolved management has been the recommended solution to many of the problems of centralised public bureaucracies, but what does it mean in practice? In particular, how much control should be retained at the centre and how much allocated to service managers?
Chapter
In a territory as yet so little explored as ‘leisure’ there can hardly be said to be ‘traditions’ of analysis and debate, terms and definitions. At the same time, any cursory glance at the burgeoning literature would show quite clearly some emerging points of consensus as well as some more questionable assumptions. One particularly healthy aspect o...
Article
The Labour Party has a restricted socialist vision of the welfare state as a machine or `system' which can be run through sound administration, This view underpins both local and national labourism, seeking technical solutions to political problems.Labourism simply takes on the form of the state as a model for administration without questioning eit...
Article
In the concentration on the leisure patterns and aspirations of individuals, we have lost sight of the extremely varied and significant ways in which people come together to undertake their activities. What is commonly termed the `voluntary sector' is an immensely rich and important area of collective activity in which participants, by and large, c...

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