The planner within a professional and institutional context

Abstract

This chapter considers the role of planners in reform processes by outlining how they can be understood as professional technical experts, as subjects of neoliberalism and as frontline ‘Street-level Bureaucrats’. This leads to an exploration of ‘sociological institutionalism’, which draws upon Giddens’ structuration theory, and which provides the theoretical framework for the subsequent chapters. The chapter concludes that planning reform, like other public sector modernisation, must be considered as a ‘peopled process’.