Lost in transition? The personal and professional challenges for probation leaders engaged in delivering public sector reform

Matthew Millings,Gwen Robinson,Lol Burke

doi:10.1177/0264550518820120

Matthew Millings, Gwen Robinson + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0264550518820120

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Abstract

The outsourcing and transfer of labour in the contexts of policing, prisons and courts illustrate that, even in a national context, these transitions are not uniform. Rather, there are a diverse set of ‘privatisation journeys’ that can be taken and that need to be understood. Our focus in this article is on the experience of probation leaders who, under the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reform programme, were charged with stewarding their organisation from the public sector, through a 10-month transitional period, and into the full relinquishing of ownership to the private sector. It is an account of how, with no clear ‘transition and transformation’ precedent to follow, a locally-based senior management team from one probation trust engaged with the task of implementing organisational change during a period of great uncertainty. We explore managers’ engagement with the language, working styles and vision of engineering transformational change and how they processed and began to articulate the challenges of new ownership, both for themselves (as individuals) and for their organisation (as a collective). We examine the resilience of the organisational culture at senior management level; the operational dynamism of leaders to embrace change; and the extent to which senior managers felt able to participate in, and take ownership of, the new Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) they were charged with forming.

Highlights

The launch of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reform programme represented the most profound change in the structure of probation services in the history of offender management services (Ministry of Justice, 2013)
At its core was the splitting of probation services from 35 public sector probation trusts into a much smaller public National Probation Service (NPS) – responsible for the management and supervision of high-risk offenders – and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies where a blend of public, private and third sector organisations would bid for and deliver services to medium- and low-risk offenders
In other articles we have explored the impact of the TR reforms on the organisational identities of staff (Robinson et al, 2016); the development of occupational cultures (Burke et al, 2016); and the challenges facing privatised probation services in negotiating their organisational legitimacy (Robinson et al, 2017)

Summary

Introduction

The launch of the TR reform programme represented the most profound change in the structure of probation services in the history of offender management services (Ministry of Justice, 2013). Our narrower focus here is on the professional and personal reflections of the senior management team in our case study CRC whose responsibility it was to establish a new organisation and guide it through the procurement process in readiness for new owners to assume control in February 2015.

Results

Conclusion