Morag McDermont

MIXED MESSAGES: HOUSING ASSOCIATIONS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Housing associations have traditionally been bound together by notions of providing for those in housing need, non-profit making and a voluntary ethos. Since the mid- 1980s these understandings have altered when associations began to develop a private sector ethos leading to: increased priority given to the needs of private funders; the professionalization of boards of management, largely at the behest of the state regulator; and a reimaging of tenants as ‘customers’. These changes have raised fundamental questions about the appropriateness of associations’ modes of internal governance through voluntary governing bodies. This article explores those shifts in culture and the ways in which they have created difficult and contradictory subject positions for members of boards, particularly tenant board members. The article raises questions about the application of corporate governance models to the housing association sector, and the appropriateness of applying private sector principles of corporate governance to organizations in the voluntary/quasi-public sector. Using Foucault’s insights on the subject and power the article will consider how tenant board members are constructed by others and themselves, and how these constructions could affect their potential for intervening in the power relations of the board.

Structuring governance: A case study of the new organizational provision of public service delivery

Drawing on research findings concerning the new management structures and paradigms in the range of services formerly provided within the public sector, this paper reports on research conducted into the governing structures of a newly registered social landlord, formed to take over a local authority’s housing stock. Using a variety of ethnographic methods, the research looked at the ways in which the members of the governing body translated understandings of neutrality into their everyday practices and how expertise was constructed by the members themselves as well as their perceptions of each other’s expertise. We conclude by relating the findings of our research to other literature on citizen participation and argue that these elements of neutrality and expertise lie in tension with, and constrain, effective participation.

Acts of Translation: UK Advice Agencies and the creation of matters-of-public-concern

Voluntary sector advice agencies have performed an important function in providing free, accessible advice in the UK for many decades. As legal aid is slashed, and ‘austerity’ leaves everyday life for many ever more precarious, their role has never been more essential. Advice agencies provide a dynamic and increasingly significant transition point where the rights, responsibilities and grievances of the individual are brought into dialogue with formal legal structures. Drawing on ideas from the ‘sociology of translation’, this paper sets out to consider the multiple, complex roles these organizations play. They are involved not simply in the delivery of advice to individuals, but in a collective concern that translates personal grievances into matters-of-public-concern. The paper concludes by considering the implications for an emerging research agenda that considers advice organizations as legal actors in a fragmenting world.

Imagining and practising citizenship in austere times: the work of Citizens Advice

Abstract This article explores the significance of citizenship for those working in Citizens Advice, a network of voluntary organisations in the UK that exists to provide peer-to-peer advice and support to those facing problems. Drawing on a recent research study, the article considers the ways in which the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is imagined and translated into practice. Despite current political and policy moves to shrink citizenship (in terms of eligibility, access and substance), the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is regularly thought about in expansive ways that draw on other imaginaries of citizenship. We suggest that these everyday discursive practices of citizenship are important both in analytic terms and in reinvigorating a political discussion otherwise focused upon restriction and exclusion.

Socio-legal Studies Module: the Bristol Experience

In this chapter we discuss the standalone Socio-Legal Studies module that has been offered to undergraduate students at Bristol University since 2006. The module was offered initially to second and third-year law students; it is now limited to third-year law students, but is open to students from other departments and schools in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law. The module is optional but has drawn a healthy number of students in the six years that it has run. The module is not intended to provide the detailed training which we offer at postgraduate level, but seeks to provide students with an encounter with law ‘from the outside’ through a social science lens. This has required a compromise between an approach based entirely on theory and one on empirical methods and research.

Participatory Research and the Medicalization of Research Ethics Processes

This article illustrates how medicalized epistemologies and methodologies significantly influence the institutional ethical review processes applied to sociolegal research in law schools. It argues this development has elevated particular renderings of mental distress and objectivity to universal definitions, potentially placing a straitjacket on methodological innovation. The authors use two case studies from their experiences as researchers in a UK Law School, alongside a small-scale survey of sociolegal researchers in other UK law schools, to illustrate the problems that can arise in securing ethical approval for sociolegal research, in particular with participatory research designs that mobilize ideas of mental distress and objectivity not premised on conventional medical understandings. The article develops key proposals that the authors feel merit further inquiry. First, there should be a comprehensive evaluation of how the jurisdiction of ethical review for sociolegal research is established. Second, sociolegal scholarship can contribute to debates concerning the discursive, material and procedural constitution of institutional ethics approval processes. Finally, we might rethink the nature of, and relationship between, university-based research ethics committees and National Health Service research ethics committees, by placing both within wider ecologies of capacities for ethical decision-making.

Poverty, social exclusion and the denial of rights to a fair hearing: a case study of employment disputes

Drawing on data from a research study of workers who sought justice following a dispute at work, this paper examines exclusion from systems of justice as a crucial element in understandings of poverty and social exclusion. We focus on the stories of those who attempt to use the employment tribunal system, which illustrate the multiple barriers to justice experienced by these workers. Arguing that the employment tribunal system provides a crucial forum independent from the workplace which can put a brake on prejudicial and arbitrary actions by employers, we conclude with suggestions for reform.

How co-production regulates

This article examines how and why regulatory influences tend to embed within the practices of co-production. Informed by empirical data derived from semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of experts in co-production, the analysis seeks to illuminate some of the ‘soft’ and ‘interactive’ forms of regulatory work that are performed. In so doing, the discussion provides a ‘lightly’ critical reading of co-production and draws in Erving Goffman’s hitherto neglected use of the concept of regulation. Framed by this work, a distinction is drawn between the regulation of co-production and regulation by co-production. The analysis contributes to a growing literature on some of the subtle and sophisticated ways in which regulation is being conducted in contemporary societies and how these contribute to the governance of social order more generally.

Assembling Citizenship in Austere Times

As neoliberalism has been assembled and reassembled in its many forms, citizenship has remained a constant object of its attention as a focal point through which economic, social and political relations can be reimagined and re-configured. We trace diverse attempts by neoliberal political projects to reassemble citizenship in the Global North and in the UK in particular. Drawing on a study of voluntary advice work in the UK (Citizens Advice), we explore how citizenship is being reassembled in the context of a citizen-to-citizen network of advice-giving. How are conceptions of citizenship negotiated in the face of the disassembling of citizenship in politics and policy? The study points to a complex field of negotiation, raising issues of theory and practice in everyday sites and relationships.