Managerialism, governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance

Political Geography 19 (2000) 293–314 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Managerialism, governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance Danny MacKinnon

*

Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK

Abstract After decades of relative stability, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a radical restructuring of local–central relations in Britain. This paper draws on neo-Foucauldian writings on ‘governmentality’ to argue that local state restructuring is a product of the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as a distinct political rationality. Material drawn from empirical research on local economic governance in the Scottish Highlands shows how the functioning of a distinct set of managerial ‘technologies’ — embedded in specific practices such as budgetary management, audit and targeting — is instrumental in giving the central state the capacity to shape local institutional practice. At the same time, however, local institutional actors retain some scope to adapt and ‘translate’ central directives to their own particular purposes. Whilst recent neo-Gramscian contributions argue that local governance must be seen as a product of national state restructuring, the neo-Foucauldian emphasis on governmental technologies specifies the precise mechanisms which give central state authorities the reach and capability to monitor and steer the activities of local institutions. In conclusion, the paper suggests that focusing on the reception of governmental technologies within sub-national institutional sites may offer a productive line of inquiry which can expose the internal contradictions and fissures of neo-liberal programmes.  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: State restructuring; Governmentality; Local economic governance; Managerialism; Scottish Highlands

* Tel.: +44-1222-876092; fax: +44-1222-874845. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. MacKinnon) 0962-6298/00/$ - see front matter  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 6 2 - 6 2 9 8 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 8 6 - 4

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Introduction After decades of relative stability underpinned by the expansion of Keynesian welfarism, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a radical restructuring of local–central relations in Britain. Conservative reforms such as the establishment of unelected quasi-autonomous agencies (‘quangos’), the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering, and the increasing involvement of private and voluntary agencies in service delivery have transformed local institutional structures and relations (Goodwin & Painter, 1996; Hoggett, 1996). The overall effect is commonly represented in the academic literature in terms of a shift from local government to local governance (Goodwin & Painter, 1996; Jones 1997, 1998; MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999a,b; Rhodes, 1996; Stoker, 1999). In broad terms, this understanding emphasises the decline and fragmentation of established bureaucracies in the face of an increasingly complex and plural system which involves a wide range of institutions and actors drawn from the public, private and voluntary sectors. One indication of the significance of these changes was the launch, in 1993, of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded local governance research programme. The programme’s key aims were to examine the shift to “a system of local governance involving complex sets of organisations drawn from the public and private sectors” and to develop a multi-theoretic approach (Rhodes, 1999: xiv). In theoretical terms, local governance research projects have variously drawn upon the insights of the policy network approach, urban regime theory, rational choice theory and reputational analysis. For Jones (1998), however, this concern with local agents, networks and coalitions amounts to little more than a descriptive localism which fails to comprehend the underlying social, political and economic forces driving the transition to local governance (cf. MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999a,b; Ward, 1996). Informed by research on the political economy of vocational training in England and Wales, Jones argues that local transformation has been driven by a state-articulated project of social regulation and social control. Other recent contributions have, in a similar fashion, sought to place the rise of local governance within the context of a complex and multi-dimensional process of state restructuring and re-scaling whereby state functions are being re-organised and re-located between national, supra-national and sub-national levels (Jessop, 1994, 1997a,b; MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999a,b; Swyngedouw, 1997). These accounts tend to be informed by neo-Gramscian state theory (Jessop, 1990, 1997a) which is attracting interest from local governance researchers as a broader conceptual framework for assessing how governance is channelled and delivered through local state institutions (Jones 1997, 1998; MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999a,b). Beginning from the premise that the shift to governance is indeed a product of wider strategies of social regulation and control, this paper draws on neo-Foucauldian writings on ‘governmentality’ to argue that local state restructuring is a product of the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as a distinct political rationality. It stresses the importance of managerialism — conceptualised as a set of inter-linked practices and technologies — in providing political actors with the means to introduce, enact and legitimate strategies of institutional reform. The local effects and consequences of

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state restructuring are highlighted by an empirical analysis of Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) — the government agency responsible for delivering economic development and training services in the Scottish Highlands. This shows how Conservative reforms have created local–central tensions which are accommodated and managed through routine forms of institutional practice.1 The next section outlines the main features of the ‘governmentality’ approach and considers how the notion of ‘managerial technologies’ might be used to inform analyses of local–central relations. After a third section places the establishment of HIE within the broader context of state restructuring, the paper goes on to assess how managerial technologies structure institutional relations in the Scottish Highlands through the HIE network. The concluding section considers the main strengths and weaknesses of neo-Foucauldian theory in the context of research on local economic governance.

Managerialism and the local state Notions of governmentality support a focus on the how of government, on the specific mechanisms, techniques and procedures which political authorities deploy to realise and enact their programmes (Rose, 1996a). This section sets out the basic premises of the neo-Foucauldian approach and considers their implications for our understandings of the state and its role in local economic governance before going on to assess how the notion of ‘managerial technologies’ can be deployed to interpret local state restructuring. Governmentality and the state The origins of current debates on governmentality lie in Foucault’s reflections on the nature of modern government in the late 1970s (Foucault, 1991). Foucault interpreted the term as referring to the ‘conduct of conduct’ — the techniques and practices evolved for governing the conduct of others (Burchell, 1996: 19). From this perspective, political programmes are defined in terms of the underlying rationalities that shape their development (O’Malley, Weir & Shearing, 1997). The concept of governmentality also draws attention to the techniques employed by the state as it represents and intervenes in the specific domains it seeks to govern (Murdoch & Ward, 1997). This neo-Foucauldian emphasis on the specific mechanisms, procedures and tactics that are assembled and deployed as particular programmes are materialised contrasts with political theory’s traditional focus on abstract principles of rule. Recent studies have developed this approach by tracing a shift from welfarism to ‘advanced’ (neo)liberalism and examining how the latter frames interventions in particular policy fields (see Barry et al., 1996; Rose 1996a,b, 1999). Characteristi-

1 The paper is based on a research project involving 70 semi-structured interviews with officials and representatives drawn from a range of institutions and groups in the Scottish Highlands.

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cally, Rose and Miller stress the importance of knowledge and expertise to modern forms of government: Government is intrinsically linked to the activities of expertise, whose role is not one of weaving an all-pervasive web of ‘social control’, but of enacting assorted attempts at the calculated administration of diverse aspects of conduct through countless, often competing, local tactics of education, persuasion, inducement, management, incitement, motivation and encouragement (Rose & Miller, 1992: 175). For neo-Foucauldians, what makes particular techniques and practices governmental is their capacity to be made practical, to be transformed into concrete devices for managing and directing reality (Rose, 1996a: 41). As an inherently problematising activity which frames the obligations of authorities in terms of the problems they address, government depends upon knowledge (Rose & Miller, 1992; Rose & Valverde, 1998). The disciplinary knowledges of the social sciences play an important role here in providing an ‘intellectual machinery’ of ordering procedures and explanations which construct and frame reality in ways that allow government to act upon it (Rose & Miller, 1992: 182).2 Yet expertise can also pose problems for government given the tendency of specialist knowledge to form enclosures: tightly-bounded sites within which the authority of experts is concentrated and defended against external interference (Rose & Miller, 1992: 190). Ruling strategies are characteristically formulated and articulated through specific programmes of government (Miller & Rose, 1990: 6–7). These consist of efforts to address identified problems through more or less coherent plans or strategies that specify intended outcomes consistent with the principles of underlying political rationalities. Rose & Miller (1992: 185) refer to the set of mechanisms, techniques and procedures through which programmes are activated and put into practice as technologies of government. Following Latour (1987), inscription and calculation are identified as key technologies, enabling ‘enclosures’ to be breached by ‘responsibilising’ and disciplining actors to the claims of central authority (Rose, 1996a). These technologies work to make reality “stable, mobile, comparable, combinable”, thereby enabling government to act upon it (Rose & Miller, 1992: 185). Through successive ‘cycles of accumulation’, information is gathered and transferred back to distant centres (Latour, 1987). By bringing traces of distant objects of government back to centres of calculation in this way, government is able to ‘act at a distance’ on these same objects (Latour, 1987: 227, 239; Miller & Rose, 1990: 9–10; Rose & Miller, 1992: 185). Centres of calculation are the key nodes where information is compared, combined and aggregated through the deployment of statistical and mathematical techniques (Latour, 1987: 237–240). Neo-Foucauldian analyses of government have been prompted by dissatisfaction

2 An example of this, emphasised by Foucault (1991) and cited by Miller and Rose, is the role of the theories and techniques of economics in rendering ‘the economy’ programmable.

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with the tendency to locate political power within the institutional structures of a centralised state (Rose & Miller, 1992; Miller & Rose, 1995). As Miller and Rose (1995: 594) argue, much of this work “accords ‘the state’ a quite illusory necessity, functionality and territorialisation” (cf. Foucault, 1991: 103–104). Their alternative approach draws on Foucault’s notion of power as a ubiquitous feature of modern societies, one that is not confined to any particular set of institutional sites (Foucault, 1980: 96–99). For Rose (1999: 5), the effect is to re-locate the state as an element within wider circuits of power. This is often conceptualised in terms of Foucault’s notion of the ‘governmentalisation of the state’, referring to the tendency for state power to be exercised and realised through a heterogeneous array of regulatory practices and technologies (see Foucault, 1991). To the extent that neo-Foucauldians recognise ‘the state’ at all, it is conceptualised as a set of capacities and forces which must be instrumentalised within wider strategies of government (Hindess, 1996: 108– 109). The crucial underlying point is that the state cannot be used to explain events but must itself be explained through empirical analysis (cf. Latour, 1986). Whilst the neo-Foucauldian critique of state theory carries considerable force, Jessop (1982, 1985, 1990) has developed a neo-Gramscian approach that is anti-functionalist and anti-reductionist. Crucially, Jessop argues that the state has no substantive unity or functionality: internal coherence can only be achieved through the successful realisation of specific ‘state projects’ which unite state agencies and officials behind a distinct line of action. In this respect, then, there are ‘hidden parallels’ (Jessop, 1990: 229) between neo-Gramscian and neo-Foucauldian approaches as both stress that the assertion and realisation of power is a contingent matter. This reflects certain similarities between Foucault’s (1980) ‘capillary’ notion of power and the neo-Gramscian emphasis on how hegemonic projects are channelled through complex ensembles of institutions that are dispersed throughout civil society (Jessop, 1997a). The key difference lies in the contrast between the neo-Foucauldian emphasis on the autonomy of political discourses and technologies and the neo-Gramscian concern with identifying the social and economic bases of state power (Jessop, 1990: 196–219). Whilst this paper works with post-structuralist understandings of political power, it contends that the common emphasis on how the state must be actively constructed as a political project (Jessop, 1990, 1997a; Miller, 1990) provides a basis for dialogue between neo-Gramscian and neo-Foucauldian approaches. Neo-liberalism and managerial technologies From a neo-Foucauldian perspective, the shift from local government to local governance can be seen as a product of the influence of neo-liberal governmentalities (Rose & Miller, 1992; Rose, 1996a,b). According to Rose (1996a), diverse strands of criticism have been rationalised within a neo-liberal mentality which has linked traditional liberal scepticism of government with a series of positive technologies for regulating conduct. As a political rationality, neo-liberalism directs itself against the technologies of welfarism by seeking to ‘free’ subjects from collective forms of social provision as it strives to (re)construct the conditions in which ‘enterprise’ and competition can flourish (Burchell, 1996). Consequently, economic government has

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been ‘de-socialised’ in an effort to stimulate entrepreneurship by reducing social obligations and costs (Rose, 1999: 144). At the same time, the introduction of specific technologies designed to ensure that individuals conduct themselves according to norms of personal responsibility and self-provision has re-configured the terrain of government (Rose, 1996b: 348). This paper argues that the local state has been restructured through the deployment of ‘managerial’ technologies designed to realise the objectives of neo-liberal programmes of government. As a distinctive set of technologies and practices, managerialism can be seen as a product of the intersection of neo-liberal political rationalities and business management prescriptions for organisational change to meet the competitive challenge of a global economy (Clarke & Newman, 1997: 34–55). The influence of managerialism spread rapidly following the Conservatives’ introduction of the ‘new public management’ in 1982 as part of the drive to control public expenditure (Gray, 1997). The nascent ‘enclosures’ formed by professional expertise within the public sector have subsequently been breached by a series of calculative technologies embedded in specific practices such as budgetary management, audit and targeting (Clarke & Newman, 1997). These technologies depend upon the authority and apparent objectivity of disciplines such as accountancy, economics and management which have risen to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s (Rose, 1996a). Governmental technologies cannot, from a neo-Foucauldian perspective, be viewed as neutral instruments compatible with a range of political projects. Rather, much of their political force stems from the way that managerial technologies have been harnessed to a Conservative project designed to smash any alternative power bases within the local state (Hoggett, 1996: 18). At the same time, these technologies have been deployed more positively to implant new modes of calculation by creating ‘simulacra of markets’ within the public sector (Rose, 1999: 146). The expansion of regulatory practices like audit and targeting has been promoted and legitimated through elaborate rhetorics of accountability and openness. Such an expansion is bound up with a shift from the bureaucratic control of ‘inputs’ towards a new focus on ‘outputs’ and ‘delivery’ as government agencies become subjected to new forms of performance management. During the 1990s, the use of targeting as a tool of public policy has expanded markedly. As a mobile technology, targeting embodies underlying managerial rationalities by enabling ministers and civil servants to structure the activities of distant agencies. Whilst senior officials from targeted agencies are often involved in agreeing target levels, there is considerable pressure to deliver once targets have been agreed and inscribed in the contractual relationship between the two parties (Gray, 1997). Much of this pressures stems from the increasingly close relationship between targeting and the allocation of funds: as Peck and Jones (1995) argue, relating funding to performance creates a ‘pseudomarket’ which forces local agencies to work to neoliberal imperatives. In this sense, the underlying threat that failure to meet targets will be accompanied by funding cuts encourages a process of ‘institutional Darwinism’ (Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley & Ling, 1988) as organisations strive to out-perform one another in the struggle to maintain funding shares in a context of public expenditure cuts.

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Auditing can be seen as another key instrument of the ‘new public management’. Organisations must be changed to be made auditable and the formation of the National Audit Office and Audit Commission in the early 1980s played a crucial role in spreading managerial norms across institutional domains (Day & Klein, 1987: 40–50). According to Michael Power (1997), audit emphasises the ‘control of control’ through its characteristic focus on the effectiveness of organisations’ internal management systems. In this sense, there is a tendency for pre-existing local practices of evaluation to be governmentalised and formalised (Rose, 1996a). Crucially, audit depends upon expertise, with much of its legitimacy resting on the professional judgement and integrity of the auditor as a source of independent validation (Power, 1994). Although in some ways a technology of mistrust, audit paradoxically requires that experts whose judgements tend to remain obscure and often hidden from public view be trusted. Beneath a rhetoric of openness and transparency, then, the suggestion is that audit remains a relatively closed form of managerial accountability which is only superficially empowering to the publics it claims to serve (Power, 1997). The emphasis on gauging performance through specific output measures built into operating contracts means that the unelected local agencies established during the 1980s and early 1990s tend to embody managerial rationalities. Whilst the move to devolved local management and the emphasis on ‘enterprise’ has in some senses encouraged local initiative, this tends to be undermined by the continuing emphasis on performance management and audit (Hoggett, 1996). For Clarke and Newman (1997), the experience of state restructuring has been crucially shaped by an underlying process of organisational dispersal. Embodying contradictory moments of centralisation and decentralisation, dispersal combines increased local responsibility with an enhanced capacity for central direction. As the ‘cement’ that binds institutional networks together, managerialism enables the dispersed state to function effectively in delivering services to an individuated public (Clarke & Newman, 1997: 30). One key issue arising from the emphasis on managerialism concerns how it is received and implemented within institutional sites. Recent reviews suggest that the governmentality literature finds it difficult to accommodate the possibility of contestation and resistance (Bevir, 1999; Curtis, 1995; Frankel, 1997; O’Malley et al., 1997). As O’Malley et al. (1997: 510) put it, the imagery associated with the conception of politics as ‘mentalities of rule’ tends to “militate against a critical understanding of the relations and effects of rule”. This reflects two underlying problems: the neglect of politics as social relations (O’Malley et al., 1997; Pearce & Tombs, 1998), and a failure to accommodate agency (Bevir, 1999). The neo-Foucauldian neglect of social and economic relations is sometimes manifest in a tendency to reify and essentialise power by “reducing it to the modalities of its exercise” (Poulantzas, 1978: 148–150). Against this, it is important to assert that it is not technologies or programmes of government that act, but rather the social forces deploying these technologies and programmes for their own particular purposes (cf. Jessop, 1990: 269–270). In terms of the neglect of agency, Bevir (1999: 358) makes the crucial point that Foucault’s (1980, 1982) rejection of the autonomous subject need not entail a rejection of agency itself. While individuals are indeed constituted through the effects of

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social forces, this does not preclude them from intervening creatively to transform social structures. This paper contends that this point is crucial to a critical understanding of the reception of managerialism within institutional sites. As Clarke and Newman (1997) stress, the impact of managerialism has been characteristically uneven with the effects of calculative technologies and practices varying across different organisational contexts. In this sense, organisations will react differently to the same set of ‘structural’ forces. Bevir (1999) advocates the use of the concept of tradition to accommodate the effects of local reasoning and beliefs on governmental practices and technologies. In a similar fashion, the remainder of this paper uses notions of local institutional norms and practices to emphasise how the effects of managerial technologies in the Scottish Highlands have been crucially shaped by the pre-existing structure of regional governance.

Establishing the enterprise networks in Scotland Formally institutionalised by the creation of the ‘crofting counties’ as an administrative region in 1886 in response to land agitation, the Scottish Highlands has long been viewed as a ‘problem’ region requiring particular forms of political-economic regulation. Over the course of the twentieth century, a series of special purpose agencies established to promote economic development have played a key role in the governance of this ‘state dominated region’ (Geddes, 1984). The most significant of these institutional experiments, the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB), was set up by the Wilson government in 1965 as part of a broader commitment to regional planning.3 The HIDB was closely linked to other parts of the state apparatus, particularly the Scottish Office — a territorially-defined department of central government — whose role as the source of core grant funding and in appointing board members enabled it to influence HIDB policy. By the 1960s, relations between Scottish institutions were structured by a form of technocracy which privileged bureau-professional authority (Paterson, 1994). As a distinctive regulatory system, this ‘Scottish village’ had limited scope to pursue its own agenda, providing this did not conflict with government policy (Moore & Booth, 1989: 25). In the changed political climate of the 1980s, the HIDB sought to engineer its survival by adapting to the marketled paradigm of economic development (Danson, Fairley, Lloyd & Newlands, 1990; Danson, Lloyd & Newlands, 1993). Managerialist technologies and discourses demanded a new emphasis on outputs and efficiency, forcing the HIDB to move away from interventionism as it adopted an increasingly commercialised profile (see MacKinnon, 1999). While this seemed to have secured the Board’s survival, the Conservative government remained receptive to arguments for more fundamental reform. Proposals to create employer-led Local Enterprise Companies (LECs) to take over

3

See MacKinnon (1998, 1999) and Geddes (1984) for accounts of the HIDB.

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the functions of the HIDB and the Scottish Development Agency (the equivalent body for lowland Scotland) were published in late 1988 (see Danson et al., 1990; Moore, 1989). Following a (brief) period of consultation, legislation was passed and LECs and Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) — their equivalents in England and Wales — became operational in 1990–91 (see Bennett, Wicks & McCoshan, 1994; Peck, 1992). The reforms introduced substantial changes to the structure and practice of regional economic development by establishing LECs as local employerled bodies. Members of LEC boards are appointed as individuals, on the basis of their particular experience or knowledge, rather than as representatives of any established interest or organisation (Industry Department for Scotland, 1988: 11–12). Two-thirds of the board must be drawn from the private sector. TECs and LECs share these basic features with other unelected local agencies established in the period of ‘radical’ Thatcherism following the 1987 General Election victory (Jessop et al., 1988; Hay, 1996). Given the Conservatives’ precarious political position in Scotland, however, there was also a need for the proposals to recognise its distinctive institutional arrangements. Consequently, regional elites were able to ensure a degree of continuity and the establishment of HIE and Scottish Enterprise (SE) to replace the HIDB and SDA respectively maintained a structure of regional agencies (see MacLeod, 1999, on Scottish Enterprise). Although required to decentralise programme delivery through annual contracts with LECs, HIE and SE retain responsibility for a number of key functions. These include: monitoring LECs’ performance and outputs; formulating regional strategies; developing sectoral initiatives across their regions; and attracting inward investment. This contrasts with the situation in England and Wales where TECs not only contract directly with the Department of Employment but also exercise a much narrower range of functions dominated by the delivery of statutory training programmes (Bennett et al., 1994). Despite the scepticism of many observers, the combined influence of a mobilising rhetoric of local autonomy and flexibility (Industry Department for Scotland, 1989) and a strong ethos of public service brought business representatives and community leaders together to form steering groups to bid for development funding. However, the expectations engendered by the LEC initiative soon ran up against the realities of service delivery: In the early days particularly there was a lot of tension between LECs generally and HIE… There still is tension, but it was particularly marked in the early days… between [the] doctrine that business people are now in charge, they can do what they like… which was… typical government rhetoric of the time… and the fact that on the other hand these were bodies that were dishing out large sums of public money, and the… constraints on all of that were very marked (Interview with LEC director, 1997). Talk of ‘local solutions to local problems’ (Industry Department for Scotland 1988, 1989) led business leaders to expect the freedom to allocate resources according to local priorities without central interference. Indeed, as a political rationality, neo-

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liberalism extolled the need for local initiative and entrepreneurial flair in the face of global competition and technological change. At the same time, however, a Conservative government whose policies were leading to centralisation in other areas had invested too much political capital in the establishment of TECs and LECs to cede overall control of the initiative (see Peck, 1992). Accordingly, the managerial technologies discussed earlier were deployed as a means of ‘steering’ the activities of local agencies, thereby ensuring that they were actively delivering national policy objectives. The resultant tension between the expectations of local business elites and established mechanisms of ‘managerial’ accountability to central government (Hart, Haughton & Peck, 1996) — which has also been identified by critical research on TECs (Peck 1992, 1993; Peck & Jones, 1995) — has shaped the development of the HIE network. The remainder of this paper investigates this crucial underlying tension, examining how it is mediated and channelled through routine institutional practices.

Managerialism and local economic governance in the Scottish Highlands Despite their legal status as private companies (limited by guarantee), LECs are largely dependent on the state for funding. HIE submits a bid for funding in the form of an Operating Plan to the Scottish Office detailing how the money will be spent in terms of specific programmes and initiatives. The Scottish Office then allocates funding from its block grant in accordance with its assessment of the significance of economic development as a political priority. Variations in funding levels are always set against an established ‘baseline’ and the routines of negotiation and allocation give the institutional networks connecting the Scottish Office, HIE and LECs the stability and durability that enables them to function effectively. The methods HIE uses to allocate funding to LECs vary across seven budget blocks.4 While the budgets for adult and youth training are determined by national formulas, block 1 funding (normally over 50% of LECs’ budgets) is allocated by HIE according to a formula share method based on population and economic need (incorporating a range of variables in addition to unemployment). The emphasis on business development again contrasts with the situation in England and Wales where 80–90% of TECs’ budgets are absorbed by national training programmes (Peck & Jones, 1995). Initially developed by the HIDB in the late 1980s, HIE’s formula share method is based on calculated need. This is important given the expectation that managerial technologies would force LECs to compete with one another for HIE funds on the basis of performance and efficiency. In practice the formula share acts 4 These budget blocks, relating to specific functions, were inherited from the HIDB/Training Agency. Block one covers business development (through the Finance For Business (FFB)) programme, property and projects; block two, the enterprise programmes inherited from the Training Agency; block three, environmental renewal; block four, youth training; block five, adult training; block six, community development; and block seven, operating costs. This system was recently re-organised for the 1997–98 financial year.

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more as a guide, however, as there is scope for allocations to be varied according to the proposals set out in LEC business plans. While this may seem to encourage competition for funds, accumulated experience has removed some of the early tensions: Now I suppose we’re sort of five–six years into it, it becomes very much more sleek… In the early days there was a lot of tooing and frooing… but I think… a lot of that … has passed now and we’re very much in a good understanding of what the situation is in each of the areas (Interview with senior LEC official, 1997).

It’s very slick, we’ve been doing a few years now… If you look at the historical pattern of splits between the LECs and the HIE core and if you know the overall figure you’ve got a pretty good feel for what your allocation might be and then it’s just a matter of negotiating… to maximise it. So it’s… a very amicable thing, it’s not an aggressive arrangement at all (Interview with LEC official, 1997). In this sense, competitive pressures have been regulated and contained as modes of allocation are gradually institutionalised and normalised. There is mutual exchange of information from an early stage in the business planning process as HIE conveys its expectations of overall budget allocations from the Scottish Office and their implications for individual LECs. Close communication between HIE and LECs throughout the operational year enables funds to be transferred rapidly to LECs and programmes where demand is highest. This responsiveness to changing conditions can be seen as a function of the ‘vertical’ flexibility of the Network. However, such flexibility contrasts with a ‘horizontal’ rigidity in terms of LECs’ capacity to transfer money between funding categories. While LECs are able to determine their own priorities within funding blocks, tight rules set by HIE prevent them from viring anything more than a minimal sum between blocks (Interview with LEC official, 1997). The limited scope for interblock virement affects local service provision. For instance, central rules determining funding levels for national training programmes constrain LECs’ ability to provide training schemes tailored to the needs of local business: The difficulty is that you’ve actually got monies being ring-fenced in fact for delivering Skillseekers, Training For Work and small business support… and you’re given a specific budget to deliver these three programmes and at the end of the day you haven’t got very much other money left for training the private sector (Interview with LEC official, 1997). LECs’ dependence on HIE for permission to vire funds is indicative of the latter’s financial control over LECs. Crucially, HIE’s ability to gather and compare information gives it a knowledge of LEC performance and local conditions across the

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Highlands which individual LECs lack, thereby enabling it to control the flow of allocative resources across the Network. HIE’s control over LEC’s funding regime has not, however, been sufficient to shield the HIE Network from the impact of the shift towards targeting. At the panHighland level, the Scottish Office expects HIE to deliver certain outputs in return for public funding. The specific level of targets (i.e. how many jobs) forms a key part of the detailed negotiations between HIE and Scottish Office officials over the Operating Plan (Interviews with Scottish Office official, 1996; HIE official, 1997). Although HIE is heavily involved in these discussions, ultimately the Scottish Office’s role as the core funder allows it to set the level of targets it expects HIE to deliver. The requirements of the Scottish Office are in turn structured by Treasury rules which fix the ‘content’ of the targets (i.e. the specific output measures such as jobs created/retained, cost per job and number of Scottish Vocational Qualifications (SVQs), see Table 1, against which performance is measured) that a regional development agency like HIE is expected to deliver. Thus, while central guidelines determine what the specific targets are, the levels of these targets are shaped by protracted negotiations between the Scottish Office and HIE. Given its basic structure, HIE is unable to deliver key targets directly, forcing it to rely on the combined efforts of its constituent LECs. LEC business plans are linked to HIE’s Operating Plan from an early stage with ‘shadow’ targets attached Table 1 Western Isles Enterprise, main targets 1996–97a Programme

Measures

Targets

Finance for business

Spend (’000) Jobs created/retained Cost per job (average) Leverage Spend (’000) Site acquisition New units (m2) Occupancy rate Spend (’000) Training weeks Employed status ORF points SVQs per 100 leavers Spend Training weeks ORF points SVQs per 100 leavers Commitments Cases approved Rate of assistance

1900 285 £4100 1:3 1800 3 750 85% 614 11,868 35% 290 45 201 4454 300 21 50 33 40%

Property

Skillseekers

Training for work

Investors in people Community action grant

a Source: Western Isles Enterprise (1996–97: 10–12). ORF=Output-Related Funding; SVQs=Scottish Vocational Qualifications.

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to the main programmes in anticipation of the outcomes of negotiations with the Scottish Office. HIE’s knowledge of both central demands and local conditions (through LECs) enables it to pay a crucial mediating role, translating the emerging requirements of the Scottish Office into the detailed programmes of action inscribed in LEC business plans. It divides the main targets among the 10 LECs. Table 1 provides an example of the range of targets a LEC is expected to meet on its main programmes in return for funding. Each LEC is required to deliver an agreed share of the overall pan-Highland target for each measure. Some of these — for example jobs created/retained — are defined as output targets in that they measure the immediate ‘external’ impact of LEC expenditure on the local economy whilst others — such as cost per job — are performance targets which refer to the ‘internal’ efficiency of LEC activities. Although LECs have some involvement in setting their own targets, HIE retains ultimate authority: I mean the targets are largely set by, certainly by HIE, sometimes a little bit unrealistically but you know there’s a bit of discussion obviously goes on but at the end of the day it’s them that would set the targets which we have to … just accept and get on with… There’s a bit of come and go, put it like that, but at the end of the day they’re the masters so they can decide (Interview with LEC official, 1997). The inscription of agreed output measures in the operating agreement incorporates targets within the broader contractual relationship between HIE and LECs. Accordingly, individual LECs’ performance against key targets is closely monitored throughout the year with LECs being required to submit a monthly report to HIE. A key measure against which the effectiveness of the HIE Network is measured is job creation/retention, an emphasis that reflects the importance of economic growth and development to the legitimacy of the modern state (Painter & Goodwin, 1995: 343). There is no explicit measure or target recognising job quality or status in an operating regime which only differentiates between full-time, part-time, and seasonal jobs. In the absence of any formal recognition of the importance of job quality, such considerations tend to be crowded out by narrowly quantitative targets which encourage a focus on short-term outputs. The emphasis on job numbers can be seen as a product of the way in which targeting, as a managerial technology, has been linked to a neo-liberal accumulation strategy designed to promote local economic competitiveness through deregulation and the attraction of mobile investment. Officials report a resistance from the Scottish Office and HIE to any notion of introducing softer, more ‘social’ measures (Interview with LEC official, 1997). One consequence is that the operating regime tends to encourage a focus on a limited number of large projects which create a substantial number of jobs, and thereby enable LECs to achieve output targets. Furthermore, the targets used to assess community development programmes tend to be somewhat meaningless since they merely measure the number of interventions (for instance, projects approved) rather than the impact of these interventions on particular groups and the wider community (Interview with

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LEC official, 1997). Such ambiguities and tensions suggest that whilst managerial technologies enable LEC activities to be linked to the objectives of neo-liberalism as a political project (see Rose, 1996a), the forms of representation and standardisation that this involves inevitably tend to simplify and distort local experiences of programme delivery. Despite the scepticism of some LEC officials, however, the HIE example shows that the distinct managerial rationalities associated with targeting tend to be internalised within ‘target’ institutions. In his analysis of auditing, Power (1997) highlights two forms of organisational response: ‘decoupling’ and ‘colonisation’. The former refers to situations in which audit is treated as a formal ritual, often through the establishment of specialist sub-units to manage the relationship with external auditors whereas ‘colonisation’ indicates that audit has transformed organisational values and practices, leading to the creation of new mentalities (Power, 1997: 96– 98). As with most organisations, the impact of targeting on HIE lies somewhere between these two extremes. In many ways, however, HIE’s internal management culture which privileges operational efficiency and programme delivery over strategic appraisal and policy initiative makes it particularly receptive to the logic of targeting (Discussion with LEC official, 1998). Consequently, targeting has been accommodated within the routine practices of reflexive monitoring deployed by HIE to collect and interpret information whilst becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of LEC personnel working towards specific targets. In the HIE case, then, managerial technologies have intersected with pre-existing institutional norms and practices to produce an outcome closer to colonisation than decoupling. The ‘authoritative resources’ (Giddens, 1984) of the HIE core, grounded in the knowledge and experience inherited from the HIDB, enables it to act as a ‘centre of calculation’ (Latour, 1987) in which data on a range of trends related to HIE’s remit — business profitability, unemployment, labour market processes, demographic trends — are collected, compared and aggregated. These processes of data collection and reflexive monitoring rely upon mobile technologies of inscription and calculation. The effect is to render the domain for which HIE is responsible “susceptible to evaluation, calculation and intervention” (Rose & Miller, 1992: 185). Processes of targeting are important in extending this beyond aspects of ‘external’ reality (i.e. local economies) to construct LECs themselves as objects of government. This amounts to more than merely the Treasury’s long-standing dominance of programme management. Through specific forms of inscription and representation (for instance, league tables), local economies and local agencies are actively constructed as domains which can be programmed, evaluated and managed.5 While the HIDB established ‘statistical areas’ as a way of managing sub-regional disparities, the establishment of LECs has gone well beyond this by effectively constructing a new (local) scale of governance (see MacKinnon, 1999). This process of institutional restructuring has not only constructed LECs as organisations subject to managerial forms of

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Though in some ways this could be seen as an extension of Treasury control.

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accountability, it also renders local areas visible as targets for intervention.6 HIE’s ‘allocative resources’ (Giddens, 1984) as the agency which controls the distribution of funds between LECs enables it to assess and compare LEC performance through technologies of representation and calculation (i.e. targeting) and structure its interventions accordingly. While the growth of targeting has played an important role in the re-modelling of the public sector in the 1980s and 1990s, other managerial technologies have also had a significant impact. Like targeting, the spread of auditing is justified by a pervasive ‘rhetoric of accountability’ (Power, 1994). As unelected local agencies modelled on neo-liberal principles, LECs are subject to stringent audit procedures: We are audited very, very carefully… we have so many different layers of auditing, we have the National Audit Office, we have HIE’s internal audit team…, and we have our own Board’s audit team… the Finance for Business side of things [is] horrendously audited, you really have to have all your bases covered… We’re pretty confident that we can defend most of the figures, and the principle is if you can’t defend it don’t do it, I think people stick to that quite rigidly (Interview with LEC official, 1997).

We have a monitoring and aftercare officer in the admin. team… We also are audited and monitored by a variety of organisations, starting with HIE internal audit but going to the Scottish Office who look quite frequently at what we do, we have European auditors who look at the European programmes, and annually we have the National Audit Office looking at both compliance and value-formoney aspects of the Programmes, so we’re audited to death basically (Interview with LEC official, 1997). These comments clearly emphasise the density of audit in terms of the multiple layers of evaluation which administrative practices are subject to. Audit not only assesses performance and efficiency against a set of apparently objective standards, it is also a constitutive force in shaping administrative practice. As the quotations indicate, the norms of audit tend to be internalised by target groups, leading HIE and LECs not only to establish their own system of internal audit, but also to anticipate the demands of audit during routine decision-making processes. In Power’s (1997) terms, HIE’s response is again closer to ‘colonisation’ than ‘decoupling’. Such internalisation does, to an extent, reflect the force of the underlying rhetorics of accountability; as Power (1994: 304) observes, to resist or oppose audit is to ‘support non-accountability’. Yet this cannot explain how organisations react differently to the same set of ‘structural’ forces (Bevir, 1999). A fuller explanation requires, instead, that the interaction between managerial technologies and pre-exist-

6 In this sense, LECs can be seen as both ‘objects’ and ‘agents’ of government (see Duncan & Goodwin, 1988).

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ing institutional norms and practices be examined. It is the effects of HIE’s internal practices in emphasising management control, efficiency and delivery that has engendered an openness to the principles of audit. Targeting also functions as a ‘responsibilising’ technology which links the activities of local and regional actors to broader political programmes. It seems to enable the central state to direct programme delivery across the HIE Network: I mean the LECs often … complain I think that HIE set those targets … but the targets come from the Scottish Office and we’re just translating them into what has to be done at the local level, to that extent it’s a fairly top-down process … I guess it’s a measure of control in some ways … The Scottish Office control us by saying we must deliver these targets, likewise there’s an element of central control here in saying to the LECs you must do this, but that’s the whole nature of the Enterprise Network, they have contracts that they have to comply with (Interview with HIE official, 1997). This presents a picture of a hierarchical structure with each institutional tier using the process of targeting to assert control over the subordinate tier. The utility of targeting as a managerial tool lies in the way in which it has been linked to the allocation of funding. Given that institutions will invariably seek to maximise their funds, attaching conditions in the form of targets to these funds gives the funding authorities a directive capacity over their activities. This top-down process, controlled by state managers in the Scottish Office and HIE, is one crucial way in which the activities of LECs as local business-led agencies have been incorporated within a broader set of institutional rules and procedures. The logic of targeting clashes with the neo-liberal rhetoric of business leadership and local autonomy: If you tell businessmen they’re in charge they’re dim enough to understand that’s what you mean, whereas what you really mean is you’re in charge old boy but you’re still under the Treasury’s control … and after a while even the dimmest of them seemed to realise that’s what had happened … I think there was a genuine feeling at one point that the LECs had been told by people like Ian Lang [then Scottish Secretary] … you’re in charge and civil servants had gone around telling them you’ve got enormous responsibility and power. The reality was that they were going to be held to account by HIE who in turn were going to be held to account by Scottish Office who therefore weren’t going to let them too far off the leash (Interview with former HIE official, 1997). This suggests that, in practice, the centralising effects of managerial technologies tend to contradict some of the key principles of neo-liberalism as a political rationality (business rather than bureaucracy, local initiative rather than central direction). In many senses, this can be viewed as a tension between technical and programmatic aspects of government. Examining how managerial technologies are received and experienced within specific institutional sites can therefore highlight some of the internal contradictions of neo-liberal programmes. This also provides a way of

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addressing the neo-Foucauldian tendency to over-emphasise the coherence and effectiveness of political projects (see O’Malley et al., 1997). The use of the term ‘translating’ in the quote on p. 308 suggests, however, that neither HIE nor LECs are passive actors in the process of targeting. Both the initial formula share and the system enabling funds to be transferred during the financial year are mechanisms devised by local experts which, rather than allocating funds according to performance, seek to channel them to areas of greatest need. HIE’s role as a centre of calculation with a relative monopoly of aggregated information on LEC performance and local conditions enables it to control this funding regime. The effects of targeting are ‘filtered’ through pre-existing structures and practices. In particular, the existence of an integrated network based on close co-operation and communication has enabled HIE to contain the threat of ‘institutional Darwinism’: I think what was originally intended and what eventually happened are not quite the same. I’m not aware of any LEC that’s had its funding reduced because its performance has been less than … expected. At once stage it was anticipated that that might be the case … I think what has happened instead is that there is rigorous monitoring of performance, I mean literally monthly Reports from LECs … and as soon as any problems start to arise … the corrective action is put in … There’s been no real financial penalties to LECs for performance (Interview with senior HIE official, 1996). There is thus little sense in which the prospect of matching funding to performance has fostered direct competition between LECs. Although HIE compiles league tables to assess performance across a range of quantitative indicators (Table 1), no LEC has had its funding reduced as a result of unsatisfactory performance. While the ‘corrective action’ is not always sufficient to ensure that LECs meet targets, there is scope for local officials to explain and justify ‘failure’ in terms of how local conditions beyond the control of LECs affect programme demand. Targets do, nonetheless, exert control since under-performance, however it is rationalised, brings the threat of budget cuts. The levels at which targets are set (i.e. how many jobs) vary between LECs according to past performance which reflects, in turn, the influence of local conditions on programme delivery. It is the combination of flexibility and standardisation (i.e. different levels, same targets) that gives governmental technologies their utility as instruments for managing space. As I have tried to show, however, this can only be achieved at the expense of reducing local complexity and diversity to a set of figures which allow aggregation and comparison. Whilst managerial technologies function as more or less effective tools of ‘territorial management’ (Kellas, 1991), the numerical tables which they construct are representations of the underlying conditions. Figures representing, for instance, regional GDP, jobs created and retained, or levels of private investment are then manipulated and programmed as ‘objects’ of government. For LECs, moreover, one effect of these standardised rules and procedures is to limit their capacity to address local priorities:

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The flexibility’s not there,7 … at the local level it just kind of disappears … this whole thing about not being not being able to vire and over-emphasis on a few main targets … In a way that’s kind of where the fundamental conflict comes … The issue as far as LECs are concerned is that the whole Local Enterprise Company Network was based on the fundamental … premise that local businessmen … know best what the economic policy for that area … should be. Now people may disagree with that fundamentally but if … that is the basis for it then freedom to vire money into whatever the board believes are the priorities … should be there (Interview with LEC director, 1997). This suggests that the tension between central direction and local autonomy is being resolved in favour of the former. Rather than the centre exerting control from a distance (Rose, 1996a; Hoggett, 1996), however, it is HIE that is perceived to be in control through a regulatory process characterised by its immediacy. The relationship between internal (HIE) and external (government) rationalities is crucial in terms of how HIE’s ‘response’ to the demands of managerialism has been shaped by an organisational culture that privileges operational efficiency over strategic appraisal. HIE’s inheritance of ‘authoritative resources’ from the HIDB has structured the ‘power geometry’ (Massey, 1991) of the Network since 1991, giving it the capacity to ‘translate’ central directives and ‘control’ LEC activity.

Conclusion This paper has assessed how neo-liberal state projects have re-shaped local–central relations in Britain since the early 1980s. Through the managerial technologies emphasised in this paper, unelected local agencies have been subject to new forms of central control. This perspective provides theoretical and empirical support for Jessop’s (1997b) observation that local economic governance continue to be underpinned by (national) structures of government. Whilst the establishment of unelected local agencies involved the decentralisation of certain functions, this has not been accompanied by a corresponding shift of power and influence (MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999b). This emphasis on central control must be qualified in two ways, however. First, such a conclusion is partly shaped by the paper’s focus on ‘internal’ state practices. By contrast, an emphasis on wider extra-state dimensions of local governance such as partnerships or the formulation of economic strategies may have indicated a higher degree of local control.8 Second, the centralising logic of managerialism is mediated, empirically, by the ‘authoritative resources’ concentrated within the HIE core. Such resources give HIE a limited capacity to adapt and ‘translate’ central directives to its own purposes. The presence of this regional ‘filter’ has

7

The apparent contradiction between this statement and the regional manager’s comments on p. 309 suggests that respondents’ perceptions are conditioned by their positions within the network. 8 Thanks to an anonymous referee for this important point.

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shielded LECs from the full rigours of output-related funding, in contrast to the situation in England and Wales where TECs contract directly with central government (see Bennett et al., 1994; Peck & Jones, 1995; Jones, 1998). Although the governmentality literature has been criticised for deploying a dense theoretical language to merely re-describe routine institutional phenomena (Curtis, 1995; Frankel, 1997), this paper is based on the contention that it adds new insights to local governance research. Not all of these insights are exclusive to neo-Foucauldian theory, but notions of governmentality do provide a distinctive perspective to inform research on local state restructuring. First, while recent neo-Gramscian contributions argue that local governance must be seen as a product of national state restructuring (Jessop, 1997a,b; Jones 1997, 1998; MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999a,b), the neo-Foucauldian emphasis on governmental technologies and practices specifies the precise mechanisms which give state authorities the reach and capability to monitor and steer the activities of local institutions. This reinforces the need to explain how local state agencies are constituted through broader process of state restructuring and rescaling (see MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999a). Second, the idea that power is embedded in a wide range of social practices provides a basis for decentred studies of institutional relations (Bevir, 1999). Although neo-Foucauldians reject state-centred explanations, neo-Gramscian conceptions of the state may provide a basis for assessing how dispersed micro-practices are linked and codified as state projects are formulated and realised at sub-national, national and supra-national levels (see Miller, 1990). Third, neo-Foucauldian theory provides a framework for examining how governmental programmes and technologies are received and experienced by sub-national institutions.9 Whilst this paper’s analysis of the HIE network is suggestive of a tension between technical and programmatic aspects of government, this represents only a modest starting point for such a research agenda. Nevertheless, focusing on the relationships between governmental technologies and pre-existing institutional norms and practices may offer a productive line of inquiry which brings out the ‘messiness’ of implementation (O’Malley et al., 1997: 512) and exposes the internal contradictions and fissures of neo-liberal programmes. By unsettling and de-naturalising the operation of contemporary regimes of power in this way, neoFoucauldian analysis can add critical depth to studies of sub-national governance.

Acknowledgements The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh. I am grateful to the 67 individuals who agreed to be interviewed for sharing their time and knowledge. I would like to thank Peter Sunley, Charles Withers, Jon Murdoch, Nick Phelps, David Slater and three anonymous referees for their insightful

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Though the governmentality literature fails to address this issue in any detail.

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comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am, of course, solely responsible for the contents of the paper.

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