Governing the Local? A Response to Kevin Stenson

Kevin Stenson’s article offers a powerful argument for examining governmentality in particular local configurations rather than as relatively abstract and text-centred studies of changing mentalities and rationalities of rule. I think this is an important endeavour, partly because more situated analyses of governmentality are necessary to enrich the analytical (and political) significance of the perspective; and partly because the view from governmentality has a capacity to enrich our understandings of governance, policy and practice. Kevin’s own discussion of community safety in the Thames Valley area demonstrates just how much such a situated analysis might add to an understanding of liberal rule in England in the 21st century. Let me highlight four points that I think are absolutely central to that analysis:

A Critical Response to Kevin Stenson’s Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety

In his compelling case study of local governance and community safety in the UK Thames Valley, Kevin Stenson makes several important contributions to the field of governmentality studies. While the paper’s merits are far-reaching, to this reader’s assessment they can be summarized in the following key areas: 1) Empirically, the article enhances our knowledge of the political economic transformation of a region otherwise overlooked in social science research ; 2) Conceptually, Stenson offers several theoretical and analytical refrains that, while becoming increasingly commonplace, are nonetheless still germane and rightly oriented to offer push back against otherwise totalizing, reified accounts of roll back/roll out neoliberalism. A welcomed new approach is offered as a corrective, The Realist Governmentality perspective, which emphasizes the interrelated and co-constitutive nature of politics, local culture, and habitus in processes related to the restructuring of social governance; 3) Methodologically, the paper makes a pitch for the ways in which finely grained, nuanced, mixed-method/ethnographic analyses have the potential to further problematize and recast a field of governmentality studies far too often dominated by discursive and textual approaches.

Rationalities, Practices, and Resistance in Post-Welfarism. A Comment on Kevin Stenson

The former welfare arrangements are, according to Stenson, in a process of fundamental re-structuring. Or regarding the topic of this SW&S-Special Issue (was meint ihr genau mit dem vorhergehenden Satz? Man sollte einen Satz besser nicht mit ‘or’ anfangen): the spatial scales of the welfare states are under siege. With this advice Stenson assents to the prevalent description of a fundamental shift of former welfare arrangements since the last third of the 20th century (see for welfare policy research, research on human services and social work: Castel 2003; Clarke 2004; Gilbert 2004; Lessenich 2008/forthcoming; Marston/McDonald 2006; Webb 2006).

Comments on Kevin Stenson’s ‘Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety’

It is a challenging time to be a social scientist. Many of the concepts and categories we took for granted have been revealed as temporally and geographically specific. It is now widely accepted that the nation-state is no longer the sole container for economic, political and social processes, if indeed it ever was. This is where Kevin Stenson begins his paper. He traces the re-ordering of both state and nation, highlighting recent discussions about the unbundling and rescaling of the state and outlining how increasing ethnic and cultural diversity challenge homogeneous conceptions of the nation. In Stenson’s account these are largely empirical processes that are the basis for the important questions he raises about changing understandings of publics and social order, and their implications for the local governance of community safety. He contrasts two alternative positions; the ‘universal human rights position’ which refuses to privilege the interests of majority populations, and a more ‘communitarian and nationalistic position’ which he argues is most likely to be deployed by right wing politicians and interests groups. Drawing from extensive research in the Thames Valley region of the United Kingdom, he shows how these two understandings have both shaped the local policy response to crime and disorder.