The Big Society’s success in England: Neoliberalism as recomposition of public-institutional spaces

Abstract

This article argues that the ‘Big Society’ agenda, widely understood as a failure, was instrumental in shaping how austerity played out after 2010 in England. Of particular importance was the growing role in public service delivery of private, profit-making companies and their equivalents on the one hand, and voluntary, charitable work on the other. Therefore, the Big Society’s impact can be understood as a neoliberal recomposition of public-institutional spaces, a form of restructuring that has always been sought by the neoliberal project (as the article shows). Furthermore, these recompositions have differed from a generalised logic of ‘marketisation’ that is often (mis)attributed to such processes of public-institutional change, in England or elsewhere: more accurate is to forefront parcellised corporatisation via contracting and the imposition of social-reproductive burdens on wider society. That the Big Society should be considered as an important keyword in the lexicon of neoliberalism has several implications. For instance, the impact of numerous austerian legacies, that have become increasingly visible in 2020s England, needs reappraising. More broadly, the article’s argument that the how of austerity ought to be examined as much as the what, widens the scope for research enquiries into austerity’s (after)lives in and across multiple local, regional and national contexts.