A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice E-Book

Basem Adi

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This volume argues that relational realism can help us to make better educational policy that is more effective in practice. Basem Adi draws on critical realism to thoroughly re-examine fundamental assumptions about how government policymaking works, developing an ontological basis from which to examine existing government approaches and imagine an alternative approach based on a relational realist-informed critical pedagogy.


Adi casts familiar issues in a new light by drawing on a less familiar theoretical and meta-theoretical tradition, offering a critique that can be productively engaged with by many educational organizations to tackle the issues they face.


A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice will be of great interest to academics of sociology, critical realism, sociological theory and education, as well as policymakers and educators seeking a theoretical perspective on their work.

Leseprobe

A RELATIONAL REALIST VISION FOR EDUCATION POLICY AND PRACTICE

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice

Basem Adi

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

©2023 Basem Adi

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Basem Adi, A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0327

Further details about the CC BY-NC license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine athttps://archive.org/web

Any digital material and resources associated with this volume will be available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0327#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-898-2

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-899-9

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-900-2

ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 978-1-80064-901-9

ISBN XML: 978-1-80064-903-3

ISBN HTML: 978-1-80064-904-0

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0327

Cover image: Tamanna Rumee, Yellow color pencil isolated on blue paper background (2020), https://unsplash.com/photos/FtJEat_S7Q4

Cover design: Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal

Contents

List of Figures vii

Introduction 1

1. The Functionalist Symbolic Reference of UK Governance Models 11

2. Relational Realism as an Alternative General Sociological Approach 43

3. The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social 61

4. Social Capitalisation & the Making of Relational Goods 85

5. Student Development as the Referential Reality of Education 105

6. Morphogenetic Education with a Developmental Mission 121

7. A Summary of the Argument Presented 143

Glossary of Key Terms 155

References 167

Index 179

List of Figures

Fig. 1

For relational sociology, critical realism is an approach that extends the epistemic triangle (Donati 2011: 100). The diagram is adapted to show the epistemic quadrangle in the context of social interventions generating transformational social realities.

54

Fig. 2

The components of sociology as a knowledge system built upon two axes, L–G and A–I (Donati 2011: 105).

56

Fig. 3

Realism’s account of the development of the stratified human being (Archer 2000: 260). The diagram is adapted to relational realism and the morphogenetic paradigm.

71

Fig. 4

The emergence of personal and social identity (Archer 2000: 296).

72

Fig. 5

Added social value of sociability (SY) as the re-generation of relational goods (RG) over time (cycle T1–T4), that is, as alteration of the order of relations through the order of interactions (Donati & Archer 2015: 309).

98

Fig. 6

The basic morphogenetic sequence (Archer 2011: 62)..

99

Fig. 7

The components of social relations according to the AGIL scheme (Donati 2011: 87). The diagram has been adapted to show the interchange between the referential (L-I) and organisational (A-G) dimensions of social relations in the context of the morphogenetic emergence of relational goods.

113

Fig. 8

The three-fold view of the curriculum as aspects of different orders of social relationality, adapted from Donati (2021: 56).

123

Introduction

© 2023 Basem Adi, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0327.01

This book presents an argument for a new governance model wherein policy-making is underpinned by a relational realist approach. Its central contention is that prevailing governance models produce analytical closure due to starting from a system-based perspective wherein the state regulates the structure of relations that defines the standards reciprocated between citizens. As a result, the regulation and integration of subjective motivation and its value-orientation represent the central problem of governance. Integration into the state-defined collective becomes necessary to enable the responsible citizen to benefit from public goods and occupy roles contributing to economic growth.

Therefore, a re-think is needed to express responsive modes of sociability that valorise the human element as an active contributor to the production of the common good. The position adopted here is that governing bodies benefit from a shift away from providing opportunities in the form of public goods towards the fostering of a relational social state. In the relational social state, individual and collective social actors are Relational Subjects who participate in the making of social policies and practices. The starting point for an alternative to state-defined governance is an appreciation of the way these Relational Subjects relate to one another in the production of the common good. In this book, the idea of a relational social state is applied in the context of education. The student serves as the reference point for identifying the learning criteria that guide the development of agency in potential Relational Subjects.

This book builds on key themes in sociological theory, reusing established terminology. When one such term or concept is introduced here, it will be italicised to indicate its inclusion in a glossary at the end of the book.

Why Relational Realism?

In a relational social state, practices and policies emerge from the interdependence of different elements of social relations that generate social structures. Relational realism names an epistemic approach that starts from the ontological reality of these social relations; its explanatory capacity is more encompassing than the self-justifying mechanisms of system-based governance. The nature and benefit of relational realism is perhaps best understood by contrast with contemporary methods of policy formulation and their effects. In late modern social formations, the functionalist conceptual infrastructure is limiting because it oscillates between the state/market binary, thus bypassing the dynamics of social relations.

The current model, against which relational realism is set, is called lib/lab governance (Donati 2911; 2021). It works through two poles representing the market/state nexus that forms its operation logic. These poles represent different dimensions of governance. ‘Lab’ refers to the holism of state interventions that enable individuals to pursue their set of preferences as consumers and producers within a productive economic order. The ‘lib’ pole, with which it is in continuous tension, encompasses the economic activity of subjects as both producers and consumers and is the referential point of adaptation (Donati 2021). In turn, the state is represented as an organisational dimension that regulates relations to ensure the referential dimension of governance operates to provide opportunities for the individual to occupy roles in the market of goods and services. The referential character of the market (lib) directs the organisational role of the state (lab) and generates modes of observation, diagnosis and intervention that rely on impersonal mechanisms. As will be discussed in Chapter One, the perspective of the subject and the reality of the interactions they stimulate are secondary to the impersonal gaze of the lib pole that represents the finalism of state-defined relations (lab).Hence, the lib/lab mode of governance is first an epistemic approach to seeing the world through the prism of the lib end of governance. It sees freedom in a negative sense (freedom from), and the referential role of marketisation and economic growth generates inherent tensions that the lab pole needs to adapt continuously. The central goal of the state in the provision of public goods is to ensure fairness that provides access to the same forces of marketisation. By bypassing the dynamics of social relations, both poles become antagonistic, which requires state management. In the case of policy triangulation, as discussed in Chapter One, the attempt to resolve the relationship between both poles through some form of synergy is firmly located within the needs of a productive economic order.

In this book, the need for relational realism is first justified by its conceptual starting point that transcends the functionalist conceptual infrastructure of modernity’s lib/lab governance. Relational realism is a general knowledge assumption that underpins a mode of observation that explains the relational emergence of the human-in-the-social. This observation is focused not merely on regulating individual preferences but on active mediations that impact the concerns of the observed. The ontological status of mediation between the subject-observer and the object observed in their relationality is the epistemic focus of relational realism and offers insight into the observed object, be that society or a policy of governance.

Rather than impersonal mechanisms steering relations in the lib/lab model, the dynamic relationship between observer and observed in relational realism is ascribed an ontological status with a mode of reflexivity that is shaped by the socio-cultural context. Three perspectives are considered in these mediations — the personal, interpersonal, and systemic — as part of a stratified understanding of social reality. To meet the needs of the human individual’s constitutive relationality, it becomes necessary to re-draw the epistemic parameters so that social practices organise the structural dynamic that connects freedom and control as part of the dialectic processes of personal and social morphogenesis (covered in Chapters Three, Four, Five, and Six). The necessity of control in relations — the structure that gives purpose and direction — is viewed as emergent from the relationship between observer and observed.

This stratified social ontology, with its concomitant forms of reflexivity, implicates a relational state with a societal governance that encompasses the elements of relations (personal, interpersonal, and systemic). The social includes a relational continuum that comprises personal and collective Relational Subjects that operate within a morphogenetic sociocultural context. In turn, within societal governance, the control of the structures of the socio-cultural context is meant to enable positive freedom in the form of relational reflexivity capable of transforming the same socio-cultural context in future morphogenetic cycles. Freedom is thus understood positively, that is, the capability to act upon the direction of existing mechanisms and their emergent impact on future social relations are recognised. Relational realism understands freedom and control as two interrelated realities that require each other to operate to maintain societal governance and the production of relational goods that sustain this governance.

This acknowledgement of the interrelated realities of freedom and control distinguishes relational realism as a general approach and its explanatory powers. To transcend modernity’s analytical closure, the societal mode of production necessitates a dynamic that ascribes efficacy to the relationality of the mechanisms of freedom and control. Affirming the societal dynamic between freedom and control is grounded in a philosophical ontology that does not dictate the parameters of knowability as it does not establish an a priori judgement on the relation’s symbolic reference. While it starts from the relational constitution of the subject, it does not view this relationality as an end — its realism is identified in its affirmation of the relation and its determinants as co-principles of reality (Donati 2021). Acknowledging determinants in a stratified social ontology means confirming the human and non-human distinction.

The relational reflexivity that steers the interdependence between freedom and control entails relational goods produced in the third space between freedom (lib) and state-regulated constraint (lab) (Donati 2021). Starting from the relationality of relations results in an approach that avoids the closure of system-based governance while not falling into a relationism that negates the distinctions of pre-existing determinants of sociability. In the context of societal governance, the morphogenesis of both realities of freedom and control ensures relational goods generate Relational Subjects (engines of morphogenesis) within an adaptable socio-cultural context (constraint). When the subject’s identity within the social is acknowledged, the latter can be continuously reimagined in reference to the emergent human reality that pre-exists but is also relationally constituted.

Structure of this Book

Arguing for the necessity of transcending lib/lab governance, the book is structured into seven chapters. Chapter One aims to demonstrate the continuity of policy from New Labour to Conservative governments in recent decades. Policy triangulation or a ‘third way’ is presented as an alternative to the inadequacies of past policy templates in their over-reliance on one pole in governance. The goal is to rectify these limitations by synergising individual freedom (lib) and the state’s collective control (lab) within the conceptual infrastructure of a functionalist mode of governance. In the lib/lab mode, the attempt to balance individual freedoms and state-defined collective initiatives is defined from the perspective of system needs. The aim is to provide enough space for individuals to identify their needs but always within a regulated environment, which provides the basis for agreed-upon reciprocal interchanges. The relational autonomy of the personality system is pre-defined in the context of a system-based structured dialectic of freedom (lib) and control (lab). In functionalist terminology, the lib side represents the capability of the individual to freely choose a status-role, while the lab side represents the extrinsic powers of the state to intervene to ensure fairness through the provision of opportunities that enable individuals to pursue their choices. Nevertheless, as the attempt to reach a synergy is pre-defined, the horizons of possibility are restricted to maintaining what is posited as adaptations necessary for economic productivity. The freedom to choose a role, therefore, is externally controlled by the state’s articulation of the parameters of public goods through which these roles can be accessed.

Chapter Two proposes an alternative epistemic approach capable of opening new horizons that transcend the pre-defined outcomes of system-based governance. First, the chapter argues that an a priori epistemic approach is a reasoned necessity. Second, it presents a general approach based on Donati’s (2011; 2021) relational realism that takes as its fundamental starting point the relation and its contingencies (the contingencies of social reality being the conditions of emergence of personhood). An epistemic quadrangle is introduced as a map to analyse progressive problem-solving between the observer and observed within the context of mediations between both realities. Mediating these realities establishes a morphogenetic dialectic between lib (freedom) and lab (directive control). Within the morphogenetic dialectic, the person is emergent, raising ethical questions about the human element as an outcome of freedom and control. Because interventions are sought within the mediations, horizons are, by implication, always reflexive and open to novel policies and practices responsive to the human element. Chapter Three, following this implication, expounds on the morphogenetic paradigm derived from relational realism.

In the third chapter, the relational realist approach is applied to explain personal morphogenesis. Archer’s morphogenetic paradigm is expounded as a theory that explores the internal dynamics of relational orders to explain the emergence of the human-in-the-social (Archer 2000; 2003). Derived from the relational realist approach, this paradigm views the deliberations of persons in their relationality. When the mediations are understood as part of relational orders that shape personal concerns, they become the place of interventions to ensure relevance to the human element within socio-cultural contexts. The normative emerges from within the relations that generate reflexive deliberations. Further, the chapter argues that reflexivity as a meaning-making mechanism extends to the personal, collective, and broader social networks — the interactive dynamics of these different facets of sociability anchor social morphogenetic processes. In a relational order of reality, these dynamics valorise the human element as the emergent referential reality of morphogenesis.

Considering policy initiatives, Chapter Four addresses the question of morphogenetic sociability and the making of social capital to generate relational goods. The chapter first critiques social capital theories to demonstrate the presence of analytical closure, wherein the dynamics of sociability are viewed as post hoc phenomena. It then presents a contrasting relational view of social capital in which the processes of social capitalisation are disentangled to include the activity of Relational Subjects as sovereign actors within a morphogenetic socio-cultural context. The interaction occurs in a relational order (a civil society) that Relational Subjects mediate between the constitution of sociability and the relational outcomes it produces. In turn, social capital is a crucial relational outcome that enhances the fabric of sociability in future morphogenetic cycles. Therefore, social capital is a relational good; its features are a process and its outcome is directed by those actively in relation as sovereign producers of a morphogenetic relational order.

The fifth chapter relationally appropriates Parsons’s AGIL scheme as a compass directed by the morphogenetic developmental points of the learner. The chapter argues that the learner’s potentiality is AGIL’s value-horizon that orients the structural axis’s normative direction. Thus, the integration of the learner into the goals pursued is not regulated from above but is based on the inner dynamics of the relation. While pre-existing learning standards exist as a directive control, they simultaneously enable the development of capabilities. Correspondingly, it will be argued that the dialogical posture of learning is intrinsic to making the structural axis of AGIL responsive to its referential axis, that is, the development of the learner in dialogue with their changing subjective access points.

Chapter Six explores the idea of a relational order of the civil society — covered in chapters four and five — in the continuity between different levels of sociability. Specifically, it looks at learning planning within this order when evaluating the student’s development as a self-reliant learner and a Relational Subject. In teaching and learning, the curriculum is expanded according to the level of sociability to which it refers. Chapter Six thus continues the earlier argument proposed in the book regarding the synergy between sociability’s organisational and interactive dimensions. A three-fold distinction will be presented in the curriculum’s role as both an aspect of the socio-structural axis of AGIL and as an adaptive resource that references the development of the student (the referential axis of AGIL). In this context, the curriculum is an organisational stabilising mechanism that outlines learning standards which monitor and evaluate learning in immediate relations. In turn, assessment evaluates learning based on criteria pre-set in the delivered curriculum, but how assessment strategies are applied first references the developmental point of the learner within the interactive dimension of teaching and learning. The integration of assessment directly into learning re-orients education from a means to sort individuals to take up a status-role to the monitoring and enablement of development as learners and Relational Subjects.

Finally, Chapter Seven summarises the argument presented in the book and provides a conceptual guide toward a relational realist view of education. It gives a point-by-point breakdown of each chapter and its relevance to the argument proposed in chapter six of the developmental mission of education.

Immanent Critique

In this book, I will adopt a position of immanent critique when articulating a relational realist alternative mode of governance. First, a transcendental refutation is utilised to establish the underlying pre-suppositions of existing governance models.1 Based on a transcendental refutation of modernity’s symbolic code — as covered in chapters one and two — the social effects of governance models are traced to starting points that shape their internal conceptual constitution. Because investigation of the internal raison d’etre of a governance approach is pre-supposed by an a priori starting point, transcendental critique leads to an immanent critique. A transcendental critique is necessary to identify the starting point of theory articulation that directs its internal logic (Bhaskar 1998).

Immanent critique seeks to show the internal inconsistencies in preliminary premises. Determining how theoretical inconsistencies are reproduced in explanation, an explanatory critique builds on immanent critique as it returns to theory articulation to identify an explanatory logic (the basis of evaluating relations). Finally, the critique of theory application (methodological critique) refers to evaluative claims and the incapability of applying these claims due to internal conceptual inconsistencies (immanent critique).2

The immanent critique is applied in Chapters Two, Four, and Five. Chapter Two uses an immanent critique to identify the inconsistencies of both mid-range realism and pragmatist methodological realism. The claims of these approaches — with their differences — show inconsistencies when negating the necessity of an a priori starting point and, by implication, the conditions of the possibility of social scientific investigation. Similarly, in Chapter Four, in the case of social capital theory, different starting points identified generate different explanatory outcomes that are incapable of accounting for the process of social capitalisation. Chapter Five, appropriating Parsons’s AGIL scheme as a relational realist compass, critiques Parsons’s functionalist scheme as incapable of acknowledging the perspective of the human element independent of institutionalised value-patterns. Therefore, the relational realist use of the AGIL scheme becomes a compass to re-direct the referential dimension to the human element.

1 Transcendental refutation is dependent on transcendental analysis. In transcendental analysis, the conditions of the possibility of social scientific investigation are analysed. Based on this analysis, the refuted account is critiqued in its capability to sustain its premises in reference to these conditions (Bhaskar 1998). In chapter two, the relation as the ontological starting point is justified as being able to sustain itself in reference to the conditions of social scientific activity without leading to analytical closure due to one element being the prism of investigation.

2 The organic relation between transcendental, immanent, methodological, and explanatory critiques is taken from Bhaskar’s metaphysical preliminaries. In these preliminaries, transcendental problems — the way the conditions of possibility of social scientific investigation are defined — generate theoretical, empirical, and methodological problems (Bhaskar 1998: 142).

1. The Functionalist Symbolic Reference of UK Governance Models

© 2023 Basem Adi, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0327.02

In coming chapters, I will argue for a relational approach to governance — with its accompanying mode of knowing — capable of articulating policy initiatives and social practices in ways that acknowledge the human element as a distinct reality. The need for this alternative will be first justified in response to existing approaches to governance in the UK that are conceptually insular. The policies and practices developed in hegemonic governance approaches negate rather than acknowledge relational distinctions; they aim to regulate relations in specific directions to generate outcomes that sustain a pre-given symbolic reference with complementary organisational ties. These ties create shared commitments that direct individual subjectivity.

Each social relation has a symbolic code that defines its identity (symbolic reference) and how its components are integrated. In insular modes of governance, relations are organised to manage differences through pre-existing objectified social formations. Actors are instrumentally encouraged to self-invest, but how they do so depends on the interactions’ socio-cultural context. Any distinction in relations (identified in the human element’s plurality) is negated through this system-based perspective. Social integration takes a collective dimension that shapes the parameters of exchange between actors and regulates those involved to produce outcomes ensuring an economically productive social order.

In the regulation of individual subjectivity, there is an attempt to balance individuals’ liberty as self-maximisers — taking up opportunities to better themselves in guided ways — with a collective sense of belonging to a state-defined national project. Consequently, policy initiatives aim to reach a compromise between self-interested individualism (homo economicus) and the need to integrate and regulate this individualism (homo sociologicus). The different pathways seeking to achieve this compromise characterise the lib/lab mode of governance and its functionalist symbolic reference. On the individualist path, the goal is to valorise self-governance as the model of navigating the world. Whereas, on the collectivist path, the state seeks to collectively regulate the environment of interaction to enable individuals to reproduce system needs.

The state-regulated environment means that the state’s opportunities (public goods1) become a pathway to scarce goods attached to prescribed roles and defined by a competitive situational logic.2 In this competitive situational logic, the design and application of opportunities guide the acquisition of private goods by providing individuals with tools to make sovereign choices. The end goal in this arrangement is not the development of individuals but the acquisition of system-based accredited goods on a meritocratic playing field. 

To demonstrate the centrality of lib/lab compromises that shape policy and practice, four UK approaches to governance (derived from New Labour and three Conservative governments) will be discussed:

The New Labour approach (1997–2010) sought to regulate social networks through the idea of an enabling state. The state provides the tools through which actors responsibly integrate into the collective.

The ‘Big Society’ agenda (2010–2015) sought to remake social networks in pre-given ways.

The ‘Great Meritocracy’ (2016–2019) idea is that the state provides opportunities for individuals to integrate into modes of belonging.

‘Unleashing the potential of post-Brexit Britain’ (2019–ongoing) combines a renewed civic infrastructure that unleashes opportunities through job-based skills training and broader economic infrastructure investment. Levelling up and providing opportunities leads to greater enterprise and productivity growth.

With differences in focus and approach, each of these four examples points to the same lib/lab direction that negates the plurality of the human element by starting from a social integration model that reproduces and sustains system integration in reference to activity within impersonal market mechanisms.

New Labour, Social Networks, and the Enabling State

The New Labour project sought to justify itself by articulating a narrative of change that required specific interventions. These interventions involved the state’s re-invention in meeting the needs of a changing world. The imperative of a competitive logic is extended to a global economic order that needs a consensual national society to adapt and work in partnership. As a result, as Morrison observes, a new policy direction was proposed that moved beyond the failures of the Old Left and New Right:

These are the presupposition, firstly, of a neo-liberal narrative of a changing world that demands adaptation; secondly, of a consensual society that can agree shared values and work in partnership; and, finally, of the failure of both Old Left and the New Right, characterised respectively as the first and second ways, hence the required Third Way (Morrison 2004: 176).

The notion of a consensual society is presented as an alternative mediation to the Old Left’s failures and the holism of top-down state provision. To generate an environment that is not centrally regulated, a third way is required that adopts what can be described as ‘culture governance’ (Donati 2011:206). In this approach, the goal is to empower citizens to be part of the state’s provision. Individual conduct becomes part of state-steered partnerships in which self- and co-governance generate the optimal conditions for an economically productive society that is part of a changing world. Culture governance results in a discourse of self-empowerment that is, in reality, self-disciplining: 

Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for self- and co-governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform and utilise individual and collective conduct so that it may become amenable to its rule. Culture governance represents a new kind of top-down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self-disciplining (Donati 2011: 206).

New Labour sought to bring about this level of self- and co-governance between state and individual by proposing that norms and values should connect social action — the culture of provision — with a consensual society’s institutions. Behavioural changes generate common expectations between provider and recipient. In turn, responsible individuals take up roles that achieve the desired outcomes of sustaining social integration and working partnerships. Worker-citizens claim their stake in a consensual society as part of a mutual duty to improve themselves through the opportunities provided. In the words of Tony Blair, such a society is

based on a notion of mutual rights and responsibilities, on what is actually a modern notion of social justice — ‘something for something’. We accept our duty as a society to give each person a stake in its future. And in return each person accepts responsibility to respond, to work to improve themselves (quoted in Morrison 2004: 114).

The emphasis on co-governance through self-governance — directed via top-down steering — led to subjective and objective formations being part of one process (a theme that recurs in the ‘Big Society’ agenda). The lab dimension of policy enables this process by producing joined-up networks and investment in supply-side weaknesses at the point of provision (that is, the state connects citizens to networks that provide access to vital public goods). Therefore, this pluralistic and synergistic understanding of provision means co-governance generates a virtuous cycle in which state-steered social networks operate to maintain social integration in times of change and upheaval. According to Tony Blair, it is a method for making a new relationship between citizens and community that is suitable for the ‘modern world’ (quoted in Morrison 2004: 171). 

New Labour’s focus on claiming responsibility represented a turn to strategic self-governance that invests in employability. In this model, the self-governing citizen is committed to life-long learning and the development of skills that further the collective project promoted by state-regulated partnerships. Life-long learning is promoted as providing benefits to the individual, to businesses, and to the competitiveness of the national economy:

All adults need the opportunity to continue to learn throughout their working life, to bring their qualifications up to date and, where necessary, to train for a different job. Now and in the future employability is and will be the best guarantee of employment. Learning also brings broader benefits. It encourages and supports active citizenship, helps communities help themselves, and opens up new opportunities such as the chance to explore art, music and literature. It helps strengthen families and encourages independence. That means that everyone must have access to high quality, relevant learning at a time and pace, and in places that suit them. Not only do individuals, families and communities benefit, learning throughout life also delivers tangible results for business — improved productivity and competitiveness (DfEE 1999: 56).

Thus, New Labour’s education policy emphasised learning throughout working life and continuing learning to sustain employability. It linked the enhancement of employability with behavioural outcomes believed to affect collective conduct by strengthening communities and families and improving economic productivity and competitiveness. In these shared mediations of state-steered partnerships, individuals are connected to strategic networks that offer pathways (public goods) to enhance life chances in the long term. Consequently, disadvantage is understood by New Labour as being cut off from a consensual society’s norms and values.

In this model of governance, the state’s role was to provide opportunities to citizens in the context of the UK’s position in a global emerging knowledge economy. The idea of a knowledge economy is the defining feature of a globalised economic order that implicates the necessity of supply-side interventions to remedy skills-gap problems in the workforce. This workforce investment is part of adapting to competitive external conditions between national economies. Skills investment attempts generate advantage through institutional arrangements capable of mediating social pressures represented as natural facts. Thus, for example, New Labour’s ‘The Future of Higher Education’ White Paper (2003) viewed higher education as a global business responsive to the skills demand required for a knowledge-based economy and competitive markets:

Our competitors see — as we should — that the developing knowledge economy means the need for more, better trained people in the workforce. And higher education is becoming a global business. Our competitors are looking to sell higher education overseas, into the markets we have traditionally seen as ours (DfES 2003: 13).

In the words of Gordon Brown, it is the skills and ability of the workforce that ‘define the ability of a national economy to compete‘ (quoted in Bevir 2005: 113).

The lab’s role is to produce institutional arrangements that integrate citizens into broader governance goals. Therefore, objectified institutional arrangements (Bevir 2005: 31) played an essential mediatory role in managing contingencies to ensure the right outcomes were produced. These arrangements become transmission belts between social pressures and envisaged policy outcomes. As a result, in the narrative of social pressures in ‘today’s world‘, the right institutional arrangements and policy outcomes are given as natural facts in which initiatives are validated in relation to these same facts (Bevir 2002: 52). What is handed down becomes the collective project of ‘one nation’. In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry, Tony Blair stated that all stakeholders contribute to making ‘Britain more competitive’:

The choice is: to let change overwhelm us, to resist it or equip ourselves to survive and prosper in it. The first leads to a fragmented society. The second is pointless and futile, trying to keep the clock from turning. The only way is surely to analyse the challenge of change and to meet it. When I talk of a third way — between the old-style intervention of the old left and the

laissez-faire

of the new right —I do not mean a soggy compromise in the middle. I mean avowing there is a role for government, for teamwork and partnership. But it must be a role for today’s world. Not about picking winners, state subsidies, heavy regulation; but about education, infrastructure, promoting investment, helping small business and entrepreneurs and fairness. To make Britain more competitive, better at generating wealth, but do it on a basis that serves the needs of the whole nation — one nation. This is a policy that is unashamedly long-termist. Competing on quality can’t be done by government alone. The whole nation must put its shoulder to the wheel (quoted in Fairclough 2000: 26).

Social Capital Investment and Communitarian Themes: Long-Term Investment to Manage Social Pressures and Produce Pre-Set Outcomes

The long-term lab agenda of networked partnerships led to a focus on communitarian and social capital themes. New Labour’s turn to co-governance (pluralistic modes of provision) was part of a discourse of empowering local and mid-level collective actors. Innovative modes of state provision were part of an integrative approach needed to manage social pressures in a changing world. Investing in the social is an investment in alternative organisational ecologies and subjective identities. These dimensions — alternative organisational ecologies and subjective identities — are aspects of social investment guided by the state and part of the devolvement of power and responsibility to empower individuals and communities. As such, they are examples of culture governance. Enriching social capital was central to a third way of thinking as an antidote to neoliberalism and the dependency culture of welfarist collectivism: ‘Within third way discourses, social capital is presented as an antidote to both socially destructive nature of rampant neoliberalism and the ‘dependency culture’ produced by excessive collectivism’ (Gewirtz et al. 2005: 653).

New Labour’s investment in the social as a corrective measure, observed in the adoption of social capital theory and communitarian themes, aimed to tackle possible moral anomie and social fragmentation that arises with unfettered markets (Driver & Martell 1997). Devolution of provision to regional and local social networks sought to transform corporate actors’ behaviour and social practices through government recalibration of social networks (Franklin 2007).3 In the context of a centrally regulated co-governance model, social capital theory is utilised to redefine idealised sources that impact social network outcomes. An affinity is identifiable in Putnam’s view of social capital as a self-sustaining virtuous cycle, i.e., networks of families and communities whose relations are enhanced by sources of social capital (features of social organisation). Sources of social capital include ‘networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate action and cooperation for mutual benefit‘ (Putnam, quoted in Portes 1998: 18). Societies rich in the right sources of social capital are better equipped to cultivate desired forms of behaviour that, cyclically, enrich the stock of social capital.

In turn, societies rich in social capital are better equipped to overcome possible structural strains (the social pressures of a changing world) to generate outcomes that advance economic performance and system-wide integration. Reliance on the right sources of social capital — a resource for the dual purposes of ordered social space and economic resource (Franklin 2007) — was part of New Labour’s view of the social world as a consensual and ordered space. In this consensual space, policy initiatives work from an unproblematic understanding of what makes for positive system integration. Investment in social capital guides individuals to identify with the normative sources and expectations of social networks. Individuals’ integration, achieved through responsible investment in social capital sources, produces a knock-on effect in behavioural changes. The result of managing social pressures and structural strains is individual changes that lead to effective access to strategic networks and opportunities (bridging social capital).

According to New Labour, the community represented a contingent achievement of people acting ethically in fulfilling their duties to others (Bevir 2005: 77). Driver & Martell (1997) consider New Labour’s communitarian thinking to place the individual, as a moral and responsible citizen, within a virtuous cycle that generates social cohesion and contributes to the creation of a more viable market economy:

In Labour’s communitarian thinking three themes — economic efficiency, social cohesion and morality — are interwoven. Economic success — particularly more jobs — will bring greater social cohesion, which is further strengthened by a more dutiful and responsible citizenry, and more social cohesion will in turn help create a more viable market economy (Driver & Martell 1997: 34).

As social exclusion is multi-dimensional, re-distributive measures were promoted to tackle the different facets of deprivation, including unemployment, high crime, substandard education performance, and limited aspiration (Levitas 2005). A networked approach to behavioural changes improves employability chances and makes Britain more economically competitive in a changing world (Levitas 2005: 206–209; Fairclough 2000: 57).

Accordingly, New Labour’s commitment to communitarian themes was a vital component of a networked society, a bedrock of ties and relationships of trust, values, beliefs, and norms that are all core components of social capital. Communities, as the bonding and bridging social capital, contribute to making ethical and cooperative citizens. Such citizens who fulfil their responsibilities make the most of the opportunities provided by the state and broader social structures. In claiming their stake, they thus realise and demonstrate values within their community and wider society: there is a renewal of civic life in fulfilling responsibilities to others.

Furthermore, New Labour’s communitarian thinking, in emphasising the fulfilment of responsibilities, acknowledges a moral underclass. Family and community are structures wherein individuals learn to negotiate the boundaries of acceptable conduct. The implication is that the breakdown of family and community bonds leads to a breakdown of law and order. Inherent in the provision of opportunity is a contractual arrangement whereby individuals claim their stake in society. In the words of Tony Blair:

The breakdown of family and community bonds is intimately linked to the breakdown of law and order. Both family and community rely on notions of mutual respect and duty. It is in the family that we first learn to negotiate the boundaries of acceptable conduct and to recognise that we owe responsibilities to others as well as ourselves. We then build out from that family base to the community and beyond that to society as a whole […] we do not show our children respect or act responsibly to them if we fail to provide them with the opportunities they need, with a stake in the society in which they live. Equally, we demand that respect and responsibility from them in return (quoted in Fairclough 2000: 42–43).

In New Labour’s approach to lib/lab governance and its seeking of a third way, multiple discourses can be identified, including the Labour Party’s social democratic tradition. Newman recognizes this multiplicity of discourses to emerge when ‘old and emergent regimes interact, with different elements of the new and old being packaged and repackaged, producing tensions and dis-junctures as different sets of norms and assumptions are overlaid on each other’ (Newman 2001: 26). In a non-linear understanding of policy production, different assumptions and expectations may co-exist in a governance approach (Newman 2001: 30). Therefore, it is possible to identify different and sometimes contradictory themes within New Labour’s policy initiatives as they seek to reach a working lib/lab compromise. These themes may co-exist in tension, such as self-governance and open-systems models or policies devolving power to citizens and communities and those preserving centralised governance that sets policy directives from above as an output-based model of managerialism.

The ‘Big Society’ Agenda: Focusing on Behavioural Adjustments

Integrating individual behaviour through centrally regulated social relations continues in David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda, first outlined in 2010. However, rather than focusing on regulating top-down social inclusion measures, it focused on managing behaviour by rolling forward local co-governance that stresses social responsibility and initiative. While there are differences in how the lib/lab compromise is articulated, there are similarities to New Labour’s third way in the vital role ascribed to the social as the site of policy interventions (interventions that are an antidote to transcend past policy failures). In the Big Society agenda, the focus was on localism to enable a more responsive state that empowers individuals and works to generate the conditions of self-dependency. Nevertheless, like New Labour’s third way, the citizen’s role is viewed in the context of pre-defined system imperatives and the need to make the social work for individuals as members of a national community. From a normative representation, policy initiatives are developed that establish a distinct diagnosis of what went wrong and what may be done to remedy those mistakes.

‘Big Society’, ‘Broken Britain’, & Breaking Cycles of Dependency

David Cameron’s ‘Broken Britain’ thesis underlines the normative regulation of social relations through re-worked practices that mediate inter-generational structures. The focus of his ‘Big Society’ policy response was not merely on making the economy work better for those socially excluded, as was the case with New Labour, but on reversing a moral crisis and bringing coherence to a fragmented normative landscape. Deploying a polemical tone, Cameron presented the welfare state as a harbinger of dependency culture, eroding responsibility and encouraging dispositions that entrap individuals in antithetical life choices and cycles of poverty. He suggested that dependence on local measures, in the form of community and, more importantly, the family, had been compromised by an overbearing big government’s nationalisation of social problems. The institutionalization of a welfare system had not rewarded responsibility or granted a voice to citizens, rather, the provision of public services had eroded any notion of responsibility and reciprocity.

’Broken Britain’ was a return to New Right discourses on poverty, but Cameron’s Conservatives articulated ‘the non-financial aspects of poverty‘ to use them for specific ideological ends. A shift in rhetoric rendered unemployment, for example, a ‘structural’ problem that created ‘perpetual jobseekers’, a ‘benefits trap’, a ‘way of life’, and the need to replace the conditions that rewarded the work-shy to one in which ‘the payment of unemployment benefit by the state is an entitlement which is earned, not owed‘ (Conservative Party 2009: 12). To counter this ‘culture of worklessness and structural unemployment’, the party posited a holistic policy that sought to tackle the interconnected paths to poverty, that is, ‘family breakdown, serious personal debt, drug and alcohol addiction, failed education, worklessness and dependency‘ (Social Justice Policy Group 2007: 5). However, ‘Broken Britain’ was not just a policy of blame with an imperative for individual self-improvement. Instead, it was a stance that, while acknowledging the necessity of ‘Thatcherite modernisation’, conceded that problems had been generated by its reforms of hyper-individualism to an over-reliance on the centralised power of the state to push ahead with economic reforms (McAnulla 2010: 290).

In the spirit of lib/lab policy triangulation, the state — specifically the welfare state — erodes responsibility and entraps individuals into cycles of disadvantage and poverty. Thus, as with New Labour’s third way, David Cameron offered the idea of the ‘Big Society’ as a policy that transcended what is represented as the traditional Left/Right dichotomy:

The left in politics talk too much about the state. And the Right sometimes talks too much about the individual. But what really matters is what is in between — society (Cameron 2009a).

Connected to the Conservative Party, the think-tank ‘The Centre for Social Justice’ emphasised this political triangulation in their publication ‘From Breakdown Britain to Breakthrough Britain’ (2007):

The traditional ’laissez-faire’ approach understands poverty simply as a product of wrong personal choices about family, drugs, crime and schooling. That view says that poverty is always the fault of the person who makes the wrong choices. On the other side of the political divide, the elimination of poverty is seen principally as the job of government — thus if a person is in poverty it must be the government’s fault and it must be the government that develops a top-down solution to the problem (Social Justice Policy Group 2007: 7).

In place of the maligned welfare state, the policy called for public services to be provided beyond the state. ‘Big Society’, in the form of the locale and community, between both state and individual, was viewed as the appropriate site of welfare provision and simultaneously given the role of creating ‘avenues through which responsibility and opportunity can develop‘ (Cameron 2009b). Through a ‘radical decentralisation’ of power, service recipients would be empowered and inter-generational structural disadvantage would be countered (Cameron 2009c). Rolling back the state would serve to roll forward society and break cycles of dependency and selfish individualism.

By creating the ‘Big Society’, the government resituated itself as a guide, partner, and instrument in engineering changes to remedy behavioural pathologies. In the words of David Cameron: ‘But I see a powerful role for government in helping to engineer that shift. Let me put it more plainly: we must use the state to remake society’ (Cameron 2009b).

The ‘Big Society’ agenda sought to strengthen and encourage social entrepreneurship within local institutions embedded in communities, generating solidarity, and making welfare provision more personal. It advanced the idea that strong local institutions would enable people to come together and work on a responsive provision (Cameron 2009b). As envisioned, individuals would be encouraged to make the right choices by the cultivation of a more responsive service through the devolution of provision. The intended effect of this devolution was a shared responsibility for social welfare, so that provision would become a shared burden and not solely the government’s job.

Nudging citizens towards positive choices, whether through devolving powers to communities or introducing tax credits and benefits for families, empowers both communities and families with purpose. New conditions were envisaged to break a cycle of poverty, especially early on in a child’s development (Social Justice Policy Group 2007: 8–9), by encouraging aspiration, the take-up of newfound opportunity, and behavioural changes. Ascribing significant importance to a new environment of a public provision meant breaking inherited subjective experiences that come with pre-existing social positionalities, for example, intergenerational worklessness with its subsequent ‘state of mind’. To achieve this objective, what was required, according to the Social Justice Policy Group, was the breaking of a ‘cycle of disadvantage in the early years of a child’s life‘ by rolling ‘forward the frontiers of society by extending the parameters of social responsibility’ (2007: 7).

A consistent theme emerges in ‘From Breakdown Britain to Breakthrough Britain’— individuals make wrong choices, but policy initiatives cannot regulate individual choices. Thus, the creation of the right structures and environment for individuals and communities would enable self-dependency: ‘On the contrary, what we should be doing as politicians is, wherever possible, creating the right structures and environment for individuals and communities to help themselves’ (Cameron & Herbert 2008: 123).

With this focus on the right structure and environment, ‘From Breakdown Britain to Breakthrough Britain’ further describes New Labour’s state interventions as piecemeal, to be superseded by a Conservative holistic and structural approach. The mutualism of ‘Big Society’ offers avenues of opportunity — corrective behavioural measures — through a network of empowered local institutions meeting citizens’ needs. Membership in these organisations fosters responsibility and a more accountable and responsive welfare provision.

Like New Labour’s co-governance themes, the citizen in the ‘Big Society’ is a stakeholder in public provision; he or she takes responsibility for its delivery and balances citizens’ rights as consumers of these same services. Through taking responsibility, citizens acknowledge their shared responsibility, hold public services accountable, and are incentivised by the government to take up opportunities. The difference between New Labour and the Conservative ‘Big Society’ approach to triangulation is New Labour’s greater focus on initiatives that produce social inclusion. Thus, as noted above, New Labour aimed to connect citizens to the right self-improvement resources through networked interventions that generate behavioural changes. While a moral underclass discourse is implied in this approach, there is no pre-existing assumption of a systemic normative breakdown. Conservative policy under David Cameron, on the other hand, focused on the erosion of responsibility, inculcated by a paternalistic state, which requires an alternative ethos that encourages citizens to adopt a ‘collective culture of responsibility’ and an ‘ethosof self-betterment’ (Cameron 2011).

The remaking of society was deemed necessary for a more responsive devolved public service (better provision) and a holistic delivery of these same services. This holistic approach included early-life interventions and paternalistic nudges to guide choice-strategies that sustain and complement the state’s enabling role. This assumption of a holistic approach to welfare provision led David Cameron’s Conservatives to accuse New Labour’s policies of being both piecemeal and insufficient in tackling social exclusion problems. Nonetheless, both approaches maintain a functionalist understanding of social integration but differ in strategies adopted to connect individuals to the general system of social action and its pre-defined goals.

Welfare Co-Production & Redefining State Provision

As social disadvantage is viewed as a structured outcome and the site to develop an ethos of self-responsibility, policy initiatives focus on community development as the means to achieve this goal. The ‘Big Society’ agenda, as set out by the Community Development Foundation, defined the role of community development as ‘empowering communities, opening up public services and promoting social action’, and all three mentioned components ‘will require greater cooperation and unity among local people, and between local people and the authorities that serve them’ (Community Development Foundation 2010: 2).4 The three components are intertwined; empowering communities will open up public services and promote social action (active citizenship). The third role of community/social action is to offer ‘social value and complements or fills gaps in public services‘ (Community Development Foundation 2010b: 3). These three components thus fulfil two overarching and related objectives: ‘localism and redefining the role of the state‘ (Community Development Foundation 2010b: 3). The state’s redefined role is understood as an enabler of welfare co-production, in partnership with local people, and in being responsive to citizens, altering its provision to meet local people’s needs.

Two themes may be identified with the above vision of welfare co-production: 

A process view of service provision indicates a change in the nature of public service delivery

.The resulting change leads to

a responsive and open state engaged in the service-delivery environment and the transformation it may generate through

this same

delivery. Consequently, there is a shift from the delivery of service as targets or outputs defined as ‘top-down regulations and targets‘ to ‘bottom-up accountability — individual choice, competition, direct elections and transparency’ (Cameron & Clegg 2010)

.

Changing citizen behaviour and outlook by giving communities full responsibility

for

their lives. A responsive state encourages community action and devolves power to the locale. As a knock-on effect, it implicates a change in the citizen’s habitus and the state’s efficacy in meeting citizens’ needs.

The first theme — a process view of public service provision — aims to respond to consumers’ lived expectations in both delivery and outcome. As a result, there is a view of service provision in which ‘there is no separation between production and consumption of a service; they happen simultaneously’ (Klein 2010: 3). Objective outputs and subjective changes become inseparable, with citizens being transformed as they take responsibility for services in their communities. Subjective transformation necessitates creating ‘the right structures and environment for individuals and communities to help themselves’ (Cameron & Herbert 2008: 123). Whitaker describes this co-production view as follows:

In ‘delivering’ services the agent helps the person being served to make the desired sorts of changes. Whether it is learning new ideas or new skills, acquiring healthier habits, or changing one’s outlook on family or society, only the individual served can accomplish the change. He or she is a vital ‘co-producer’ of any personal transformation that occur. The agent can supply encouragements, suggest options, illustrate techniques, and provide guidance and advice, but the agency alone cannot bring about the change. Rather than an agent presenting a ‘finished product’ to the citizen, agent and citizen together produce the desired transformation (Whitaker 1980: 240).

Policy initiatives become necessary to establish a process approach to service provision by generating the right structures and environment for individuals and communities to help themselves. For this objective, instruments were set out, including the training of community organisers, to assist in self-help groups’ operation and organisation. Both the institutional framework and situational factors (choice context) were viewed as key interventions in generating the right conditions through which ‘government can harness the power and potential of self-help to meet the converging ambitions of localism and the Big Society‘ (Archer & Vanderhoven 2010: 5).

Institutionally, policy initiatives were utilised to devolve powers to the micro-level. In terms of actual policy initiatives, the Conservative Party sought to redefine responsive public service through the following measures:

The reduction of

bureaucratic and red-tape burden on local community organisations and businesses

.

The establishment of neighbourhood grants and start-up funds for community groups to generate social capital in the poorest areas

.

The support of self-help groups, for example, co-ops, mutuals, charities and social enterprises (Conservative Party 2010a & 2010b), as front-line providers of a double devolution of public services (Community Development Foundation 2011)

.

Setting up a national citizen service as ‘a two-month summer programme for 16-year-olds’ that facilitates community engagement. According to the Conservative Party

, this was a longer-term strand of the policy:

‘This is about sowing the seeds of the Big Society — and seeing them thrive in the years to come’ (Conservative Party 2010b: 2)

.

The designation of a ‘Big Society Day’ aimed ‘to celebrate the work of neighbourhood groups and encourage more people to take part in social action projects‘ (Conservative Party 2010a: 2)

.

A proposal to set up national centres to train community organisers with the necessary skills and expertise to assist self-help groups in providing localised public services. While not paid, community organisers will ‘help communities to establish and operate neighbourhood groups, and help neighbourhood groups to tackle difficult social challenges‘ (Conservative Party 2010a: 6). Also, intermediary bodies were viewed as a bridge between self-help groups and the successful provision of services that require expertise, skills, and successful mediation between the state and the locale. For this purpose, the Conservative Party envisaged a role f

or

civil servants and trained community organisers, fulfilling the key functions of intermediary groups (Archer & Vanderhoven 2010). Regarding civil servants, the Conservative Party sought to ‘transform the civil service into a national “civic service”‘. This change of ethos was to be enacted ‘by making regular community service, particularly in the most deprived areas, a key element in staff appraisals’

(Conservative Party 2010a: 7).

The proposal of a more responsive state (as demonstrated in the initiatives noted above) was part of a process to generate citizens’ transformation. It works to create an altered terrain conducive to a different and responsible outlook. As a result, welfare co-production is understood as more than an individualised workfare model — a model in which individual rights are preceded by a responsibility to seek out and take up opportunities. While an individualised dimension existed within the ‘Big Society’ agenda, there was a greater emphasis on the collectivein welfare co-production that is preceded, as noted, by a conducive structure and environment. As a processual approach does not focus on the top-down production of set service outputs, the locale’s collective assets are sought to generate outcomes that feed into a virtuous cycle of welfare co-production.

Citizen co-production is part of the virtuous cycle in which behavioural changes — maintaining a self-reliant culture — break intergenerational cultures of dependence and sustain self-reliant community groups. Whitaker (1980) categorises three types of citizen co-production; these types recognise a relational inseparability between the citizen and a responsive institutional environment:

(1) Citizens requesting assistance from public agents; (2) citizens assisting public agents; and (3) citizens and agents interacting to adjust each other’s service expectations and actions (Whitaker 1980: 242).

All three categories rhetorically existed in Conservative policy (cf. Cabinet Office: Behavioural Insights Team 2010 & 2011), ranging from open communication on local needs between service providers and citizens, cooperation in the delivery of services (e.g., recycling waste), and finally in the existence of self-help groups as service providers, with the government as an enabler in this process.

Nudging Community Action & Changing the Decision Context

Libertarian Paternalism complements the ‘Big Society’ policy vision. The Conservatives adopted ‘nudge theory’ — part of thelab component of governance — to restructure the choice context to generate different social practices and conditions and to cultivate specific subjectivities. With its focus on developing a choice-architecture for self-help groups and individuals, the ‘Big Society’ approach ‘nudged’ citizens with a combination of Libertarian Paternalism (Thaler and Sunstein 2003) and Libertarian Welfarism (Korobkin 2009). In these, the consequences of individual choices, as covered above in the case of a virtuous cycle of welfare co-production, are more than a matter of maximising personal utility; they include collective welfare. Because the ‘Big Society’ vision places sustainable communities at its core, supporting policies seek to go beyond personal behavioural change. Self-help was thus viewed primarily as a collective initiative that provides direction to changes in individual behaviour.

Nudge theory (Libertarian Paternalism) assumes a negative view of human decision-making. Individuals, it is argued, often make decisions that are detrimental to both themselves and the greater public good. In the homo economicus view, human nature is characterized by ‘unbounded rationality, unbounded willpower, and unbounded selfishness’ (Mullainathan & Thaler 2000). Thaler and Sunstein propose the contrasting term ‘homereconomicus’to denote that ‘people have self-control problems’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2003: 176). Self-control problems — bounded willpower and rationality — can include a judgemental bias, status-quo bias, context-dependent preferences (the situational factors of decision-making (Korobkin 2009)), and susceptibility to social influences such as herding (Thaler and Sunstein 2009; Thaler and Sunstein 2003).   

To alter the decision-making process, Thaler and Sunstein recommend an array of possible avenues or a toolbox that can nudge the citizen in directions that counter potential problems arising from bounded rationality and willpower. For the provision of such a toolbox to qualify as Libertarian Paternalism, however, coercion must be carefully circumvented, and citizen welfare promoted to render it unobjectionable:

But since no one is forced to do anything, we think this steering should be considered unobjectionable to libertarians (Thaler & Sunstein 2003: 177).

For example, overcoming a status-quo bias or inertia can be achieved by introducing automatic enrolment for pension schemes that do not coerce the citizen, as it offers a possible opt-out. The setting of such defaults is considered an unavoidable nudge, but other nudges exist that can be deployed to prevent or remedy common errors in decision-making. These include providing feedback and advice. Examples include (Thaler, Sunstein, & Balz 2010):

Providing a map of welfare provision and explaining public-service choices and what they entail.

Structuring complex choices to avoid possible confusion and accompanying servic

e

s with well-thought-out information that enables the user to learn about possible decisions to reach an informed choice.

Providing incentives for certain choices by making salient the outcomes they produce. 

Nudges exist in policies that target individual choices. For example, organ donation, smoking, diet and health problems require the dissemination of information to allow the making of more informed choices. However, in terms of the ‘Big Society’ agenda, nudge theory was viewed as more than a useful means of cultivating citizen behavioural adjustment. Italso extended to what can be described as Libertarian Welfarism, in whichinterventions or nudges encourage collective well-being through behavioural changes that extend beyond personal benefit. Overall, nudges were envisaged in terms of ‘the power of the crowd’; this power is both collective and collaborative, where consumers work ‘together for a better deal‘, which includes ‘introducing a range of new initiatives that will support the development of collective purchasing and collaborative consumption’ (Cabinet Office: Behavioural Insight Team 2011: 6-7). The collective dimension of the ‘power of the crowd’ was part of a joint government initiative that advocated government-business-community partnerships based on allocating budgets to the locale at the point of delivery.

The ‘Big Society’ agenda thus extended Thaler and Sunstein’s notion of a nudge-choice architecture to collective enterprises and collaborative efforts. In the previously noted example of community organisers who work with intermediaries to nudge self-help groups to take responsibility for public service provision, nudges could take the form of the dissemination of information via intermediaries and the social structuring of choice mechanisms. Also, incentivising nudges are sought to generate an intrinsic motivation to participate when devolving power, that is, a sense of self-determination and belonging for local services (an envisaged ‘Big Society Day’ is one such nudge in this direction) (Klein 2010). Other incentives included monetary funding of local self-help groups via a proposed ‘Big Society Bank’ (Archer & Vanderhoven 2010).

Because the transformation of citizen behaviour is tied to a broader welfare co-production in public service, Conservative policy sought to achieve a more holistic approach by ‘facilitating the design and delivery of other services with diverse sector partners’ (Cabinet Office: Behavioural Insight Team 2011: 4). In delivering services, this partnership was sought within a three-level ecosystem conception of ‘Big Society’. Each level has its designated role — from the government (both central and local) to government partnerships with both private and social sectors and finally to the locale as a point of delivery delivered by