Perri Six

Devolution and individual choice in local government services

Abstract The Labour government in England is pressing for further individual consumer choice in local authority services and, in the name of localism, exploring possibilities for devolution of powers to councils. Little work has been done on how the two agendas might interact. Are they in inevitable tension, because choice promotes exit and devolution promotes voice? Might devolution be offered as a reward for good performance in choice? What might be the consequences for equity? This article argues that the more significant interaction issues are likely to arise from the dynamics created by their combined effects on incentives on households at the margin to relocate. The article offers conceptual and deductive analysis, because before we know the design of devolution and choice schemes we cannot measure the size of the interaction effects. Although major policy tension is not inevitable, the article concludes that policy makers may have to decide how much gains in voice and from choice are worth the possible losses in equity.

An Integrated Theory of Networks

In this chapter, we begin to build the theory which will be developed further in later chapters and then explored empirically in Part III. This theory is fundamentally institutionalist, in that it argues that the fundamental causal forces shaping networks are institutional in character. Like institutional theories in general, it suggests that these institutional factors provide marked constraints upon the scope for optimisation in the choice of network form. They impose limitations on the scope for human agency and also exert pressures for the primacy of certain biases in the ways of framing that choice. These limitations and pressures constrain the options available to agents in particular contexts and these can be explained by the institutional factors that the theory emphasises. However, it allows for a wider range of causal dynamics than do many ‘new’ institutionalist theories.

Money and the Organisational Process: Organisational Capability and the Relationship between Structure and Agency

“Romance without finance is a nuisance”, as “Tiny” Grimes’ early bebop song had it. That policies cannot be implemented without finance — either new money or money taken from existing programmes — is hardly news. It is common enough to find studies of failed implementation that report either insufficiency of resources or weaknesses in financial management as key contributory factors in explaining non-implementation. These tend to highlight three sorts of impact that money can have on the delivery of national policy at a local level: directly, when a programme is attempted with budgets that make the goals unaffordable (e.g. Beck, 1999); indirectly, as when organisations cannot make use of the money given to them (e.g. Sabbat, 1997); and, more broadly, as resource constraints that reduce morale, commitment and care in following procedures (e.g. Blackmore, 2001).

Memory, Forgetting, Time Horizons and Capability in Organisations

What an organisation can do depends on what its members can remember, collectively and individually; even the most recently acquired skills are not available for use if they cannot be stored in a form which enables people to recognise their need of them and then achieve their retrieval. On the other hand, organisational change relies, at least in part, on forgetting; organisational memory has finite capacity. If everything is remembered with equal vividness and sense of relevance, the past will quickly become a burden and it will prove impossible to store new capabilities, as they will fail to displace obsolete ones. Selective memory is, therefore, inevitable and invaluable. As Borges’ famous short story “Funes the memorious” (1964) showed, total recall of everything would be entirely disabling; in such a condition, humans would be unable to distinguish the trivial from the urgent. That is to say, complete retention of the past would undermine the very thing to which memory is essential: sense-making.

Trust between Organisations

Trust and trustworthiness have long been regarded as essential characteristics of inter-organisational networks. Indeed, it is commonplace within the social sciences for trust between organisations to be regarded as a positive attribute in alliances, partnerships, networks, and joint ventures. Trust, it is argued, helps to manage uncertainty (Gluckler and Armbrster, 2003); make co-operation easier (Doucette and Wiederholt, 1997); enable organisational learning (Ingham and Mothe, 1998); sustain accountability (Tomkins, 2001); encourage effective joint project management (Holt et al., 2000); secure commitment between parties (Geyskens et al., 1996) including those who have very different degrees of power (e.g. Kim, 2000); and support industrial districts (Sabel, 1992; Boschma and Lambooy, 2001) and economic development in developing countries (Murphy, 2003). Unsurprisingly, the crucial importance of trust has seeped into the literature aimed at managers involved in partnership (e.g. Greig and Poxton, 2001). Perhaps more surprisingly, most of these propositions about the general benefits of trust were already well known to social scientists more than 30 years ago (see Akerlof, 1970; Arrow, 1974; Fox, 1976; Barber, 1983; and Zucker, 1986).

Networks in Defence Procurement and Supply

This chapter examines networks in two distinct but closely related areas: arms procurement and arms supply. Markowski and Hall (1998) identify six dimensions of arms procurement: user requirements (what to buy?); division of labour (make or buy?); contracting (what type of contract?); source selection and competition (how much competition?); organisational (who should have the authority and responsibility for making procurement decisions?); and international collaboration (what should be the drivers of international procurement?). This final dimension – the extent of international collaboration between sovereign governments that underpins the other five dimensions – is the focus of discussion of procurement in this chapter. As the specifiers and paymasters for most new weapons systems, thus acting in effect as monopsony purchasers in contractual arrangements that can take up to twenty years to complete and with keen economic interests in the protection of domestic suppliers, the behaviour of governments is central to shaping the supply side of the defence industry.

Combating Crime, Disorder and Drugs

This chapter considers the development of networks designed to combat crime, disorder and drug misuse within the United Kingdom since the 1980s. These networks are largely designated partnerships within the literature. The period covered by this review reveals three distinct approaches to partnership development in this sector which are themselves informed by broader public policy trends in governance: early network initiatives typified by non-financial voluntary partnerships between enclaves; the overlay of formalised, contractbased relationships between purchasers and providers within internal markets; and, finally, the development of hierarchical hybrids in the form of statutory partnerships in which networks between agencies were mandated rather than encouraged and a suite of joint partnership structures (network forms) for monitoring, predicting, analysing and preventing crime and disorder were developed. The balance of material considered in this review concerns the formation of hierarchical hybrids, whose reported strengths and weaknesses are considered in the light of the neo-Durkheimian framework.

Learning and Leading Across Networks: Styles and Sensibilities

This chapter addresses two sets of issues that are concerned with the processes and capabilities within organisations by which they can support the strategies of, first, management in, and second, external management of, networks that were discussed in Chapter 6. To operate effectively in networks, organisations must be able to recognise and to make intelligent use of information from other organisations, whether that information is taskspecific, structured and concerned with specific operational matters or is more general intelligence about the conditions in their field. That is to say, organisational learning is key to achieving effective influence in networks. This chapter draws on studies of capacities for learning in organisations to enrich the theory already developed. Here, we are concerned principally with management in and of networks rather than their external governance.

Epilogue: Settlements and Sense-Making

This book has argued that policy implementation requires something other than setting targets and then attempting to discipline frontline staff and organisations in order to make them comply with the instructions of ministers. Fundamentally, it demands a much richer understanding of organisational process than is implied in the notion of “delivery”. Indeed, such positive feedback of what we have called hierarchical approaches tends over the long term to undermine the generic skills and commitments of organisations and professions charged with service provision. By directing the attention of managers and frontline staff to specific — and typically quantitatively measured — targets at the expense of broader goals, their capacity to appreciate the wider significance of the context of their organisation and its trajectory can be attenuated. The experience of having systems around targets, surveillance, punishment and rewards changed on an almost annual basis — sometimes incorporating major reconfigurations in relationships within and between agencies — makes it very difficult for organisations to support cohesive and coherent sense-making. The resultant culture of blame for failure induces not only short-term defensive practice but over the longer term breeds a focus on reducing the risk of being shamed in public; as managers have only so much time and attention to give to their task, the priorities of enhancing client outcomes and sustaining wider organisational capabilities suffer.

Types of Networks

One of the central arguments of this book is that the development of a taxonomy of network forms is more useful than any simple definition of networks. Such a taxonomy offers the chance to distinguish between network forms in respect of the opportunities around, constraints on and resources for management within, management affecting and governance of networks. Moreover, each network form has a different context for sensemaking around these management activities since all networks exhibit divergent patterns of relationships between the member organisations or individuals (despite the claims of some writers and theorists).