Institutional Identities and the Shifting Scales of State Governance in the United Kingdom

Abstract

In recent years, organizations of state governance within the United Kingdom have undergone a fundamental change in scale. The creation of a Scottish Parliament, and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies, along with the devolution of power to Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in England, has signalled a substantial territorial refocusing of the scales of political and economic power within the UK state. In this paper, I argue that Storper’s (1997: 268) distinction between institutions - in other words, customary, and sometimes informal rules of practice between groups and individuals - and more formal organizations - which relate to far more programmed and prescriptive political and administrative forms - is useful to study such processes. I suggest that it is imperative for these new bureaucracies of governance, along with their representatives, to undergo an institutional, as well as an organizational, change if they are to become key elements within the British political economy. I contextualize the processes occurring within the contemporary British state by exploring some of the crucial changes which happened during another important period of state restructuring in the United Kingdom, namely the early modern period. In this context, Braddick (1991) has forcefully argued that the centralization of state power which occurred during this earlier period was successful precisely because it also involved a change in informal institutions, as the identities and loyalties of the key bureaucratic officers in the localities gradually became more aligned with the English state. Using some brief vignettes from the contemporary UK state, I suggest that the loyalties and institutional identities of the key officers of state within the new regional bodies - politicians and civil servants, for instance - also need to change if these new organizations are to become truly effective means of governance.