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The governance of mundane urban nuisances: Examining the influence of neoliberal reason on regulatory practices in Brisbane, Australia
Abstract
Existing research demonstrates how the governance of urban nuisances is often linked to the punitive treatment of marginalised subjects and the neoliberal imperatives that drive this. Yet, whilst the discourse of nuisance disproportionately effects marginalised populations, it is also applied to other urban subjects and problems. Drawing on a qualitative study of nuisance governance in Brisbane, Australia, this paper extends upon the existing literature by investigating how nuisances are governed in the wider community, paying particular attention to the role of punitive practices and neoliberal rationalities in this process. It shows how a broader array of neoliberal rationalities inform nuisance governance than acknowledged in previous research, which has predominantly focused on the political-economic rationality of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’. It shows, furthermore, that these rationalities do not merely promote punitive responses to nuisance problems, but rather combine punishment with more traditionally ‘liberal’ governance practices that seek to facilitate self-governance. I argue that taking account of this broader array of nuisance governance practices enables us to better understand what is specific about the treatment of marginalised urban populations, as well as deepening our understanding of the relationship between neoliberal rationalities and punitive governance practices.
... While the marginalisation and removal of the poorest has been well-documented (Wacquant 2008;Fassin 2013), and its structural causes explained (Brenner 2011), more diffuse practices targeting wider populations remain under-theorised (Reigner 2015). In a recent issue of City, this line of thought prompted Clarke (2019) to consider how the Australian city of Brisbane resorted to a neoliberal rationality in handling so-called nuisances. Clarke (2019, 526), in paraphrasing Valverde (2012Valverde ( , 2011, explained that "nuisance is a relational phenomenon that emerges when one or more parties are disturbed or bothered by the conduct or property of another." ...
... As Valverde (2011) argues, nuisance is central, historically and yet today, in "seeing like a city". Indeed, canines constitute a key source of nuisance in contemporary cities (Instone and Sweeney 2014;Clarke 2019), and have for decades, even centuries. For example, as early as the year 1900, public authorities in Calgary were receiving complaints regarding the disorder caused by ranchers bringing in packs of "coyote hounds" when visiting Calgary and "letting them lie about the streets, sometimes for a week at a time, to the annoyance of pedestrians especially of ladies" (City of Calgary 2006). ...
... A nuisance occurs when someone' s conduct and use of property negatively affects one or several parties. Despite their variety, nuisances of all types are relational phenomena (Valverde 2011;Clarke 2019), in that nuisances involve several parties, but also in that a nuisance "is contingent upon the ostensible norms, values and expectations of a particular 'community' or neighbourhood to which the relevant parties belong" (Clarke 2019, 3). For dogs, the nuisance concept translates into such questions as: How loud, where, and for how long, can a dog "reasonably" bark? ...
The field of urban studies has scrutinised digital technologies and their proliferation, but rather little attention has been paid to databases. Furthermore, contributions to date have focused almost exclusively on how digital technologies interface with human populations in cities. By contrast, we draw attention to databases maintained by city governments that contain identifying information about pet dogs and their legal owners in cities. Methodologically, our study merges database ethnography with multi-species ethnography. Conceptually, we contend that “dog data” contribute to orderly conduct in urban space. This orientation to urban governance illustrates “trans-biopolitics,” in the sense of socially-situated and technologically-mediated power relations that operate through multi-species entanglements. As such, this article extends the literature on (neoliberal) urban policing by providing a fine-grained analysis of how emergent forms of social control become palpable. In general terms, the adoption and use of digital technologies by city governments has increased their capacity to enforce rules and regulations. Overall, we find that the more legible dogs and their legal owners become in databases, the more governable both dogs and people become in urban life.
... Entre estas han recibido especial atención las políticas laboristas de nuevo cuño en el Reino Unido y su enfoque de control del incivismo en un contexto que se describe como de pérdida de respeto Flint y Nixon, 2006;Hodgkinson y Tilley, 2011). La ordenanza de civismo de Barcelona forma parte de una tendencia observada en la mayor parte de los países occidentales de definiciones de la desviación y la inadecuación que, debido a su laxitud, incorporan un número creciente de comportamientos (Galdon-Clavell, 2015: 10), en un contexto de incremento de las percepciones de inseguridad y miedo al crimen que derivan en la adopción (y aceptación) de políticas disciplinarias y punitivas de gestión, no solo de los comportamientos incívicos, sino de las molestias urbanas en general (Clarke, 2019). ...
En 2006 entró en vigor en Barcelona la popularmente conocida como «Ordenanza de Civismo» con el explicitado fin de promover la convivencia a través de la regulación de los comportamientos en los espacios públicos de la ciudad. Este texto analiza la relación existente entre la entrada en vigor de la normativa (y la hiperregulación resultante) y la incomodidad y el malestar de ciertos grupos populares de la ciudad ante un abanico creciente de comportamientos en el espacio urbano. Tras una década, el mayor éxito de esta ordenanza ha sido la inclusión en el lenguaje cotidiano de la ciudad de la terminología del «civismo», donde la calificación peyorativa de incívico ha pasado a formar parte del léxico habitual, no solo de los grupos promotores de la ordenanza, sino incluso del de aquellos grupos cuyos comportamientos esta buscaba regular. Este texto analiza los orígenes y usos de la terminología del «civismo» en el contexto de la ciudad de Barcelona, incluyendo sus patrones de aparición y recurrencia en la prensa y su cambiante significado. En una segunda parte el texto muestra cómo grupos populares de barrios periféricos de la ciudad como El Carmel (conformados en su mayor parte por migrantes internos y sus descendientes) han apropiado la terminología, empleándola para marcar la diferencia entre ellos y los incívicos otros llegados con posterioridad que también habitan, pero no son del barrio.
In this article we move beyond the binary division between care and punishment in urban studies of homelessness to examine how caring institutions are themselves crucial to the punitive and exclusionary project of capitalist urbanisation. Based on ethnographic and archival analysis of homelessness management in Fresno, California, and Phoenix, Arizona, we show how punitive measures and institutions of care often emerge simultaneously and operate in tandem as part of a broader scheme for urban revitalisation. Further, we show how caring institutions themselves often perform the function of controlling homeless people’s movements in the city, while punitive institutions adopt more caring tactics. Thus, we argue for a focus on how compassion and criminalisation are regularly blurred.
This paper seeks to refine the analytical tools available to critical policy scholars for analyzing policy problems by extending upon the popular ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach. WPR is highly effective at revealing how policy problems are contingent upon prevailing discourses; however, it is less effective for addressing how this contingency unfolds at the level of practice in particular governance context. Hence, this paper argues for supplementing the WPR approach with an analysis of the situated practices that give rise to particular problematizations. To demonstrate the utility of studying situated practices, a case study is presented wherein this approached is deployed alongside a more standard WPR analysis. The case study is based on research into the adoption of ‘customer focus’ policies by the compliance branch of an Australian city council. The paper makes a contribution to literature on policy problems, policy practice, compliance-oriented services, and customer focus.
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.
Brisbane is Australia’s third largest city, and capital of the state of Queensland. It has a sprawling urban footprint and impending connections to neighbouring metropolises, said to create a ‘200 km city’. The governing body of Brisbane controls the largest municipality in Australia, with unrivalled opportunity to influence both urban planning and marketing for the CBD and suburbs. Brisbane is home to over one million people, and its population has grown rapidly over the past decades, doubling in the past 40 years. Brisbane represents the quintessential city with an emerging quest for urbanity, both in brand and physical form. The relationships between the city’s urban planning and its branding is not well examined, despite clear entanglement between these two strategies. We use a case-study analysis of both Brisbane City (which is glossed as the Central Business District) and an outer-suburban area, Inala, to interrogate how urban identities and brand are being constructed in relation to their social settings and governance, with particular reference to the importance of city branding and its relationship to planning strategies. The manifestation of branding and relationship to place qualities at the core and on the periphery of Brisbane are examined, with relevance for other rapidly growing, ambitious cities. The focus of Brisbane’s push for urbanity is on the city centre, and is not representative of the typical suburban condition, nor of many cities dominated by suburban forms. An analysis of place brand, planning strategies and resident’s responses to place, from planning, architectural and anthropological perspectives are offered, as an alternative reading of place brand from the marketing dominated approach usually favoured in branding analysis. We make recommendations to incorporate a more complete version of place in the construction of a “genuine” urbanity. We argue that the recognition of resident-centred place identity in place branding will produce more socially sustainable places, as well as more authentic city brands.
This paper considers the context for the development of the concept of responsive regulation, namely the transcending of the deregulation debate. It argues that claims regarding responsive regulation when allied to risk-based rationales for enforcement can, in fact, allow a “deregulatory” momentum to develop. This argument is grounded with reference to a case study of the regulation of workplace health and safety in the UK, with a particular focus upon the period 2000–2010. The paper casts doubt on the relevance and robustness of the concept of responsive regulation. In a context that might have been fertile ground for developing genuinely responsive regulatory policy, empirically we find the development of policies that are better described as “regulatory degradation.” Thus we argue in this paper that, whatever the intentions of its proponents, there is a logical affinity between responsive regulation, and effective de-regulation, and that it is this affinity that has provided a convenient political rationale for the emergence of a neo-liberal regulatory settlement in the UK.
Although responsive regulation includes much more than the enforcement pyramid, it is the pyramid that has received most attention from academics and practitioners. This is despite the fact that the implementation of the strategy of gradual escalation has proved challenging in many respects. Why has the enforcement pyramid been so attractive? Apart from its scholarly and policy usefulness, this paper suggests that it appeals to practitioners because it provides a theoretical endorsement of the professional autonomy to which practitioners aspire. It was, and is, still appealing to scholars because it provides a practical means to improve regulation, which is congruent with the dominant neoliberal reflex to depoliticize the regulation of capitalist economies. All in all, because responsive regulation has very largely been reduced to the enforcement pyramid, the literature has neglected the normative issues surrounding the regulation of capitalist economies that were central to Ayres and Braithwaite.
The publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s has provided new insight into crucial developments in his late work, including the return to an analysis of the state and the introduction of biopolitics as a central theme. According to one dominant interpretation, these shifts did not entail a fundamental methodological break; the approach Foucault developed in his work on knowledge/power was simply applied to new objects. The present article argues that this reading — which is colored by the overwhelming privilege afforded to Discipline and Punish in secondary literature — obscures an important modification in Foucault’s method and diagnostic style that occurred between the introduction of biopolitics in 1976 (in Society Must Be Defended) and the lectures of 1978 ( Security, Territory, Population) and 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics). Foucault’s initial analysis of biopolitics was couched in surprisingly epochal and totalizing claims about the characteristic forms of power in modernity. The later lectures, by contrast, suggest what I propose to call a ‘topological’ analysis that examines the ‘patterns of correlation’ in which heterogeneous elements — techniques, material forms, institutional structures and technologies of power — are configured, as well as the redeployments through which these patterns are transformed. I also indicate how attention to the topological dimension of Foucault’s analysis might change our understanding of key themes in his late work: biopolitics, the analysis of thinking, and the concept of governmentality.
Private and public nuisance have been the subject of extensive legal scholarship; however, far less has been said about nuisance as a sociolegal and political concept. Bringing a normative perspective to the analysis of nuisance claims, this article seeks to draw together discussions of nuisance in very different contexts - from the tortious injuries caused by sounds, vibrations and odours crossing property boundaries to the everyday claims that particular identities or statuses represent an impediment to the pursuit of legitimate interests. In attempting to determine the common ground, if any, that exists between these different nuisance usages, the article focuses on the ways in which freedom, control, responsibility, attention, purpose and place have been articulated. My aim in doing so is threefold: first, to analyse the norms and values underlying nuisance as a discourse and regulatory technique; second, to consider whether engaging in nuisance conduct has anything to offer a progressive or radical politics; and third, to consider the limits and potential in reconceptualizing nuisance to designate new, counterhegemonic common senses.
This paper examines the intelligibility of authoritarian measures within Foucauldian analyses of the liberal government of the state. Such measures are understood as following from a liberal understanding of the task of government itself. This understanding rests on a distinction between the legal and political order (of 'the state') and a 'liberal police' of what is exterior to it, classically conceived as 'civil society'. The relation between these two aspects is conceived as a series of 'foldings' between the two sides of a liberal governing, which turn the injunction to govern through freedom into a set of binding obligations potentially or actually enforceable by coercive or sovereign instruments. The paper places this perspective within aspects of the genealogies of economy, poverty, welfare and police and discusses the trajectories of such foldings in the present.
Studies of urban governance, as well as the overlapping literature on law and space, have been heavily influenced by critical analyses of how spatial techniques helped constitute modern disciplinary powers and knowledges. The rise of land-use control and land-use planning seem at first sight to be perfect examples of the disciplining of populations through space by the kind of governmental gaze dubbed by Scott (1998) as “seeing like a state.” But a detailed genealogical study that puts the emergence of the notion of “land use” in the broader context of urban governance technologies reveals that modernist techniques of land use planning, such as North American zoning, are more flexible, contradictory, and fragile than critical urbanists assume. Legal tools of premodern origin that target nonquantifiable offensiveness and thus construct an embodied and relational form of urban subjectivity keep reappearing in the present day. When cities attempt to govern conflicts about the use of space through objective rules, these rules often undermine themselves in a dialectical process that results in the return to older notions of offensiveness. This article argues that the dialectical process by which modernist “seeing like a state” techniques give way to older ways of seeing (e.g., the logic of nuisance) plays a central role in the epistemologically hybrid approach to governing space that is here called “seeing like a city.”
The shift to an entrepreneurial city has inaugurated changes in the surveillance and control of urban space through a myriad of technologies and legal–moral ordering practices. This has occurred as cities attempt to reimage and remarket themselves in the context of regional, national and international inter-urban competition for capital investment. A re-emphasis on the visual in the politics of the street underpins changes in the primary definition over urban spatiality and statecraft. This article examines these powerful definitional processes as a strategy to create visually pleasing space that is impacting on discourses and practices of surveillance that target forms of 'crime' and 'incivility' and contribute to the spatial production process itself. It is argued that in producing urban spaces of an entrepreneurial kind, contemporary surveillance practices need to be placed within wider debates about continuing urban inequality and the meaning of spatial justice.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
A growing literature examines the extent to which the criminal justice system perpetuates poverty and inequality. This research examines how anti-homeless laws produce various forms of police interactions that fall short of arrest, yet have wide-ranging impacts on the urban poor. Our analysis draws on a citywide survey of currently and recently homeless people, along with 43 in-depth interviews, to examine and reveal the mechanisms through which consistent punitive interactions, including move-along orders, citations, and destruction of property, systematically limit homeless people’s access to services, housing, and jobs, while damaging their health, safety, and well-being. Our findings also suggest that anti-homeless laws and enforcement fail to reduce urban disorder, but create instead a spatial churn in which homeless people circulate between neighborhoods and police jurisdictions rather than leaving public space. We argue that these laws and their enforcement, which affected the majority of study participants, constitute a larger process of pervasive penality—consistent punitive interactions with state officials that rarely result in arrest, but that do material and psychological harm. This process not only reproduces homelessness, but also deepens racial, gender, and health inequalities among the urban poor.
Since the late 1990s, Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row has undergone private and state‐sanctioned policing practices within the fifty‐block neighborhood. These policing practices are fueled by increased commercial and real‐estate development to dispossess and contain the mostly Black homeless and housed residents. Grassroots organizations and residents have responded to gentrification‐induced policing by claiming a homeless right to property, transforming neighborhood politics. This article examines these neighborhood politics as a process of contested development. Contested development reveals the push‐and‐pull contradictions that occur when spatial difference is challenged and reproduced. Through the sphere of urban property, the contested development of property in Skid Row restores or resists the generation of spatial difference. In so doing, the claims of homeless residents and grassroots organizations to a right to property engender transformative police reforms while at the same time igniting revanchist policing methods.
As people who live in closest proximity to us, the conduct of neighbours can have an impact upon our lives, even if they are relative strangers. While previous research has generally examined the positive effects of good neighbour interactions, neighbours can also be a source of nuisance, conflict and distress. In the advent of socio-structural processes of urban policy and change – such as gentrification and densification – the taken-for-granted conventions that once regulated neighbour interactions are being eroded, potentially leading to greater levels of neighbour problems and complaints. In this paper, we apply a latent modelling approach to identify subgroups of neighbourhoods based on their profiles of neighbour problems and to assess whether these subgroups are characterised by the degree of social change in the neighbourhood towards the dual processes of gentrification and densification. The findings show that high intensity problems are associated with both processes, but that class factors of gentrification are more influential than density in accounting for neighbour tensions.
The article investigates how governmental responses to problems arising from urban population growth contribute to the post-political governance of cities. It does this through a case study of the city of Brisbane, Australia. Brisbane markets itself as a medium-sized metropolis that balances economic growth with a level of urban liveability not found in larger cities. Yet, there are signs that rapid population growth and consolidation are undermining liveability in some Brisbane neighbourhoods, as evidenced by a rise in urban nuisances and neighbour complaints reported to the City Council. Drawing on theories of urban post-politics, we analyse how the Council recasts these symptoms of urban overload as a ‘techno-managerial’ problem that can be addressed by improving efficiency and ‘customer focus’ within its compliance branch. This strategy both eschews political questions about the compatibility of growth and liveability, and promotes an economic and transactional conception of urban citizenship that downplays urban politics more generally. This strategy is significant as it relates to the local state’s internal administrative practices and relations with its citizens, rather than the forms of governance-beyond-the-state that are usually associated with urban post-politics. We conclude that the identification of government-centred depoliticisation strategies indicates that urban post-politics is more comprehensive and multifaceted than previously thought.
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
This chapter explores neoliberalism not as a specific kind of expertise but as a form of critical technopolitical reflection on the way that the authority of truth and the legitimate exercise of political power both ground and limit each other. Focusing on the work of the political scientist Vincent Ostrom, it examines how American neoliberalism emerged as a critique of expert rule established during the Progressive Era and the New Deal and as an argument in favor of an alternative model of administration that is embedded in a “polycentric” democratic polity. It proposes that Ostrom’s work suggests a reappraisal of the critique of technical expertise and democracy that has been advanced in recent social theory.
The literature on governmentality has had a major impact across the social sciences over the past decade, and much of this has drawn upon the pioneering work by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose. This volume will bring together key papers from their work for the first time, including those that set out the basic frameworks, concepts and ethos of this approach to the analysis of political power and the state, and others that analyse specific domains of the conduct of conduct, from marketing to accountancy, and from the psychological management of organizations to the government of economic life.
Bringing together empirical papers on the government of economic, social and personal life, the volume demonstrates clearly the importance of analysing these as conjoint phenomena rather than separate domains, and questions some cherished boundaries between disciplines and topic areas. Linking programmes and strategies for the administration of these different domains with the formation of subjectivities and the transformation of ethics, the papers cast a new light on some of the leading issues in contemporary social science modernity, democracy, reflexivity and individualisation.
This volume will be indispensable for all those, from whatever discipline in the social sciences, who have an interest in the concepts and methods necessary for critical empirical analysis of power relations in our present.
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Since the turn of the 21st century, several US cities have witnessed the resurgence of large-scale homeless encampments. This paper explains how and why such encampments emerged during a period of national economic expansion through a comparative study of encampments in Fresno, California and Seattle, Washington. Contrary to the widespread media coverage of tent cities as a consequence of the most recent recession, the paper argues they are instead rooted in penal and welfare urban policies. Precipitating as both protest and containment, durable encampments relieve the fiscal and legitimation crises of criminalization and shelterization for the local state and simultaneously function as preferred safe grounds to the shelter for homeless people in both cities. Rather than contradicting the existing policies and theories of the ongoing punitive exclusion of marginalized populations, the seclusion of the homeless into large encampments compliments its goals of managing marginality across the city.
Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism.Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.
Neo-liberalism encourages the rule of private interests coordinated by markets and arms'-length regulation by central government and regulatory bodies, and also through the explosion of audit and scrutiny. Part of this approach is the reconceptualization of users of services or functions as customers even though a quasi supplier relationship does not seem to be involved, such as between a regulator and a regulatee. This empowerment of the customer has a consequential impact on the regulation process. This paper theorizes this dynamic of power as recursive governmentality. It examines the change and unintended consequences in a regulatory authority, HM Revenue and Customs, the UK tax administration, as it responds to this policy context and how this leads to a search for a new identity as a customer-service provider.
Previous sociolegal research has neglected how the work of corporate security agents is enabled and constrained by legal knowledges. This article explores how legal knowledges shape the work of municipal corporate security (MCS) agents in Canadian cities. MCS offices are a new development in municipal governments. By drawing on analysis of freedom of information requests and interviews with MCS managers and staff, we investigate how legal knowledges shape MCS practices in Canadian cities, with a focus on trespass law, licensing law, litigation, labor law, privacy law, and workplace violence legislation that converge in MCS offices. MCS agents must interpret, translate, and apply these laws in their municipal jurisdiction or urban problem space to confront the defining element of the urban milieu—nuisance—but also to mitigate the risks. Interpretation and use of numerous laws by MCS staff constitute a distinctively urban way of governing through legal knowledge.
Focusing on Glasgow's East End, home to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper explores the ways in which narratives of decline, 'blight' and decay play a central role in stigmatising the local population. 'Glasgow East' represents the new urban frontier in a city that has been heralded in recent decades as a model of successful post-industrial transformation. Utilising Loic Wacquant's arguments about advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation in the urban context, we argue that narratives of decline and redevelopment are part of a wider ideological onslaught on the local population, intended to pave the way for low grade and flexible forms of employment, for punitive workfare schemes and for upwards rent restructuring. To this end, the media and politicians have played a particularly important role in constructing Glasgow East as a marker of a 'broken Britain'. While the focus of this paper is on Glasgow's East End, the arguments therein have a wider UK and global resonance, reflected in the numerous cases whereby stigmatised locales of relegation are being re-imagined as elements in wider processes of neo-liberalisation in the city.
The anthropology of neoliberalism has become polarised between a hegemonic economic model anchored by variants of market rule and an insurgent approach fuelled by derivations of the Foucaultian notion of governmentality. Both conceptions obscure what is ‘neo’ about neoliberalism: the reengineering and redeployment of the state as the core agency that sets the rules and fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to realising markets. Drawing on two decades of field-based inquiries into the structure, experience and political treatment of urban marginality in advanced society, I propose a via media between these two approaches that construes neoliberalism as an articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third. Bourdieu's concept of bureaucratic field offers a powerful tool for dissecting the revamping of the state as stratification and classification machine driving the neoliberal revolution from above and serves to put forth three theses: (1) neoliberalism is not an economic regime but a political project of state-crafting that puts disciplinary ‘workfare’, neutralising ‘prisonfare’ and the trope of individual responsibility at the service of commodification; (2) neoliberalism entails a rightward tilting of the space of bureaucratic agencies that define and distribute public goods and spawns a Centaur-state that practises liberalism at the top of the class structure and punitive paternalism at the bottom; (3) the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state is an integral component of the neoliberal Leviathan, such that the police, courts and prison need to be brought into the political anthropology of neoliberal rule.
This new in paperback edition provides a comprehensive, state-of-the art review of current research in the field of New Public Management (NPM) reform. Aimed primarily at a student readership with a special interest in contemporary public-sector reforms, The Ashgate Research Companion to New Public Management offers a refreshing and up-to-date analysis of key issues of modern administrative reforms.Designed as a one-stop reference point and revision guide, this textbook comprises 29 chapters divided into six thematic sessions, each with chapters ranging across a variety of crucial topics in the field of New Public Management reforms and beyond.The principal themes addressed are: • Processes and driving forces. Basic theoretical foundations are discussed as well as the importance of institutional environments, copying, diffusion and translation of reform ideas and solutions among countries • The question of convergence or divergence among countries. Four families of countries with different state traditions are examined: Anglo-Saxon countries, Scandinavia, Continental Europe and Asian countries.• Developments in the ’soft’ welfare sectors of hospital systems, universities and welfare administration, and the ’harder’ sectors like regulation of utilities in areas such as telecommunications and energy.• The effects and implications of NPM reforms, both the more direct and the narrower effects on efficiency and the broader impact on democracy, trust and public sector values.• What new trends are occurring beyond the NMP movement, such as whole-of-government initiatives, Neo-Weberian models and New Public Governance as a new trend.Covering not only the NPM movement in general but also the driving forces behind the reform and its various trajectories and special features, this important contribution is essential reading for students and anyone wanting to expand their knowledge of administrative reform.
Customer‐driven government is a much‐stressed theme of contemporary public management reform. This article identifies 16 ways to consumerize public services and uses that typology to examine the delivery of four services in three countries. It argues that consumerization has no single meaning, that different state traditions emphasize consumerism in different ways, and that different forms of public service consumerism may be incompatible with one another.
This paper seeks to advance understanding of compliance through identifying the constituent elements of four empirically derived postures of regulatees: resistance and disengagement (associated with non-compliance), and managerial accommodation and capture (associated with compliance) (V. Braith-waite et al. 1994). The nature of these postures is investigated through two theoretical frameworks, Meidinger's (1987) notion of regulatory culture (and the construct of social bonds) and Merton's (1968) modes of adaptation (and the construct of commitments to institutional goals and means). Social bonds and commitments to goals and means are important for explaining resistance, disengagement and managerial accommodation. In the case of capture of the regulatees, social bonds are more important than commitments to goals and means. The findings counsel regulatory agencies to establish trust and respect in the regulatee-regulator relationship.
Do we stand before a rising tide of incivility, of disrespect? Or, is this the latest moral panic? Examining (the UK) New Labour's approach to incivility in the city, as manifest in the respect and urban renaissance agendas, this paper argues that the current zero-tolerance approach to incivility is based upon a confused understanding of anti-social behaviour and contradictory evidence of its occurrence and impact. Ultimately, it is proposed that a version of urbanity that endeavours to enforce respect and create the respectable city will prove counter-productive. Rather, respect and the respectful city require tolerance of, and engagement with, incivility.
Research on urban incivility has made progress but has limited scope thanks to a stereotyped and policy-relevant focus on problem neighbourhoods and urban renewal. It also lacks benchmark comparative data, has almost nothing to say about interpersonal incivility and is experiencing diminishing returns to effort. A new agenda is proposed that explores everyday life incivility as this is experienced over the broader population in the course of daily routine. The Everyday Life Incivility in Australia Survey is introduced. This was a random national sample survey collecting systematic narrative information on interpersonal encounters involving a rude stranger. Findings from the study are reported here, documenting the range of low-level incivilities experienced in daily life and outlining some of their properties. The results challenge received wisdom about the corrosive effects of urban incivility on society.
‘Client focus’ seems like a counter-intuitive notion for regulatory agencies, whose job is to compel people to comply with government requirements. Yet it is becoming the catchphrase for many regulatory authorities. This article puts forward an argument, based on social exchange and regulatory theory, that a client-focused approach is not only compatible with a regulatory role, but also actually facilitates it. It recognizes that most people's propensity to comply is a function of factors other than the fear of punishment, such as their intrinsic or normative motivations and their ability to do what is required. It also assists in delineation and understanding of the proportion of regulatees who opportunistically avoid their obligations. The article advances a broader model of social exchange between regulators and regulatees.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
Customer friendliness in tax systems typically characterized by control and enforcement appears to be a contradiction in terms. But many tax agencies, like other types of public organizations, have become more customer-oriented in the last few decades. This article, comparing the administration of tax systems in Norway and the USA, describes and analyzes the driving forces behind the consumer orientation movement in tax administration in the two nations and the dilemmas and effects of trying to balance control and service. Using a broad transformative perspective, we analyze structural and cultural changes in tax administration that are related to the increase in customer orientation and also consider the symbolic aspects of catering more to taxpayers. Norway and the USA have experienced similar structural reforms, but the two countries deviate rather sharply in other respects, particularly in the much larger impact of consumer-oriented reforms in the USA.
Discourses on anti-social behaviour in the UK are embedded within a wider politics of conduct based around concepts of citizenship, self-regulation, welfare conditionality, obligations to communities and rights and responsibilities. This paper explores how the regulation of behaviour is framed within ideas of community and contractual governance and identifies the central role for housing within strategies aimed at tackling anti-social behaviour and promoting civility. It discusses the use of Anti-social Behaviour Orders in governing conduct within a wider package of regulatory mechanisms including Acceptable Behaviour Contracts and tenancy agreements. An increasing focus on governing the interactions between neighbours is identified along with techniques to achieve this, including the growing use of conditionality in welfare entitlement. The paper argues that the regulation of conduct is symbolic of significant realignments of the roles of various actors in policing residential areas and raises fundamental questions about the link between conduct, citizenship rights and the scope and ambition of governance interventions aimed at reducing anti-social behaviour at individual and community levels.
This Special Issue includes papers contributed to a workshop in 2008, called 'Sisters of Sisyphus', about New Public Management (NPM) and the human service professions. This workshop arose from discussions about the impact of neoliberalism on the welfare state, and specifically on its workforce. 'Neoliberalism' broadly means the project of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market. It also means the institutional arrangements to implement this project that have been installed, step by step, in every society under neoliberal control. Much of the workforce of the welfare state is composed of women: nurses, teachers, social workers and other occupations. Neoliberalism is rhetorically gender-neutral; the career-open-to-talents is part of its agenda of organizational restructuring. A crucial fact is that neoliberalism is not just an economic policy agenda—a re-arrangement of relations between capital and the state. The emergence of specialized research journals in the professional disciplines of teaching, nursing, social work and allied health means that they are not often juxtaposed in a collection that seeks to identify common challenges and to facilitate comparison. We invite readers to consider the convergences and divergences between the experiences of these occupational groups, and the complex relationships between gender, organization, policy and outcomes that the articles explore and suggest. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)