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I have called this lecture Going Public because I am increasingly concerned about the difficulty of speaking the language of the public in contemporary political discourse.
But this is not just a question of language. Despite the focus by all of the main political parties on public services in the recent election, the publicness of those services is viewed as somehow outdated, part of the old world of the universal welfare state rather than the new world of modernity, flexibility and consumerism.
Rather than looking back regretfully at a vanishing social democratic public sphere I want to address a key dilemma - a dilemma that comes out of my own experience of crossing and re-crossing the boundary between academic work and what those outside the academy like to call ‘the real world’. The dilemma is: how to hold together critical understandings of the public alongside a political commitment to its continuing importance. As an academic I know that notions of the public are constituted and contested; formed through ever changing discourses that produce new conceptions of publicness and new material practices. Michael Warner, one of today’s leading cultural theorists, captures the slippery and elusive quality of notions of publicness, listing 15 different distinctions between personal and private and noting that “Almost every cultural change – from Christianity to printing to psychoanalysis – has left a new sedimentary layer in the meaning of the public and the private” (2002; p28)
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New sedimentary layers continue to accumulate at the same time that notions of publicness become ever more difficult to sustain.. Notions of a democratic public sphere with universal suffrage were hard won in 19 th
century; but a succession of political and social movements in the 20 th
have problematised its neutrality and rationality (Young, 1990; Dryzek, 2000; Benhabib, 1996; Phillips1993, 1995). Such movements have brought into question the solidity of the boundary between public, private and personal, challenging the idea that politics could be defined as a sphere of public rationality while the private and personal was viewed as somehow ‘outside’ politics. In the 21 st
century the agenda is shifting again, with new forms of governance obscuring the clarity of the boundary between state, market and civil society alongside new strategies that attempt to reconstitute the public in more governable forms (e.g.
Rose, 1999). Notions of a collective public imaginary are being disrupted not only by the dismantling of the social democratic welfare state, but also by the dislocations of race, culture and identity in the context of post colonial anxieties (Gilroy, 2005).
All of this means that it has become increasingly difficult to speak about a public domain, and to think about how we should act in it; indeed the language of public domain, public sphere, public realm, public sector, all imply a rather spatial metaphor that fails to capture the mobile, elusive and problematic character of publicness. But despite all that, I remain someone still closely engaged with the fortunes of the public sector, of those who work in it an those who benefit from it (or not) - and as such I want to argue that notions of publicness still matter; that the publicness of public institutions and public discourse is something to be struggled over. The spaces formed at the interface between these different positions, I want to argue, has important implications for all those who work in education, in policy development or in the delivery of public services.
In what follows I want to do three things. I begin by delineating some of the terrains in which the contemporary politics of the public is being struggled over: and touch briefly on the poverty of the social democratic response. Then I draw on some of my own research to trace what I think are critical issues in the remaking of public policy, public services and public institutions. And finally I go back to the dilemma that I began with and suggest ways in which it might be possible to think about the role of
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the public intellectual – whether inside or beyond the academy – in restating a politics of publicness.
The politics of the public
This is a moment at which struggles over what is and what is not a public matter are intensifying. They encompass struggles over security with the dismantling of protections of privacy following 9/11 th ; struggles over the environment, and the private abuse of global resources; struggles around sexuality, including how far the state may regulate or intervene into the private, what sexualities are publicly recognised and what practices may occupy pubic space; struggles over issues of reproduction following challenges to the personal integrity of the body through advances in genetic engineering (and indeed the ownership of those technologies); and even struggles over that most personal moment, death, with more and more conflicts about the right to die hitting the headlines and with debates about who can decide to terminate life support technologies intensifying. And there are many others.
In the UK debates about whether financial provision for old age is a matter for the state, for employers or for personal prudentialism are moving to the centre of the government’s political agenda, while the extent of the role of the market in the provision of health, education and social care will continue to be contested.
Now across those struggles we can trace a lot of confusions in the definitions used.
Privacy may be defined as a negative freedom from incursions of the state, a private domain of domestic and personal life, or the privacy of the consumer making individualised choices in the marketplace rather than subscribing to collective provision of public services. Publicness may denote the Habermasean public sphere of communicative rationality and democratic engagement; can mean the public sector, publicly owned resources, public space or public values. However the shifting boundary between public, private and personal is not just a matter of definitional nicety – it is the focus new governmental processes through which the boundaries are reordered, and of active contestation, border skirmishes and infringements. I want to offer four quick examples of this reworking of public and private, highlighting the slippages between political, economic and moral inflections that underpin them. The first - reported in the Guardian under the alarming headline
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Pope Warns Feminists (Guardian, 31.07.04, p1) – refers to a report presented to Pope
John Paul 2 nd
by the then Cardinal Ratzinger about the dangers of feminist arguments that undermined the essential differences between women and men. This example denotes the contested boundary of the personal and the political. Domestic violence, abortion, and reproduction are issues that women have long struggled to get on the public agenda. They are now the focus of efforts by the moral right in a new politics of the personal that seeks to reassert patriarchal authority and a conservative moral agenda.
My second example also relates to the personal/political boundary, eliding the distinction between personal belief and public culture. This is a site of historical tensions between church and state, tensions taking new forms in the context of the importance of faith issues in defining and delimiting – and perhaps essentialising - notions of multiculturalism. In 2004 the Birmingham repertory Theatre attempted to put on a play – Bhezti - that drew vocal protests and public demonstrations from what was termed the local Sikh community. Now the notion of an integrated, univocal
Sikh community is of course deeply problematic. It masks differences of gender and generation, differences that were very significant here since the play depicted incidents of domestic violence against women in a holy Sikh place. Not only does this raise issues of how the boundary between public and private is culturally contested, but also raises issues about who can speak about – and for – particular publics; who has a public voice and whose voices are silenced. The example also suggests ways in which public space is differently inhabited and experienced, and what happens when the borders of those spaces are contested.
My third example draws on the contested boundary around what counts as personal.
In March 2005 – on International Women’s Day – the Labour government announced that all pregnant women were to be asked by their doctors or midwives whether they were being abused by their partner, following research showing that women are more likely to be subjected to domestic violence when pregnant. This is a typical New
Labour articulation between old forms of politics – in this case feminist – and new strategies of social governance that disrupt the privacy of personal lives. As such it was hotly debated. The minister, Melanie Johnson, said “Domestic violence is a taboo subject that is often shrouded in secrecy. This only serves to help the
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perpetrator. We want to bring it out into the open” – openness here denoting one form of publicness. Critics condemned the plans as intrusive and bureaucratic and said that doctors and midwives should not be forced to ask such personal questions. Ann
Widdecombe attacked the plans saying “this is carpet bombing everybody for the sake of getting information about a minority”.
My fourth example concerns what is probably the dominant strategy for remaking the public – that is, its abandonment in the face of marketisation and privatisation.
However we can trace moments that apparently challenge that dominant logic, from the challenge to the practice of charging local populations to cross the privately built bridge from the Scottish mainland to the island of Skye to less successful calls for the re-nationalisation of rail transport. The example I have chosen is this the pressure put on government by Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve school dinners. Jamie Oliver condenses both the impact of heroic images from the worlds of commerce and celebrity on the public sector, and the importance of the media in shaping and reshaping ideas of what is and is not a public matter. Despite the early promise of more funds from government to improve school dinners it emerged that new schools built under the private finance initiative could do nothing because they were locked into 25 year contracts, while other schools would have to pay significant financial penalties to opt out of long running contracts with private catering companies. The turkey twizzler lives on.
This example opens up questions about how the dynamics of remaking the public takes place across a field of structured inequalities. The school dinners campaign included a call for better pay for dinner ladies so that they could actually have time to cook freshly prepared food, as opposed to composing pre-packaged meals from suppliers. Now dinner ladies are an example of the kinds of worker that moved from public to private sector in the marketising reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and whose wages, conditions and quality of work suffered, alongside their capacity to deliver public value – whether defined in terms of healthy children, clean hospitals or quality of life for those in need of long term care.
This opens out a different kind of politics of the public, raising issues about who is employed in what conditions as well as what kinds of work are deemed to be a public
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or collective responsibility. The welfare state can be viewed as making public – and institutionalising - women’s domestic and emotional labour, with women constituting a high proportion of workers in local government and health. The dismantling of the welfare state involves a number of different – gendered and racialised – dynamics
(Newman 2005a). Many forms of domestic and emotional labour are being ‘reprivatised’ to the domestic or personal spheres while at the same time women are being encouraged – through welfare to work programmes and other strategies – to become full worker citizens. The tensions between these strategies are being managed partly in the personal sphere – through the further stretching of the elasticity of women’s labour – and partly by the development of a service sector supplying domestic labour. This service sector is based on a marginal economy of low paid, flexible and vulnerable employment in which the care gaps are often filled by migrant labour. And it is workers in this new economy that experience most acutely the stresses created by the withdrawal of the state, picking up responsibility for forms of welfare that have been privatised onto individuals and families as well as experiencing successive waves of intensification of their own paid work (Brodie
2002; Kingfisher 2002; Newman and Money, 2004).
In my four examples – the Pope, the Sikh protest, Midwives and Jamie Oliver - I have sketched a number of different dynamics at stake in the politics of remaking the public. These can be summarised as:
- publicising the personal – drawing issues that were previously viewed as settled, especially around identity, into the public domain.
- going to market - the increasing turn to the market for the provision of public goods and the potential displacement of collective identifications and allegiances that this produces
- obscuring the public - the turn to public/private partnerships, contracting and network forms of coordination that obscure the boundaries between state, market and civil society
- governing the private - new governmental strategies of responsibilisation and more direct forms of intervention into how we live our personal lives
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And there is a fifth strategy which I am not going to address here - one in which the public is collapsed into populist images of the people, captured not least by Blair’s rhetorical flourishes of “what people want” or the Conservative electoral hoarding adverts asking “Are you thinking what we’re thinking” on a series of issues in the run up to the 2005 election.
The social democratic response
In trying to problematise or resist these processes we are, I think, handicapped by the dominance of the language of social democracy. As the title of a 2004 book makes clear, the dominant response is one that emphasises the importance of Restating the
State (Gamble and Wright, 2004). The social democratic response tends to be based on a single narrative of decline (of the public sphere) and a single logic that drives it
(marketisation). This is a conception that views the public sphere as spatially and temporally fixed; that locks us into a traditional notion of the public as clearly distinguished from the private; and that offers a view of the public sphere as a domain of rational deliberation that can be clearly marked from the passions and pleasures of the personal or the commercialised relationships of the market. It also misses the gender subtext of the duality between public and private. One of the most prolific commentators on the decline of the public, David Marquand, has argued that “if the personal is politicised, or the political personalised, the public and private domains are both likely to be twisted out of shape” (2004: 80). This is, I want to argue, looks back
– nostalgically – to the golden days of the clarity and simplicity of class based politics, sidelining the incursions of the social movements that brought new issues and agendas into the public domain. It is organised around a state/market binary that collapses the complexity of the ways in which lives are lived, and that returns us to essentialist conceptions of individual identity and subjectivity. As such it offers a relatively narrow politics of the public sphere – one that fails to acknowledge new claims for voice and justice.
This brings me back to the dilemma with which I began – how to hold together a sensibility of the public as formed through complex discursive formations, as contested, plural, and slippery while also holding on to its significance. Rather than retelling the social democratic story of decline I want to argue for an approach that explores how notions of the public are being problematised, obscured, remade and
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contested . I want to do this by tracing how such questions have shaped and directed my own work over the last decade.
Going to market: reshaping the public sphere
The first ESRC project that I was engaged in – with Professor Sue Richards at
Birmingham University - was a study of the introduction of market testing in the civil service (part of the ESRC Whitehall Programme). One of the things I brought away from that project was how concepts such as economy and efficiency – and indeed accountability – have to be understood as social constructs whose meaning is struggled over in the process of tendering and contracting (Newman 2001a). The process of social construction and meaning making have very significant consequences, not only for the distribution of resources between public and private sector but also for the identities of those engaged in the transformation of the public sector – whether inside (the transformation of bureaucrats and professionals into managers) or outside (bringing commercial, third sector and community organisations into new forms of governmental power through the contracting process).
This was a process that challenged the clarity of the boundary between public and private: that is, it not only externalised some services but also brought the logic of the market deep inside those that remained public (Newman, Richards and Smith, 1998;
2002). This is a process that has continued with later initiatives – best value, purchaser/provider splits, public/private partnerships, and other new configurations.
The fractured and plural public domain produced by marketisation opened up the space for the rise of managerialism. Through the 1980s and 1990s the pattern of my research and teaching led me to develop an interest in its formations, logics and impact, culminating in The Managerial State: power. Politics and ideology in the remaking of social welfare , written with my long time collaborator and partner John
Clarke (Clarke and Newman, 1997). This traced how the dispersal of state power under Thatcherism was only possible because of the significance of managerialism as a logic of decisionmaking, and explored some of the effects of this new regime of power.
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After 1997 I went on to analyse ways in which power was being reconfigured again under New Labour, exploring the contradictions at the heart of the Third Way and how such contradictions produced tensions that were played out in public policy and in Labour’s agenda for public service reform (Newman 2001b; Clarke and
Newman 2004). For example the tensions between the centralisation of power that took place under new Labour and increasingly managerial style of governance on the one hand, and the communitarian philosophy that stressed the importance of local involvement and empowerment on the other; and the tensions between hierarchical governance - still very much in place - and joined up, outcomes based, and network styles associated with new policy agendas
My interest has been in how managers and staff and policy actors occupy the spaces created as those tensions are played out.
Making up managers
This term is intended both to convey the ways in which managerial roles and identities are discursively constituted, and also the performative work done by professionals and administrative staff when taking on a managerial persona and adopting managerialism as a legitimating discourse. This mention of performativity conveys, I hope, the sense that new discourses – however powerful – are not necessarily successful in constituting new subjectivities: we have to go beyond the
‘discovery’ of discourse and analysis of its logics in order to explore ways in which new discourses are articulated with others in complex re-workings of identity and social practice. Nevertheless the new discourses of transformational leadership and entrepreneurial management serve to ‘publicise the personal’, drawing on personal identity and character as mobilising resources to a greater extent than did the impersonal discourses of bureaucracy (Newman, 2005b)
When I left local government in the mid 1980s I began teaching and researching with the Women and Work programme at the University of Aston with Professor Angela
Coyle and others. Our work with senior women managers in local government taught me the importance of identifying what happens in the spaces created when traditional commitments and affiliations - to local communities, to service users, to staff –
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encountered new managerial ideologies of delegation and empowerment (Itzin and
Newman 1995). Looking back what we were doing was were working with such women to find ways in which older forms of politics - including feminist politics - could be articulated with new political rationalities. This kind of commitment albeit inflected around different forms of politics, continued in work at INLOGOV and across the School of Public Policy at Birmingham with Chris Skelcher, Michael
Hughes and other Birmingham University colleagues. It produced a lasting commitment to the importance of studying the experiences and expectations of those captured in contradictory logics of modernisation; and a commitment to theory building as a collaborative process with research subjects.
One piece of work – based on group exercises on a leadership programme where senior managers were asked, in groups, to identify the principles that informed their decision-making - opened up important research questions about concepts of accountability in the context of the new network styles of governance. The following quotations are taken from what became a larger piece of work (Newman 2004):
“its about not being the typical civil servant doing the elected politician’s will
– we are involved in shaping the agenda. At the end of the day its about making a difference, leaving some sort of legacy”
“ If you work to certain values and you believe in them then you need to be quite forceful about them… if you see a just cause you should be prepared to stick your neck out and lead on it”
“Generally people felt that our actions should be guided in terms of what benefits the end user. We want to be judged by the impact we have on users and the community at large”
What is significant here is both how, across each response, the idea of ‘making a difference’, ‘sticking your neck out’ for what you believe in or ‘making a difference’ demonstrate both the commitment to public values and public purpose; and also how important the agency of these actors is in reshaping the public sphere. The longer extracts from which these quotations are taken also suggest ways in which new
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discourses – of consumerism, community, leadership – are articulated with older discourses of bureaucratic neutrality and professional conceptions of need (Newman,
2005c).
I don’t want to romanticise public service professionals and managers as defenders of publicness – it is, after all, through their agency that governmental power is enacted and managerial power embedded. But I do want to highlight their role in managing the contradictory logics of reform – and of studying how they negotiate the tension between business accountability and a wider sense of cultural or ethical responsibility.
I want to suggest that such questions are becoming more important as the generation who grew up and began working in the Thatcher years come through into senior management and policy roles. Such tensions are also relevant to those of us who work in HE as we balance the need to respond to the market (the preferences of students and potential students) alongside our own pedagogic values or views about what we would like students to learn.
Remaking the public
The next two projects I want to talk about mark a shift from a focus on public services to a focus on publics. One was a project within the ESRC’s Democracy and
Participation programme (with Marian Barnes and Helen Sullivan at the University of
Birmingham). This studied new sites of engagement – deliberative forums – as encounters in which notions of publicness, the public interest, public value are being negotiated around local or service specific issues in a multitude of dispersed sites.
Such forums – area committees, user consultation panels, senior citizens forums and many others - recast the public sphere around a politics of user empowerment or community participation. The research helped us to develop the idea of the public as a constituted entity or entities rather than as something ‘out there’ that can be discovered or engaged by agencies looking for a public to talk to; and also suggested ways in which the institutional frameworks within which participation is enacted limit the extent of the power afforded to the participating public (Barnes et al 2003;
Newman et al 2004; Sullivan et al 2004).
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The current project at the Open University, ‘Creating Citizen-Consumers: changing relationships and identifications’, within the ESRC/AHRB Cultures of Consumption programme, is with John Clarke, Louise Westmarland, Nick Smith and Elizabeth
Vidler. Here we are studying the development of policies on consumerism and choice and the ways in which these are being interpreted and enacted across three different services – health, social care and policing – in two different locations within the UK.
The results suggest the complexity of identifications and attachments between public services and the people who use them, a complexity that is captured neither by the term citizen nor consumer (Clarke 2004; Clarke, Smith and Vidler, 2005; Newman and Vidler 2005). However the turn to consumerism, I want to argue, further masks the publicness of public services - what matters, ministers proclaim, is how services are experienced, not who provides them.
Both projects show how individuals and communities are being constituted as partners and collaborators in the process of governing. However both projects also demonstrate the possibilities of new forms of claims making – by individuals, by user movements, and by agencies speaking in the name of the consumer. This dynamic is important – I am committed to approaches that attempt to capture and work with the contradictory logics of regimes of power, rather than assuming that subjects are necessarily simply subjected to new governmental strategies. But it raises questions about the kinds of social and political imaginary being opened up and closed down through the governmental practices associated with the remaking of publics. One of the things I take from both projects is the increasing focus on service specific, community or project based patterns of public engagement. The social democratic state embodied hierarchical relationships between government and people based on liberal notions of citizenship inscribed in the nation state. This suggests an open relationship that offers a seemingly broad imaginary of belongingness- albeit one circumscribed by who is inside, who is outside and who is marginal to the collective imaginaries of national citizenship. The remaking of publics in participative, consumerist and community locales serves to recasts the public sphere as a series of horizontal spaces (Walters, 2002). This involves a dialectical process - not only a governmentality of community but also what Wendy Larner terms of communitisation of government. Such a process serves to displace the possibility of wider justice or equality claims.
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Now clearly community participation or responsive services have to be viewed as positive rather than negative developments. But I want to look at what happens when these are articulated with a second governmental strategy concerned with the remaking of publics – the shift from public to social in governmental discourse. My studies of New Labour’s modernisation agenda suggest a displacement of the ‘public’ with the language of the social: social investment, social capital, social inclusion and so on. In each the social is collapsed into the economic in a way that marginalises and residualises the public. It is a process whereby public investment - in infrastructure, transport, and public facilities such as libraries – is increasingly subordinated to a focus on social investment; that is, investment in the capacity of future citizens to flourish in globalised economy. Indeed the public tends to be associated with old fashioned imagery of welfare state. However New Labour is not a single block. Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, addresses the link between public services and an image of a shared public realm in a recent
Demos pamphlet. The tension between individual and collective identifications is acknowledged, but the collective is one that remains constrained by the dominant discourse of community (Jowell, 2005). Jowell also highlights the troubled fate of a number of public institutions – the BBC, public libraries and museums, and even the
Open University, all institutions associated with historical notions of a collective public sphere. This takes me to my fourth and last theme for this section of the lecture.
Transforming public institution
The question I want to focus on here is: how have public institutions attempted to transform themselves in order to respond to new claims for recognition and representation? This brings me to a small piece of work that looks back to the period of public sector growth and shifts in an institution that stood as an icon of the public domain – the public library services. The service that I joined in late 1960s was based on relatively recently secured principles of openness and access. However in the mid-
1970s these ideas of openness were being challenged by new claims arising from those excluded from the post war social settlement, from community activists and
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from a new professional awareness of the limits of passive conceptions of openness in the face of sharpening social inequality.
Two developments stand out: the turn to community, taking services outside the buildings; and the response to diversity, based predominantly on establishing special collections for particular groups of readers – women’s collections, black studies collections, adult literacy and basic skills collections, gay and lesbian collections, and so on. Now it has to be said that none of us was particularly political (though I was involved with the early women’s movement at the time) nor did we have any coherent theory to guide us – a couple of us were graduate trainees and I was just starting my
Open University degree. So what did we think we were up to? I am currently using interviews with key colleagues from that period to go back to the foundational question about who is the public in a diverse society, and what we thought we were doing in our attempts to reach out to new publics in a drive for equality and accessibility (Newman, forthcoming). Similar questions – about the relationships between openness and equality, and about how to acknowledge social differentiation and cultural diversity in the public sphere, are key to a number of institutions, including this one.
The role of the public intellectual
What I have been trying to argue is that the remaking of the public is played out around a number of different struggles. It is not one logic (privatisation) but a plurality of competing logics that create multiple spaces that social actors can engage with .
The contradiction I set out at the beginning define the space of being a public intellectual in the present. But I am struggling for language here – I don’t want to recreate a duality between universities as the home of public intellectuals and the rest of the public sphere peopled with reflexive practitioners, expert citizens or politicians hungry for the latest crumbs from the academic table, nor do I particularly want to engage in a one way system of knowledge transfer. The work of rethinking and remaking the public comes out of relationships that are active and engaged. One of the best public intellectuals I know – Carole Hart - is the leader of a small voluntary
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organisation run by women in Birmingham who is very skilled at going out and engaging people – including, but not confined to, academics - bringing ideas back, finding the money to send members off to big events such as the Bejing conference, the World Social Forum, and mediating new ideas into political practice.
Nevertheless universities continue to form a privileged site for intellectual activity, albeit not as privileged as it used to be. What are the intellectual resources we can work with? When I was thinking about this question I turned to a 2004 issue of the journal New Formations on the public intellectual. One of the clearest statements came from Andrew Gamble:
“public intellectuals…. are committed to the idea of the public domain itself, and the essential values for its continuance – such as openness, rationality, diversity, clarity and tolerance” (2004: 41)
Now the research I’ve been describing suggests that each of these concepts is deeply problematic. Openness is a concept that implies a form of cultural universalism problematised by those excluded from the post war social settlement, challenges picked up by some critical professionals, as in the library example. problematised by critical professionals (including librarians). Rationality is one of the characteristics of the Habermasean conception of a democratic public sphere that has been widely criticised by feminists and others as excluding particular voices and forms of expression. Clarity was never a characteristic of the social democratic state – for example the distinction between politics and administration was always very muddy - and it has become more problematic in the context of the network society. Even as an aspiration it diminishes the validity of emotional or informal dimensions of public value that do not lend themselves to the job description or contract – for example the informal care work done by cleaners in hospitals or residential care establishments before the advent of contract cleaning. Diversity tends to be institutionalised in forms that categorise publics into discrete groups for the purpose of participation or targeted initiatives (as in the library example and the public participation project). In the process, as Wendy Brown argues, publics are detached from the politics that produced them, “historical conflicts are rendered as essential ones, effects become cause, and ‘culture’, ‘religion, ethnicity or sexuality become entrenched differences with entrenched interests” (2001, 39). And tolerance is comprehensively critiqued by
Wendy Brown in her forthcoming book and I can’t hope to replicate the sophistication
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of her arguments here – but it is clear from the public library research that our early engagement with multiculturalism was marred by forms of tolerance that served to reassert the hegemony of the white norm.
Each term, then, is open to critical constructivism – but I do not want to suggest that words can mean anything that you want them to mean. These are all part of the discursive chain that form the lifeblood of liberalism. As such our task is to deconstruct them, both in order to make the choices more visible and indicate why they matter, and to engage with the work of redefining them in the context of contemporary struggles. It should not just be up to Tony Blair, Tessa Jowells and others to redefine equality and justice for a modern age. This also means defending such concepts from other forms of appropriation – for example those that collapse the discourse of diversity into an ethos of individualised choices in the market place, or take openness out of its association with a liberal public sphere – however flawed – and suture it into new discourses of opportunity and choice.
However this form of discursive work is, in itself, not enough. We need forms of critical theory that can engage with what Nancy Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003) calls hard cases – for example the Sikh protest in Birmingham; struggles that arise from the growth of the religious and moral right; or new forms of populist politics.
What I have in mind is the work done by Davina Cooper (1998; 2004) in her analyses of disruptions that take place on the boundary of legitimate government – and that demonstrate how that boundary is regulated and policed.
We also need to address the problems of analysing the public in a globalised world where the capacity of the nation state to bestow the identities – if not the entitlements
– of citizenship is under question, and in which new social movements and post colonial struggles have challenged the conception of a unified and inclusive public sphere. Here I am thinking of the kind of work done by Fiona Williams who – rather than looking back to social democratic instantiation of the welfare state - has drawn on the insights of social movement struggles to set out principles from which a new politics of welfare might take shape (Williams, 2001). There are no easy answers – but Fiona Williams and others are engaged in setting out principles that in Tony
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Blair’s words look forward not back, and in doing so offer an alternative set of political imaginaries.
If we were to attempt the same exercise in relation to delineating a politics of the public what might be produce?
 the public as complexly spatialised – here I am thinking of the kinds of work done by cultural geographers at the Open University
 the public as situated in different histories and struggles– but in a way that does not essentialise differences or strip them from the politics through which differential claims were produced. Here I want to note the work within the social policy discipline at the Open University that developed the idea of social settlements and analysed their complex formation and dismantling
 the public as a site of belonging and exclusion – this is marked, in particular, by the work of scholars such as Sarah Neal, working on issues of ‘race’ and rurality, and Gail Lewis whose work on post colonial issues of belonging is opening up new research agendas
 the public as relational and experiential – but not individuated into a multitude of specific service encounters or communitised relationships
 the public as something which is voiced and claimed, rather than solid and static - while recognising that not all claims are of equal value
 the public as constituted through social and political practice – a practice through which claims can be struggled for and in which judgements between different claims might be made. This is something debated by Nancy Fraser in her analysis of the relationship between the politics of recognition and of redistribution (Fraser and Honneth, 2003), and leads to important questions about how we redefine democracy and democratic practice – questions beyond the scope of this lecture.
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I want to make three concluding points:
First, as academics and researchers, professionals and managers we have to think about the new strategies of governance alongside questions of identity, personhood and social agency. This means opening up new theoretical conversations, work we are struggling with in at the OU with in the new research centre on Citizenship, Identity and Governance.
Second, we have to engage with the politics of the public. This is opens up some difficult issues. Anthony Giddens, Julian Le Grand, Gerry Stoker and others have been highly influential in shaping contemporary political discourse - but their ideas have in many cases become part of the problem rather than part of the solution as they get translated into policy. As academics we do have a key role in influencing the institutions and cultures of government; but must nevertheless retain some kind of critical distance, holding on to the productive tension between politics and theory rather than collapsing the distinction. Wendy Brown argues that
“We usurp the increasingly scarce space allotted today to thinking, to make meaning slide, as we politicise a space that must in turn guard its borders and mount the barricades to defend the identity it protects” (2001: 41)
This doesn’t mean not engaging in contract research or funded evaluation projects – I am currently involved as academic adviser to the Department of Health in their programme of research on the modernisation of adult social care, a programme organised around the government’s own research questions. But it does mean not being driven by government in the kinds of thinking and theorising we engage in; and opening up critical dialogues with non governmental actors and stakeholders.
Thirdly, as academics we have to turn the investigative gaze onto ourselves. The impact of managerialism has led to an increasing focus on the academy as a place conceptualised in terms of the productivity of academics. We are perhaps constrained in engaging beyond the academy by having to publish in journals that few people actually read in order to perform well in the RAE. The key question here is - how do
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we ensure that productivity discourse in HE does not squeeze out other ethical and political – and indeed educational – discourses?
I am going to end by stressing the importance of the OU in enabling all of those agendas to be pursued. But also as a public institution in its own right that continues to pursue public values and a wider public purpose, however difficult that now is to define. It had its origins in a period in which public institutions were flowering, with the expansion of the welfare state, higher education, public broadcasting and other cultural instiutions. Each has had to face new forms of competition; each has had its funding squeezed and has had to become more business like, to think about market positioning and branding. Each, like the OU, has had to make compromises on the way and we should not underestimate the continued threats that they face. But each has been engaged in a struggle to both defend the concepts of the public sphere that produced it and to remake itself around new conceptions of purpose and value. This is why, in the end, I am glad to work here.
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