Governing Subjectivities: A Q Methodology Study

Abstract

The case studies of migration and neighbourhood policy, together with the analysis of democratic performance, begin to reveal something of the important space occupied by officials – civil servants, public service professionals, public administrators – in the design, redesign and operation of hybrid forms of urban governance. Classic administrative theory is predicated on the view that representative government operates through a bureaucratic hierarchy in which elected politicians head departments staffed by public administrators. It locates public administrators as subservient to elected politicians, although always with the capacity to exercise influence through their control of the resources of expert technical knowledge, administrative capacity and the temporal aspects of the policy and service delivery process. Our study explores the emergence of types of hybrid governance operating at arm’s length to elected politicians in which these assumptions do not hold. Instead, as Chapters 3 and 4 reveal, we have practices of governance that exhibit fluidity, participation by multiple actors, variable involvement of elected politicians and weak or non–existent legal status. And what is clear from the analysis is that public administrators as employees of the state have an important role in these emergent institutions somewhat at variance from that portrayed in classic administrative theory.