Performing Governance

Partnerships, Culture and New Labour

H. Dickinson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137024039
• eBook ISBN: 9781137024046
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Performing Governance sets out a new framework to assess the performance of partnerships and examines what these actually deliver. This is applied to three areas of New Labour's welfare policy; child safeguarding, urban regeneration and the modernisation of health and social care. This book contributes to understanding governance under New Labour.

1

Introduction

The period of time covering the New Labour governments of 1997–2010 was an incredibly interesting one for those concerned with issues of governance. The concept of partnership became an important mantra, one which was central to many different policy areas and aspects of civic life as New Labour set out a plan to modernise the UK and to fundamentally transform many aspects of local and national governance. This was a time of immense optimism. New Labour were elected into government by a huge margin. There was a high degree of enthusiasm for this government and a sense that they would truly make a difference in terms of the effectiveness of government and the quality of UK public services. The New Labour governments also made considerable effort to involve academics and others into its policy development and evaluation work. This was far greater than what Britain had experienced under any other governments. As Tony Blair’s ‘big tent’ was populated by a range of researchers, consultancies and academics, it certainly felt that there was a very different mood around national government and policy development.

During this time, I led an MSc programme at the University of Birmingham for managers and health and social care professionals working in inter-agency settings. Most on this programme had day jobs that involved trying to make partnership working a reality, and my conversations with these individuals sparked the ideas that are developed in this book. Often individuals would speak of the negatives of being involved in partnerships. Working in a collaborative way may raise difficulties in terms of funding, accountability structures, human resource practices, information sharing and any number of other challenges. People spoke of chaotic working arrangements, particularly for those who had roles that spanned a number of different agencies, organisations or institutions. Individuals described being burned – and burnt out – by partnership working.

Central and local government organisations alike made huge claims for partnership working, arguing that it would deliver any number of improvements. Yet the research evidence for the impact of partnerships was rather limited. When I talked to my students about this lack of evidence, they were not surprised, and individuals often described struggling to evidence the impact of their own partnerships. I found that discussions with individuals on the issues of evidence and their experiences of partnership working were intriguing. People would speak about the lack of evidence for partnerships and talk extensively about the difficulties that working in this way would generate and yet still remained remarkably wedded to the concept nonetheless. Despite this experience, they still professed a profound belief in this concept and a sense that if they just got this ‘right’ it could cure many of the ills of the world. Clearly these individuals had an interest in partnership working; they were doing a Master’s programme in the subject after all and arguably had a vested interest in the topic. However, when I read broader accounts of partnership or spoke to people operating in other policy areas, similar sorts of patterns seemed to emerge. This led me to wonder how we could begin to explain the power that the concept of partnership seemed to have which meant that individuals and organisations were willing to persist with it in the face of adverse experiences and a paucity of evidence concerning the impacts of these working practices.

In trying to understand this phenomenon, I started to think about the nature of performance and its different forms. It struck me that more attention was being paid to technical aspects of efficiency and effectiveness and rather less, in the mainstream literature at least, to the impact that these working practices had on professional practices, relationships and different forms of individual and organisational identities. Yet it seemed to me that some of these aspects were crucial in understanding where this attachment to partnership came from and why people remained unwilling to question it, even if they acknowledged the frustrating practice of it.

Aim of this book

In order to fully understand partnership, it struck me that some sort of framework could be developed that took into consideration the full range of possible performances that working in this way might produce. This would go beyond simply an interest in issues of cost-effectiveness or organisational and individual outcomes and include issues relating to culture, identity and values. This book develops such a framework, setting out a number of questions and themes that can be used to interrogate the performance of partnership. This framework therefore combines the forms of performance that the mainstream literature has typically been concerned with alongside those aspects of performance which have only tended to be considered in the more interpretive components of the literature. The aspect of performance which, I argue, has largely been missed in the mainstream literature is that of culture. This is not to say that there is nothing written about culture and partnership, indeed many authors have dealt with this issue (see Peck and Crawford, 2004; Glasby and Dickinson, 2009; Sullivan and Williams, 2009) often citing differing cultures as part of a post hoc rationalisation for why partnership has not succeeded. In these cases, different types of professional or organisational cultures are performed which seem to demonstrate different values and beliefs about public service and care. As the material set out in this book argues, these facets of collaborative working are crucial, but they do not fully encapsulate all facets of culture, and it makes the case for a more nuanced and dynamic consideration of culture and performance in respect to partnership. Ultimately, by analysing these forms of performances in conjunction with one another, this book aims to provide a more rounded and complete sense of the impact of partnerships than those typically found within the literature.

Having established this framework, Part II applies this to three different policy areas that were prominent under the New Labour governments: child safeguarding, urban regeneration and the modernisation of health and social care. Given New Labour’s extensive reform programme, there were any number of different cases I might have selected for this task. The final case study is an area that I have spent a lot of time studying and where I initially started to develop this framework. It is an area that is of great concern to most people within the UK given the importance of health services, and as the case study shows, debates about health services played an important role in the 1997 election. The other two case studies deal with topics that were of key concern to the New Labour governments, being areas of significant inequality and focusing on the most disadvantaged within British society. Both cases saw significant investments made during the New Labour governments, and partnership was an important part of their improvement initiatives. Aside from these factors, there are no other special elements of performance that led to the selection of these cases and they were simply selected to demonstrate aspects of the performance of partnership in a range of different contexts.

This book does not provide new empirical data on these forms of partnerships but draws from the extant literature to examine the impacts that partnership working had under the New Labour governments. In doing so, the perspective this book offers on partnership under New Labour stands in sharp contrast to those that are typically found in the mainstream literature. Rather than focusing on one specific form of performance, it examines many and has a particular focus on the interplay between these different forms of performances.

Ultimately, the intention of this book is not to reach a conclusion about the degree to which partnerships did or did not work under New Labour, but to provide a more nuanced account of the realities of collaborative working and the types of factors that seem to facilitate and hinder these practices. New Labour did not discover the need for governments to work collaboratively in 1997, and with a change of national government, this agenda did not go away. It is clear that given the disaggregated welfare economy that has emerged in the UK, new and relational forms will be needed, and this will likely involve different types of collaborative activity. If we know one thing about this topic, it is that collaboration is not easy and that it can’t simply be achieved by following checklists or normative prescriptions for practice. This book aims to shed light on some factors that seem to be important in collaboration and the types of performances that we might expect to be generated by these ways of working. The implications of this analysis go beyond those of the New Labour governments or the UK context and contribute to broader debates about issues of governance, particularly paying attention to the role of culture within these discussions. In doing so, this book contributes to a growing literature on governance that is influenced by interpretive perspectives on policy and practice.

Audience

This book draws on a wide range of different disciplines and contains a number of ideas that may appeal to different groups. As such there are a range of different audiences who might potentially be interested in the material contained within this text. Clearly those academic audiences with an interest in issues of governance will be interested in some of the propositions about the nature of governance and performance set out here. Graduate and some undergraduate students on political or organisational science courses may find some of the propositions set out here helpful in further understanding issues of collaboration. As the book attempts to bring together a range of different insights into the issue of performance, this may also appeal to those with broad interests on this topic, from business and management studies to sociology, anthropology and performance studies.

Those with an interest in political history, particularly with the New Labour governments, may be interested in this as an account of one of the major themes under their administrations. Within the case study chapters (Chapters 5–7), there is some detailed analysis of the topic of partnership in relation to three important subject areas under the New Labour governments. Similarly those students on programmes in relation to any of the three case study areas – child safeguarding, urban regeneration and modernisation of health and social care – may want to dip into the text for what it says about these specific subject areas. As such the book may be of interest to those on geography, urban planning, social work, social policy or health studies programmes.

Given this potentially broad range of audiences, the book has been written in such a way that if you are new to any of the topics that are contained within, there is sufficient detail to make you understand these discussions. Also, there is a range of references to other sources so that you can further research this area. Yet this is not at the expense of the depth of analysis, and efforts have been made to combine both depth and breadth of research. However, those who are already immersed in the governance or performance literature might choose to be selective in terms of their reading of this book.

Having explained where the ideas for this book came from and what it hopes to achieve, the remainder of this chapter sets out an account of the structure of the book and how the argument will be developed throughout.

Structure of the book

Part I sets out the background to the issues and develops the performance framework that is used to analyse the case studies in the second part of the book. Chapter 2 situates the debates within the context of the governance literature, setting out an account of what is meant by this concept and outlining some of the prominent debates and discussions surrounding this field. Traditionally, the mainstream governance literature has been dominated by rather rationalist accounts which reify structure and allow for little in the way of personal agency on behalf of individuals. In recent years, a decentred account of governance has started to gather prominence, with such an approach recognising the importance of micro-level factors and the ways in which individuals perceive of everyday processes surrounding governance and the types of values and beliefs that they encounter. This text attempts to bridge these two literatures, paying attention to traditional aspects of the performance of governance and those associated with a more decentred perspective. Chapter 3 sets the New Labour reforms in context, focusing particularly on the topics of partnership and modernisation. New Labour had a keen interest in modernising aspects of governance and the concept of partnership became an important tool in this quest. This chapter aims to introduce these issues within the context of debates surrounding New Labour for those who are unfamiliar with the kinds of reforms that were introduced over this period.

Chapter 4 moves on to consider the nature of performance in more detail. Like the concept of governance, this has become an important concept in the field of public management and an issue that the New Labour governments were very concerned with. The chapter argues that government and mainstream public management literatures have tended to cleave to rationalist notions of performance as expressed through efficiency and effectiveness and less attention has been paid to cultural performance. This is problematic as it excludes important components of performance relation to values, meaning and emotion. This book fills a gap by incorporating concerns with aspects of these different forms of performances with those more conventionally considered. The chapter finishes by setting out what a general theory of performance might look like and setting out the questions that will be used to interrogate the case studies in the second half of the book.

Given that most of the literature on partnerships agrees that context matters, Part II examines particular case studies of partnership working in practice and looks at the interplay between different forms of performances. Within each chapter an account of the specific context is set out so that those who are not familiar with the context of this example and the debates that were important at these times will gain an understanding of these issues. After setting out this background, each chapter employs the performance framework generated in Part I to interrogate the kinds of performances generated within these spaces. Inevitably these are not exhaustive accounts of these policy areas and entire books could be, and have been, written on these topics. These overviews are necessarily selective in illustrating the broad themes of performance generated in these different domains. Chapter 5 focuses on issues of child safeguarding which were seen as central to New Labour’s modernisation approach, not only in terms of issues of child protection, but, more broadly, safeguarding the future of the citizen workforce. Chapter 6 examines urban regeneration initiatives which were intended to address issues of poverty and attempt to reduce the inequalities that the country was increasingly encountering. Social exclusion became an important theme in this area and vast investments were made in urban regeneration schemes as a way to improve specific areas and in the process alleviate aspects of poverty for their populations. Chapter 7 moves on to consider the modernisation of health and social care. ‘Saving’ the National Health Service (NHS) was an important aspiration for New Labour, and they argued that this could not be achieved without paying attention to the ways in which the health services interacted with a range of government and non-government organisations, particularly in terms of the care of chronically disabled or older people.

The case study accounts inevitably overlap in places and discuss similar sorts of themes in parts, all ultimately being concerned with issues of poverty and inequality at heart. All of these illustrate that despite the rhetoric of devolution and freeing up front-line practice, the New Labour governments became increasingly centralising as their terms progressed. The overwhelming discourse of modernisation in each of these cases is managerial, with New Labour seeing collaboration as something that can be achieved through structural, technological and financial levers. Despite massive investments and a range of different policies and initiatives in these areas, the evidence suggests that New Labour failed to deliver the sorts of achievements that they were hoping for.

All three case studies lack evidence to suggest that New Labour were able to unequivocally deliver clear efficiency savings or the sorts of organisational and individual outcomes that they spoke about achieving. In all three cases examined here, it seems that New Labour’s focus on the macro level came at the expense of the local and micro level of collaborative practice. Whilst New Labour spoke of freeing up the local level, many of their reform practices were managerialist and constraining, ultimately denying activity at the very level that it appears makes collaboration ‘work’. In each of these cases, the analysis of aspects of cultural forms of performance helps to explain why partnership working did not deliver the outcomes that were anticipated. By including an analysis of this aspect of performance, it is argued that we get a much better insight into issues of governance than those which are found within the mainstream literature. This is more than simply an academic exercise, and these insights should give a better appreciation of the components that seem to be important in making collaboration work and where governments, organisations and individuals might best expend their efforts in making this a reality.

Part I

Setting Out the Framework

2

Governance and Why It Matters

Introduction

At the turn of the present century, Rod Rhodes wrote that governance ‘has now become the defining narrative of British government’ (Rhodes, 2000: p. 6). Although governance has long been a key point of discussion and debate across a range of different disciplinary fields, near the end of the New Labour government’s first term in office it was seen to characterise the story of contemporary British government. Of course, we might expect Rhodes to say something along these lines given that he (along with Gerry Stoker and a number of other leading political scientists) had been influential in developing mainstream understandings of this concept and played an important role in translating this into various spheres of government. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that an interest in the concept of governance was a defining feature of the Labour governments of 1997–2010. Rhodes, Stoker and others argued that we were seeing profound shifts in the nature of civil society, the state and other forms of rule. Within this context, governance rose in prominence and was seen by some as the successor to government itself: the days of large, hierarchical government were gone and instead the state was to rule through combinations of markets and networks. However, by the end of Labour’s final term in office, even once hard-line network governance theorists had backed away from this position, acknowledging the limits of the ‘modernist-empiricist paradigm’ (Rhodes, 2011: p. 200).

This chapter aims to provide an introduction to the vast literature on governance and demonstrates why these debates matter to everyday policy and practice. The review of the literature set out here is aligned with the matter of the book; that is, New Labour and their modernisation agenda. As such, this is not a complete account of the work on governance and is necessarily selective in the pieces it draws on. The mainstream political science literature is dominated by a particular narrative set out by Rhodes and colleagues which proposes that governance theory has essentially developed in three ‘waves’: the Anglo-governance School; metagovernance; and the decentred perspective. These waves developed broadly chronologically, with each criticising the last for being unable to provide a coherent or complete account of governance in some way. The most recent decentred ‘wave’ is presented by Bevir and Rhodes as being somewhat of an innovation in thinking about governance processes, going beyond the modernist empiricist and in the process producing an important role for individuals, where previously much of the focus has been on structure. Whilst the agency of individuals is a welcome introduction to mainstream discussions of governance, as we will see in this chapter and the following two, beyond the conventional political sciences literature, different academic theorists have been developing this sort of thinking for some time. As such, there is a wealth of literature that we might draw on to shed light on the experiences of governance under the New Labour governments.

The chapter starts by setting out some of the broad definitions that have been offered for governance, before moving on to provide an account of the dominant narrative of governance studies and its three ‘waves’ of theory. Finally, some discussion is made on the interpretive contribution to studies of governance.

Governance: Some definitions

Governance has become somewhat of an all-pervasive term in recent years. Whilst this bri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Setting Out the Framework
• Part II: Case Studies
• References
• Index