Abstract
ABSTRACT Situated in Cameron’s ‘austerity Britain’, this article explores contestations surrounding financial responsibility and fair redistribution in a local authority office and an NHS psychiatric hospital. Bureaucratic action is informed by simultaneously ethical and economic calculations, but to enact public good values, bureaucrats must circumvent material contingencies beyond their control. There is an ethical, even utopian, pressure upon street bureaucrats in local offices of the welfare state to deliver a fair outcome in the interests of all. At the same time, this is rendered increasingly difficult by austerity regimes which erode resources. This article examines how legal-style advice is used to handle such tensions. Advice is an interface that can convert economic value into moral legitimacy and vice versa. This ethnography explores advisers’ ‘ethical fixes’, which aim to enable the system to operate more fairly, and the new forms of inequality which, paradoxically, emerge from actions motivated by ideals of universal equality.
Highlights
As welfare states increasingly shed their care obligations, and commitment to reversing structural inequalities falters (Narotzsky & Besnier 2014), the values and principles that shape popular understandings of the public good are undergoing radical changes, visible in global form (Bear & Mathur 2015: 1)
In the two settings explored here, a local council office and an National Health Service (NHS) hospital, advisers are developing the potentialities of advice not just as an activity fuelled by an ethic of care (Kirwan 2016; Forbess & James 2017), and as an extractive technology capable of generating economic forms of value clients, advice charities and their public and private partners
An adviser embedded in a local National Health Service (NHS) hospital juggles the languages of fiscal accountability, technocratic professionalism and legal ethics to bring to life her ethical commitment to universal access to justice, and to help redistribute streams of funding and revenue to the benefit of her clients
Summary
As welfare states increasingly shed their care obligations, and commitment to reversing structural inequalities falters (Narotzsky & Besnier 2014), the values and principles that shape popular understandings of the public good are undergoing radical changes, visible in global form (Bear & Mathur 2015: 1). It sought to reduce the social security bill by redefining key welfare benefits and radically cutting state funding for auxiliary services, such as legal style advice, on which vulnerable people have come to rely heavily to gain access to rights and entitlements.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
