Awards ceremonies, management beliefs, power relations, and the critically realist path of the righteous left

 I spluttered into my coffee yesterday when I opened an email from West Lancashire District Council’s PR Department and read that the Council has been shortlisted for the Local Government Chronicle’s Best Council award.

My first post-spluttering reaction was ‘You cannot be serious!’ in the virtual direction of the LGC people.  

Shortlisting a Council which, under cover of its ‘Services First’ leitmotif, marginalises those people that it does not consider either worthy of its services, or those people who do not fit with their standard service user profile, or simply cannot access them? 

Shortlisting a Council which has, for example, overseen a massive decline in leisure usage in the most deprived area of the area it serve, and then added insult to injury by passing up a £110,000 government grant for free swimming for children up to 16 years? 

Shortlisting a Council which reneges without notice on an agreement to apply for £284,000 to develop a much needed youth project in the poorest part of its area? 

Shortlisting a Council that takes 18 months to put together a Rural Economy Action Plan on the basis of a report commissioned at a cost of £40,000 which also has a recommended action plan in it? 

Shortlisting a Council which, only yesterday, told me that a report on public transport might be published sometime in the first quarter of 2009, about 9 months after the transport study commissioned at a cost of £10,000 reported its findings, including the fact that Bickerstaffe is the most innaccessible area of the District? 

Shortlisting a Council which…..oh, I think you know where I’m going with this…….shortlisting a Council which in general, does its best to avoid taking real responsibility for the quality of life of its residents, and focuses its energies on good publicity for the minimum that it does do?

So, in the ennervated and righteously outraged stage that I had now reached, I did a few quick mouse clicks to research what this award stuff was all about.  I found some interesting things.

In my naivety, I’d thought the LGC might review the work of all Councils in the country, using whatever information available to them, and then shortlisting some of them for closer examination. 

No such thing. It turns out that Councils decide for themselves if they want to apply for the award.  They do so with a 2,000 word application in which they try to set out why they think they are the best Council.  It’s a bit like a glorified essay competition, and shorter than this post.

Having established it was all really just a self-promotion exercise and not a real assessment of Councils across the country, I contacted the Local Government Chronicle to ask how many Councils had actually sent an application.  They were understandably reluctant to divulge too much, but admitted that the average number of Councils entering their various award categories was ‘32 – 33′.  Given the refusal to give a precise figure, I don’t think we need to read too far between the lines to assume that the number entering the ‘Best Council’ award was probably less than that.

Being on a shortlist of 6 from a self-selected ‘longlist of, let us say 20 similarly PR-driven Councils, suddenly doesn’t seem quite as impressive as ’shortlisted for best Council in the country’, does it now? 

And that is not all, as Dr Seuss so presciently said, that is not all.  While looking at the LGC site, I happened to notice who’s sponsoring the event.  The sponsorship is dominated by private companies who specialise in delivering local government services under contract,including Liberata, whose catchy tagline is ‘outsourcing work flows’.  No, I’ve no idea what it’s supposed to mean either, except that they favour privatisation their way.

And you won’t be surprised to find which other big firms are sponsoring the awards – yes, it’s our old friends Enteprise plc and Serco, with whom our senior Council officers have recently being holding top level meetings about how they might be involved in our ’shared services’, and which they refuse to talk to me about.

Now I don’t know what exact influence these sponsors have over who gets shortlisted and who gets the award, and I’m not enough of an investigative journalist to spend hours finding out, but I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to imagine that the West Lancashire District Council application for stardom is appropriately stuffed with phrases like ‘innovative partnership with the private sector for efficient delivery of services’ (for which you might read ‘hiving off services through really poor contracting processes so that the Council doesn’t have to worry about poor quality of delivery or the creation of major inequalities’). 

I’ve asked my Labour group leader if he can get hold of a copy of the bid, which (needless to say) was not shared with Labour councillors before it was sent.  It could make revealing reading.

Now, I could stop there.  I’ve said my piece about what a sham this whole award thing is, and how the whole notion of West Lancashire District Council being the ‘best Council’ in the country is almost laughable when you look at what the people of West Lancashire actually experience at their hands.  At least, it would be a laugh –  if the injustices and inequities suffered were not so very real.

But, I won’t stop there today (though of course I accept, dear reader that you might want to). 

I won’t stop because, as I’ve said many times before, neither the senior Conservative members nor the officers of the Council, who’ve decided to go for this tawdry award, are intrinsically bad people; on the whole, they are decent, hardworking public servants who came to public service in this local authority with the best of intentions; it’s out of respect for them, not least, that I need to explore a little further this dichotomy, whereby officers and the members they seek authority from seem genuinely to think that going for a ’Best Council’ is warranted, while the lived experience of residents of West Lancashire,  is that the Council is an uncaring, unresponsive, irresponsible shambles.

Put simply, officer and Conservatives actually believe their own hype.  For a Council of its size, it has a well-oiled PR machine, and it has a Chief Executive familiar and comfortable with the local media, and with what the local media wants.  Here in West Lancashire we’re away from the cut and thrust of the larger, better-resourced newspapers, for example; we’re only of marginal interest to the Liverpool Echo and the Daily Post to the South, and of even less interest to the Preston-based Lancashire Evening Post to the North or the Wigan press to the East.  The local papers have no skill base, dedicated resources or desire to interrogate the Council on the actuality of its record, and are largely happy to go along with what’s fed to them by the Council’s PR machinery.

As a result, that same PR machinery, headed up by the media-savvy Chief Executive, is regarded as a success story, and is rewarded accordingly with increased resources.  Thus, when the Chief Executive, in his weekly email to staff, praises the PR staffer who has put in extra work over weekends to get this LGC award application drafted, there is no consideration as to whether this might be a sound investment of additional resources. 

(There was apparently no consideration that it might seem odd to authorise this extra effort when, just last year, we were told explictly that Council officer time couldn’t be authorised for the drafting of an external funding bid for £284,000 in support of an important youth project for the poorest area of the District, even though the bid was through to the final round of submission;  such authorisation, I was told at the time, would be a matter for the Cabinet.)

So, with a media happy to pander to the controlling powers in the Council and no interest in any critical analysis of what’s really going on, the environment is set for a self-reinforcing process of self-congratulation – ‘we must be great because the only people who tell us we aren’t are the Labour party, and they would wouldn’t they – they are just playing politics’ (a phrase used with regular monotony when challenges are made).

As important, though, as the lack of any independent scrutiny of what’s really going on behind the PR, though, is that – in one frame of reference – West Lancashire District Council is ‘excellent’.  In July 2007, the Audit Commission’s Comprehensive Assessment Report found the Council found the Council’s services ‘excellent’; the Council has crowed about it ever since, and senior officers have increasingly been drawn in by this.

 But an excellent CPA is an excellent CPA – nothing more.  The assessment is based on desktop reviews of data, particularly performance indicator data, and a few interviews with senior officers and councillors.  Its primary focus, in keeping with the Audit Commission’s expertise, is on measuring efficiencies and managerial competencies. In the Commission’s own words:

‘Inspectors looked at how the Council is run, what the Council together with its partners is trying to achieve and the capacity of the Council to deliver services including housing, waste collection, leisure facilities and dealing with housing benefits.’

 What the CPA doesn’t do is seek to find out what impact Council policies have on actual people’s lives, and it makes no attempt to review the effect of political choices such as outsourcing service delivery provision to a private sector without securing guarantees about equity of provision.  (I was told this explicitly by the Auditor when I sent my Serco report to him for his review and use.)

In the end, officers and Conservative members have become convinced, on the basis largely of a review of managerial processes and of aggregated statistical data, that their Council is great.  As far as they are concerned, the FACTS prove that they are right, and that I am wrong, they will tell me – and you can’t argue with ‘facts’, can you?

Well, if you take concepts of power inequality seriously, then yes you can argue with ‘facts’, and you should….

Here we must indulge in a little theory, if you don’t mind, and to help me along I’ll call on one my favourite books, Andrew Sayer’s (1992) ‘Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach’, 2nd edition (London: Routledge).

What Sayer does is to challenge the positivist ‘dominance of ordering framework conceptions of theory which tend to encourage the belief that objects are relatively simple and transparent and that the main problems concern their quantitative analysis’ (p. 99).  He provides a detailed critique (ibid: 99-103) of the orthodoxy of ‘generalisation’ in social science, drawing out a number of methodological problems.  These problems include:

a)   the tendency to give ’a transhistorical, pancultural character to phenomena which  are actually historically specific or culture bound’ (ibid: 100); 

b)the tendency to confuse contingent and necessary fact in the search for explanation: (ibid: 100);  

c) the risk of ‘ecological fallacy, that is, the ‘spurious inference of individual characteristics from group-level characteristics.  (ibid: 101).

In short, Sayer sets out a coherent critical (and realist) challenge to the general, and managerially convenient assumption, that findings based on statistically aggregrated darta, of the type used for the CPA, are ‘facts’.  Life, he says, is a bit more complicated than that – because it concerns people.  

Similar challenges to the orthodoxy of generalisation, and hence to the enduring importance of quantitative methods and associated claims of representativeness and external validity, are to be found in many other texts (Lincoln and Guba 2000: 29-36; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995: 5-6; George and Bennett 2004; 19-20; Yin 2003: 32-33; Scholfield 2004: 69-71).   

Conversely, from a realist (and ethnographic) perspective, the validity of single or small ‘n’ case studies lies not in its applicability to other situations, but in the capacity for ‘naturalistic generalization’ (Stake 2000: 22-23:) and its ‘verisimilitude’.  Hence  Stake says : ‘A text with high verisimilitude provides the opportunity for vicarious experience, the reader ‘comes to know some things told, as if he or she had experienced them?’ (Stake 1994: 240).

The reason for this digression into social science will, I hope, we clear.  The ‘fact’ that West Lancashire District Council is an ‘excellent Council’ is based on the capacity of the Council to impose its view of what is ‘truth’, and this view is supported by a ‘power structure’ which includes a silently complicit local media, and an institutionalised audit approach biased towards an overly positivist reliance on quantitative data. 

Faced with this weight of ‘fact’, the actual individual experiences of people simply do not count, and can be written of by the powers that be as extraneous information, as the exception that proves the rule, or more insidiously as a failure on the part of residents to ‘comply’ with the the excellent services of the Council.

And the examples of this power inequality and its consequences are all around. 

When less people use the leisure facilities in poor areas, and those using them complain that the facilities are dirty, freezing, or both, this is seen as some kind of aberration from the norm, but the ‘fact’ that Serco is doing a great job overall in the District is still fact.

When people get into rent arrears because the Council has closed the cash offices near their house or flat, it’s the people in poor areas without direct debit facilities who are really to blame, as are the Labour councillors who make unrealistic demands for a convenience that’s not offered to other tenants in the District. 

When rural footpaths remain unmaintained for months, it just happens to be the one the councillor insisted on a site visit to which has been ‘missed on this occasion’. 

Indeed, councillors and their case work have been configured as a part of the control mechanism.  The ‘patch problem’ system set up for councillors to report single incidents or issues that they want sorting out in their ward, in replacement to the ‘ward visit’ system where councillors took a senior officer ‘on tour’ of their ward to see the reality of what was going on in all its complexity, is about creating a safe distance for officers from which they can quote aggregate figures and current resource constraints; it’s about making cases of poor service discrete and therefore discountable, and about neutralising the political will of (Labour) councillors to demand systemic change.  It’s about making councillors buffers for the Council against reality, under the guise of ‘letting them focus on community work’.

And here, I think, lies the challenge for socialist councillors.  In power terms, it’s about using the legitimacy conferred on us by our election to challenge the current power relations which exist between the authorities and the people.  In Habermasian terms, it’s about aspiring through our challenge to an ‘ideal speech’ situation, where the so-called facts do not take primacy of the expression of people’s actual experiences (Habermas 1984: 1987).  In more day to day terms, it’s about using our representative legitimacy to represent real people loud and clear. 

It’s also about not being ‘reasonable’ about what’s ’self-evident’, because we have legitimately different reasons based on a critical analysis not just of what’s happening, but of the power structures that make it go on.

So – memo to self: I must remember to be less reasonable with Council officers in future.  I must remember that, however good I am at being the temperate, articulate nouveau middle-class voice of reason that officers actually quite like to have in the room when there’s a more hostile group of less-articulate-in-their-terms working class Labour councillors there to challenge the facts that have been ’set’ before them, it is not my job to be that ‘voice of reason’. It is my job to support the challenge.

This doesn’t mean I have to shout, or be personally impolite. As I’ve noted above, officers (and even Conservative members) are not acting with personal malice, and they should be treated with respect.  But they are, in Freirian terms, ‘the oppressors’, and it is my role – as a constantly reflexive ‘convert’ to the struggle – to help them towards clarity of this concept.  For Freire indeed, this is a ‘loving kindness’ to the oppressor: