Whatever Happened to Councillors? Problematising the Deficiency Narrative in English Local Politics
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Author | Neil John Barnett,Steven Griggs,David Howarth |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718807379 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2019
Article
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(3) 775 –794
Whatever Happened to
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Deficiency Narrative in English
Local Politics
Neil John Barnett1, Steven Griggs2
and David Howarth3
Abstract
Calls for councillors to change are nothing new, even from staunch defenders of local democracy.
But one critical question has been sidestepped: Why have councillors been persistently constructed
as a ‘problem’ for local government? This article draws upon Foucault to detect the emergence
and sedimentation of an overriding problematisation of councillors. Our genealogical analysis of
a range of public commissions and inquiries, policy documents and academic discourses reveals a
‘deficiency narrative’, forged during the managerialist turn in the 1960s and subsequently reframed
in the 1990s and 2000s through the lens of community leadership. We show that the exclusions
and methodological limits of this imaginary blinker studies of councillors, leaving an unhelpfully
normative stance within local government studies. Such deficits also lead to a ‘smoothing out’ of
the complexity of local politics, downplay local dynamics and political work, and miss important
insights into the practices of local democracy.
Keywords
councillors, problematisation, local government, managerialism, community leadership
Accepted: 24 September 2018
In an age marked by austerity and public spending cuts, often directed at the local state,
councillors have become the target of competing pressures and demands. They have been
urged to adopt new positions and behaviours to meet shifting patterns of service delivery,
evolving community needs and changing institutional landscapes. Of course, these
demands are not new. For many years there has been sustained debate about the roles and
role orientations of councillors, both within the field of local government studies and in
1Faculty of Business and Law, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK
2Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
3Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, UK
Corresponding author:
Neil John Barnett, Faculty of Business and Law, Leeds Beckett University, The Rose Bowl, Portland Place,
Leeds LS1 3QS, UK.
Email: N.Barnett@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
776
Political Studies 67(3)
the wider public domain. Over time, various institutional redesigns of the office of the
councillor have mirrored the twists and turns of local government reorganisations.
However, in our view, such interventions and public deliberations have tended to side-
step one critical question: Why and how have councillors been persistently constructed as
a ‘problem’ for local government? Drawing on Foucault’s method of problematisation,
our answer to this question focuses on the emergence and crystallisation of a series of
problematisations of councillors in different conjunctures during the past 50 years. Our
genealogical analysis detects a ‘deficiency narrative’, which was forged during the mana-
gerialist turn in the 1960s, and then reframed in the late 1990s and early 2000s through
the lens of community leadership. We show that the exclusions and methodological limits
of this collective social imaginary blinker studies of councillors, pointing to an unhelp-
fully normative stance within local government studies. We also argue that such limita-
tions result in a ‘smoothing out’ of the complexity of local politics, while downplaying
local dynamics and political activity, so that we miss important insights into the practices
of local democracy. We conclude by calling for a new agenda in the study of – and
approach to – the work of councillors.
The Argument
Our argument is developed in three steps. We first stress that our objects of inquiry are
discursively constructed, so that the practice of problematisation is the necessary starting
point of any critical explanation (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). Drawing on Foucault, we
show how his idea of problematisation is an effective research strategy for unearthing and
challenging the fundamental assumptions of different fields of study. Problematisation
thus allows us to contest particular accounts produced in a discipline, while questioning
how a specific object of study has been forged in a particular context.
Second, we investigate and distil the dominant problematisations of the office of the
councillor. Here we focus mainly on the official policy discourses, public inquiries and
reports from expert committees; when taken together, as Ashforth (2014: 8) argues, such
problematisations are concerned, not only ‘with the making of substantively true proposi-
tions about material and social reality’, but also about ‘elaborating practical means to
achieve specific ends within the context of that reality’. In the context of English local
government, we describe the way that existing representations of councillors and their
work depict them as suffering from the ‘wrong’ personal attributes, the lack of managerial
skills, political shortcomings, and so forth. In this picture, councillors are invariably seen
to be behind the times, overtaken by events, and resistant to attempts to get them to pro-
fessionalise or ‘modernise’. Moreover, in both academic discourses and government
policy, we argue that such problematisations are intimately connected with – and shaped
by – what we call a ‘deficiency narrative’, which emerged during the managerialist turn
in the 1960s and 1970s, and was sedimented in the 1980s and 1990s.
This deficiency narrative serves to reframe deeply embedded attacks on the personal
qualities of councillors, thus connecting their shortcomings to the administrative and
service delivery challenges facing councils. Indeed, the ‘failings’ of councillors were
crucial in the drive to improve the performance of local government, and subsequent
proposals to address this entrenched imaginary in the 1960s and 1970s. Functioning as a
horizon for understanding the role of local councillors, a further discursive transforma-
tion occurred during the late 1980s and 1990s, as demands for democratic renewal were
gradually incorporated into the deficiency narrative through the rhetoric of community
Barnett et al.
777
leadership. Here the new rhetoric created equivalences between democratic renewal,
community leadership, new forms of management, and the perceived inadequacies of
local councillors. Opposition to the deficiency narrative was thus negated and incorpo-
rated, as demands for democratic renewal were increasingly reframed through the nor-
mative characterisation of councillors and parties as obstacles to reform. Again such
discourses sought to ‘fix’ councillors, while focusing attention on how councillors may
become ‘better’.
Third, we expose the limits and exclusions of this deficiency narrative – and the prob-
lematisations it has partly shaped – thus foregrounding how it has clouded various studies
of councillors. We argue that it has also yielded overly prescriptive inquiries, which fail
to grasp the inherent messiness of politics, as well as the practices of political work.
Inquiry into the activities of councillors is thus occluded. Indeed, the narrative defines
local councillors as a part of the ‘problem’ facing local government, while its evaluative
focus on the roles and categories of councillors contributes to their being overlooked in
explanations of local political change. In elaborating our argument, we begin with the
concept of problematisation.
The Method of Problematisation
Foucault develops the idea of problematisation as a method to capture the way a puzzle
or an anomaly (in phenomena or in theory) is registered and explored in the domain of
thought. The practice of problematisation involves ‘a movement of critical analysis in
which one tries to see how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed; but
also how these different solutions result from a specific form of problematisation’
(Foucault, 1997: 118–119). It begins with pressing and unsettling issues in the present,
which elicit thought and critical engagement, and then involves the mobilisation of
Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical modes of analysis.
The archaeological component brackets the causal determinations and conditions that
constitute a phenomenon, so that its particular identity can be discerned and described.
This involves laying-bare the rules that enable the discursive construction of the forms
that are investigated. The genealogical dimension is then employed to explore the his-
torical emergence of the investigated phenomenon, where emphasis is placed on its
‘descent’ – the evolution of an identity in a field of contingent events – coupled with the
different political struggles and relations of domination that shaped its trajectory
(Foucault, 1984a: 81–83).
Foucault’s motivated genealogies destabilise narratives that present a simple continu-
ity where none actually exists. Yet he also interrupts apparently clear-cut breaks, which
separate a ‘backward’ or problematic ‘pre-historical’ past from a new beginning, so that
past injustices or outmoded beliefs are erased. Instead, Foucault uses his historical sensi-
bility to discern subtle rhetorical...
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