RHETORIC, ORGANIZATIONAL CATEGORY DYNAMICS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: A STUDY OF THE UK WELFARE STATE
| Author | ELLEN BENNETT,TRACEY M. COULE |
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12274 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12274
RHETORIC, ORGANIZATIONAL CATEGORY DYNAMICS
AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: A STUDY OF THE UK
WELFARE STATE
TRACEY M. COULE AND ELLEN BENNETT
Accounts of institutional change and categorization conventionally assume that high-status change
agents can impose change, even to stable category systems, which lower-status actors accommodate
in order to ensure social approval and material resources.By exploring the UK Conservative-Liberal
Coalition’s rhetorical efforts to reform the welfare state, how welfare providers arecategorized and
the subsequent response of implicated category members, we offerinstead an account of institutional
change that exposes the agentic limitations of high-status actors. While governments may well be
in a position to impose changes in the formal rules of the game through manipulation of material
resources (scal contraction, privatization, open markets, deregulation), we nd that they cannot
necessarily monopolize symbolic resources (identities/cultural features). We also nd that devia-
tion from cultural expectations is available not only to large, high-status organizations; low-status
actors too have discretion over their responses to institutional pressures regarding how they are
categorized and subsequently judged.
INTRODUCTION
The ongoing global nancial crisis has signicant implications for the future of the welfare
state, with scholars discussing the shift from a universal model where services are seen as
a social right to a welfare model that places increasing responsibility on citizens creating a
‘self-service society’ in many advanced democracies (Eriksson 2012; Kuisma 2013; Watson
2013). In the UK context, the election of the Conservative-Liberal Coalition in 2010 repre-
sented a shift away from the liberal collectivist approach of New Labour to an intensied
neoliberal regime (Grimshaw and Rubery 2012; Wiggan 2012). While austerity measures
and cuts in public funding could be seen simply as a response to scal constraints, scholars
have convincingly traced welfare reform to deep-rooted ideologies about the role of the
state vis-à-vis other actors (Alcock and Kendall 2011; Grimshaw and Rubery 2012; Wiggan
2012).
Wiggan (2012) provides a useful example through his account of New Labour’s con-
version to a more activist state approach in tackling unemployment by introducing the
Future Jobs Fund during the 2008–09 recession as an alternative to relying purely on mar-
ket forces and the private sector to create jobs. This programme was swiftly abandoned by
the Coalition in favour of familiar neoliberal policy measures which instead focused on
improving the nancial attractiveness of employment and intensifying market incentives.
Despite the signicant insights provided by such work into the discursive and
ideational shifts in welfare reform and policy change associated with particular political
regimes or ‘administrative doctrines’ (Hood and Jackson 1991), such studies are largely
content-driven (Schmidt 2008). As such they reveal little about what policy texts ‘do’,
discursively speaking, or how tensions, contradictions and ambiguities play out not
on the public stage of state governance but back-stage at the micro level in specic
organizations that deliver welfare provision. For the purposes of this article, we thus
Tracey M. Coule is at the Shefeld Business School, ShefeldHallam University, UK. Ellen Bennett is at the Centre for
Regional Economic and Social Research, Shefeld Hallam University,UK.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (1059–1076)
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
1060 TRACEY M. COULE AND ELLEN BENNETT
narrow our focus from the vast domain of the welfare state specically to ask, how did
the Coalition construct the state and non-prot organizations’ (NPOs) role in public
service provision, what implications did this have for the categorization of welfare
providers, and how did implicated organizational actors receive and respond to this
political project?
Organizational categories are important because they possess disciplining functions,
creating a categorical imperative for organizations to t into a specic category in order
to gain social approval and material resources (Lounsbury and Glynn 2001; Kodeih and
Greenwood 2014). They convey cultural codes that are associated with membership of a
particular category and carry expectations that audiences such as regulators, employees
and consumers impose on different ‘types’ of organizations (Vergne and Wry 2014). Until
the election of the Coalition administration, NPOs operated in a familiar and monolithic
context under the 1997–2010 New Labour administration (Conservative Party 2008). In
particular, NPOs were recognized and treated in policy and economic terms as a distinct
organizational category that ‘partnered’ the state in providing welfare services (Haugh
and Kitson 2007; Alcock and Kendall 2011). The Coalition’s intensied neoliberal approach
and associated withdrawal of the state brings its treatment of NPOs in line with that of
commercial entities (Conservative Party 2008) and cues the expectation that NPOs should
embody the ideal categorical type – that of a professional and enterprising entity. This
categorization, however, is not entirely consistent with NPO actors’ self-categorization
and, in a context where there are increasing claims being made upon the state (Grimshaw
and Rubery 2012), marks a dramatic change in the relationship of the state with welfare
providers and citizens.
We extend understanding of category dynamics in three interrelated ways. First, we
highlight the power, struggle and conict inherentin strategic categorization (i.e. strategi-
cally pursuing membership in one category versus another). In doing so, we show impor-
tant limitations to the agency of both high- and low-status organizations in respect of
symbolic and material resources. Finally, we highlight the importance of categorization
hierarchy in category dynamics where ‘opponents’ are characterized by signicant power
differentials.
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
Early studies in cognitive psychology examined self-categorization among organizations
at the micro-level of analysis (Porac et al. 1989). More recent, more sociological insights
have advanced macro-level understandings of categories of components of an organiza-
tion’s external environment (Hsu and Hannan 2005). Vergne and Wry (2014, pp. 57–58),
however,note that despite category studies offering ‘natural points of intersection between
micro and macro’, this work has ‘become dominated by sociological perspectives asso-
ciated with the categorical imperative’. At the core of a sociological perspective is the
inference that deviation from institutional expectations about category membership result
in organizations being socially sanctioned and impelled to modify their behaviour – and
do so due to the implications for access to symbolic and material resources. Amongst other
things, what this points to is the importance of status relative to other category and eld
members as a potential driver of institutional choice. High status within a eld is theorized
to privilege organizations with better access to valuable resources and the ability to change
expectations and what is considered desirable (Durand and Szostak 2010). Consequently,
status is understood to inuence the likely success of change efforts (Phillips et al. 2004;
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (1059–1076)
© 2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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