This section reflects on a number of key methodological issues that have shaped the overall approach to the research and that are necessary to address before moving on to discuss how they influenced the more practical decisions that informed the research design. These methodological, theoretical and epistemological reflections concern; 1) the researcher’s positionality and world view; 2) the challenges of connecting (abstract) theory and (empirical) practice; and 3) the trade-off between presenting either the nuances around the contextualised cases or broader decontextualized comparisons of the sample.
It is not claimed, however, that these are the only core methodological challenges facing this study, but that together they each represent a key consideration or limitation of the approach to the development of this research. The following methodological discussion is necessary to ‘clear the decks’ and explain the broader frames of reference that have shaped the overall approach to the research. This is necessary at the outset to set up how these broader framings have influenced the more ‘practical’
research method issues of how the study was designed and implemented in the proceeding sections.
3.1.1 Positionality and ‘World View’
The first point to make is that the researcher has a clear positionality as a young, white, male academic on the political left; and a specific ‘world view’ that (sub)consciously informs the approach and (critical) interpretations of the research. In terms of the researchers’ ‘world view’, one foundational conviction
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is that neoliberalism is more than a set of market-supportive technical policies, but rather should be understood as a fundamental ideological/political attempt to change the very nature of the relationship between the state, citizens and market. This world view immediately boxes in the scope of the research.
Next is the researcher’s conjecture that ‘grounded’ and ‘real world’ practice-based data is significant for understanding the world as ‘socially constructed’ by competing actors and interests. Whilst an inductive ‘grounded theory’ approach was not specifically operationalised in a pure methodological sense; it shaped the overall approach based on the value attached to professional and lived experiences of the theoretical and policy concepts being investigated. Finally, the researcher has the belief that public planning and development can and should play a key role in socio-spatial justice. Together these form the epistemological foundations for a neoliberal structure-agency approach to planning practice.
This world view meant that qualitative research was selected as most appropriate to gain insights into
‘practice-based’ and ‘lived’ experiences and responses (E&Rs) to the research ‘objects’ of austerity and planning policy/localism reforms. It is sufficient to note here that during the early stages of the study, a number of potential qualitative methodological approaches were reviewed based on the research methods literature (e.g. Corbin and Strauss, 1990, Holloway and Todres, 2003, Flyvbjerg, 2006, Starks and Brown Trinidad, 2007, Silva et al., 2014, Farthing, 2015). As such it was decided that a variation of
‘grounded theory’ would be most the suitable based on the research questions and objectives in this study over a phenomenology, discourse analysis or single case study/ethnography approach.
The research design does not rigidly adhere to grounded theory (GT) (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) in a pure sense; but instead is informed by this approach to emphasise that concepts about the world (theory) should always have their roots (be ‘grounded’) in the ideas voiced by the people whose lives and activities are being studied (Cloke et al., 2004). Starks and Trinidad (2007) explain that GT explores the ‘six C’s’ of social processes that are causes, contexts, contingencies, consequences, covariances and conditions to ‘inquire about how social structures and processes influence how things are accomplished through a given set of social interactions’ (p. 1374). A variation of GT was selected over phenomenology because the objective is to develop explanatory theory about LG planning that is grounded in specific contexts; because ‘[g]rounded theorists inquire about how social structures and processes influence how things are accomplished through a given set of social interactions’ (ibid). Similarly, Holloway and Todres understand the goal of GT to ‘[d]evelop a theory of how individuals and groups make meaning together and interact with each other; of how particular concepts and activities fit together and can explain what happens’ (2003, p. 348). This is why the researcher selected methods that engages (talks) with people.
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Furthermore, the researcher was sympathetic to the position of the participants in having to respond to national austerity and policy reforms, and this influenced how they positively responded to the interview process. Responses such as “it has been very cathartic talking to you” (SP17) suggest an atmosphere akin to a therapy session for the participants to express their professional concerns that now formed the day-to-day challenges in their jobs. The benefit for the participants was that they were given the opportunity to discuss their practice challenges in a sympathetic way that they might not get to with others, whilst the payoff for the researcher was gaining access to insider knowledge about these actual practices of planning. The researcher attempted to minimise their influence over the research interviews and participants by adopting a measured and non-judgmental tone (akin to a quasi-therapist) that acknowledged the challenges for planners in relation to different stakeholders and encouraged them to openly discuss their E&Rs. However, it is not claimed that the researcher was a neutral party simply collecting objective data, rather the data should be considered as ‘co-produced’ between the questions and rationale/position of the researcher and specific understandings and points raised by the participants. Overall, this approach was largely successful in building rapport/trust during the interviews.
Moreover, the references made throughout this thesis to LG planning practices ‘post-2010’ under the premiership of the Cameron-led Governments is based on the conjecture that this is a ‘transformative moment’ for the planning system and public planners in England. It is argued that the national policy reforms (NPPF, localism, viability, duty to cooperate, etc.) and financial reforms driven by austerity (removal of the Revenue Support Grant, New Homes Bonus, Business Rate Retention, council tax restrictions, sale of high value public assets, etc.) in this period signal a continuity and strengthening of neoliberal thought and practice over the planning system in England. This does not necessarily mean there has been a clear break from previous models of planning (albeit the differences to New Labour’s strategic spatial planning are evident), but a significant step change in the expected practice culture of planners (Grange, 2014, Inch, 2017) and objectives of the planning system (Ellis and Henderson, 2016, Allmendinger, 2016). So already ‘post-2010’ is used here as a loaded term to denote this transformation.
Overall, the methodology and research design forms a qualitative, grounded, inductive and ‘imbricated’
approach (Homan, 1991), based on the high value the researcher places on practice-based ‘actually existing’ or ‘real world’ accounts of experiences and responses to existing national policy agendas, and working within abstract academic and elite normative and theoretical discourses/ideologies. This is also based on the researcher’s position as a ‘social constructivist’; that the social world is created by the actions of individuals/institutions but shaped by forces that led to adoption of structure-agency theory.
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3.1.2 Connecting Theory and Practice
Beyond considerations of the researcher’s role and position within the study, there are also more generalised questions surrounding the difficulties in applying ‘high-level’ (framing/meta) theory to contextualised empirical data. One of the main challenges is the attempt to connect abstract high and mid-level explanatory theorisations (whether that be neoliberalism, governmentality, post politics, etc.) with inductive ‘grounded’ empirical data on planning practices concerning specific E&Rs within local councils. There are important concerns about stretching these theorisations too far to try to explain specific events in heavily contextualised local settings, as well as misapplying them to specific findings or overstating their fit and explanatory power for planning changes. However, without such higher level theory, the empirical data would lack any explanatory frameworks and concepts to situate the findings and make sense of ‘real world’ understandings and practices. These concerns form part of wider debates around a planning ‘theory-practice gap’ (Alexander, 1997, Watson, 2002, Watson, 2008).
Critically, whilst neoliberal theory provides a useful framework for explaining the meta-narratives and trends relating to changes within the UK political economy and the planning system, the actual application to the LA cases and empirical interview data can be considered more limited. It is difficult to reconcile high-level theory with highly contextualised and specific empirical data, and caution has to be taken not to force the data to conform to the theory. This forms a significant tension within contemporary research on neoliberalism, and is why many commentators question its analytical value to explain context specific actions and events (Birch, 2017). Indeed, Venugopal (2015) goes further in arguing that as a concept, ‘neoliberalism has become a deeply problematic and incoherent term that has multiple and contradictory meanings, and thus has diminished analytical value’; and questions ‘the one-sided, morally laden usage of the term by non-economists to describe economic phenomena…[that]
serves to signify and reproduce the divide between economics and the rest of the social sciences’ (p.165).
This was a particular frustration for this researcher, finding that neoliberal theory is valuable ‘generally’
for explaining changes to planning but elusive ‘specifically’ for explaining contextual cases and actions.
In presenting a counter-argument, such high-level theories are important because planning, and politics and society more broadly, are structured by power relations; and so we need high-level abstract theory such as neoliberalism, governmentality and post-politics to assist broader explanations for how power operates (e.g. through individual conduct or manufactured consensus) and to what ends (e.g. a market-led low-regulation state). The fact that there are competing theoretical and critical interpretations that provide different explanations for the changes being enacted within the planning system in England is
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not a considered a weakness but rather a strength of planning theory (Allmendinger, 2017) and other (academic) disciplines to explain the ‘real’ world. The fact that this project has adopted an extended neoliberal structure-agency approach does not deny, for example, the insights of an alternative structuralist account of the complex changes unfolding in planning/politics/economics in the UK post-2010. In defending the approach selected, however, it is argued that governing programmes of reform are as much ideological/political as objective/technical in necessity and nature; and therefore are driven explicitly or implicitly by powerful interests. As such, the blend of theories contributing to the theoretical framework heuristic developed here attempt to deal with issues of power in their own way to greater or lesser extents; but with the contention that neoliberal ideology shaped the Cameron era.
This research primarily draws on a neoliberal structure-agency informed approach, but also insights from governmentality and post-political theory. Again, this is based on the conviction that ‘there is no one planning theory that we can assimilate and take into practice. Instead, there are a range of competing ideas and theories that will, to greater or lesser degrees, correspond to our values and views of the world’ (Allmendinger, 2017, p. 27). Rydin (2010) also makes the case that there is ‘no one planning theory’ and that planning researchers should draw on a number of explanatory frames/concepts to make sense of the ‘real world’ system. From this perspective, each of these disciplinary theories can highlight different traditions and insights for understanding contemporary planning changes, but they are not necessarily sufficient on their own (or in different combinations) to explain the range of observed empirical data and complexity of social reality (nor should they be fully expected to do this).
3.1.3 Contextualised Cases or Decontextualised Comparisons?
The last challenge discussed here is that given the extensive scope of background information and empirical data for each of the 40 cases, it was not possible to present any of the cases with significant local details. As such, much of the empirical data presented is essentially ‘decontextualized’ to present broader E&Rs, rather than to explain the local ‘contextualised’ specificities for each case. This is one methodological trade-off in the research design that prioritised some degree of geographical representativeness, and therefore generalisability and comparability, over a more fine-grained analysis.
The subsequent Analysis Chapters draw on the empirical case data to construct a number of general propositions and claims about the experiences and responses of planning/planners to austerity and policy reform post-2010. This is based on a decontextualization/recontextualisation coding approach.
The ‘coding framework’ (discussed more in section 3.4) consisted of first phase ‘open-coding’ on the
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contextualised 40 ‘place-based’ interview transcripts; and second phase ‘focussed-coding’ for the decontextualized seven ‘thematic transcripts’ (e.g. a thematic transcript on ‘localism’ rather than for a single LPA/PM ‘case’). Once decontextualized ‘themes’ had emerged (such as the shift towards LPA
‘commercialisation’ under austerity) the data would be re-contextualised by situating the practitioner’s E&Rs with their specific rural-urban, political and regional context. As such the approach was based on decontextualisation and re-contextualisation rather than a contextualised analysis of each LPA case.
In this respect it was not possible to chronicle the rich details that form the 40 LG cases and sample participants in this study in the same way as would be possible for a traditional case study approach examining a single or handful of cases. Therefore this research adopted a broader geographical focus, necessarily sacrificing depth in exchange for a greater level of representativeness. The rationale behind this approach is that both broad and specific studies have strengths and weakness, and each need to be developed to complete our understanding of research issues at different scales and grains of analysis.
Had the study been based upon a single or small number of ‘case studies’, then another approach, such as actor-network theory (Rydin and Tate, 2016), would have been more suitable for explaining the complexity of local actors involved in implementing, mediating or challenging the objectives of reforms.
There are a number of excellent case studies on local government austerity (Ahrens and Ferry, 2015, Davies and Thompson, 2016, Gardner, 2017, Fuller, 2017), and some emerging broader geographical studies (Ferry et al., 2017), in the academic literature. This study seeks to add to these literatures.
The theory and literature review highlighted the challenges involved in trying to explain the relationship between neoliberal structures (such as national policy and financial reforms) and the diverse forms of agency at the local level (such as council planning practices). There are a number of different structural forces, forms of local agency and contextual factors that can produce complex interplays to determine the specific experiences and responses (outcomes) of attempts at reforms within space. Figure 7 sketches out the different inputs that interact to shape the relationships between national level reforms and the local government planning experiences and responses investigated in this project. It should be noted that this figure is intended to be indicative of the complex interplay between different forces, agencies and contexts rather than providing a comprehensive list of factors or attempting to develop a
‘model’ of responses to reform (See Herrington and Parker [2012, p.482-487, Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association, Vol.81, No.11] for a similar attempt to map these dynamics for councils).
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Figure 7 – Outline factors that shape local experiences and responses to national reform:
It seems intuitive here (although not a claim to knowledge) that nothing can be read off about the likely E&Rs of an LPA to reform a priori; such as a more reductionist typology based on their rural-urban classification, regional context, political control or local economy alone. Instead a more complex set of relationships between (competing) factors needs to be considered to do justice to the specific local contingency of the case being investigated. Put crudely, every local (planning) authority has diverse and unique structuring forces, assemblages of agency (for more on assemblage theory see DeLanda, 2006, DeLanda, 2016) and embedded contexts that mean that every place and case is different. Such differences can be subtle and nuanced or can be a complete contrast relative to the combination of factors that shape other LPAs. The question then becomes, following Blanco et al (2014), can we say anything more about the structures of neoliberalism and its impacts on the diversity of local agency?
‘Recognising the significance of context for the logic of the local and the urban poses challenges for how we traverse the universal and the particular in studies of neoliberalism. Are we left concluding that
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comparative critical local governance that can engage with both ‘global discourses’ and contextually specific experiences, and which avoids either subsuming all regimes of local governance within an over-riding logic of neoliberalism or privileging the diversity of local regimes to the extent that we negate the hegemonic potential of discourses of neoliberalism’ (Blanco et al., 2014, p.3141).
Whilst this research has not specifically addressed this need for a ‘comparative critical local governance’, the research methodology and empirical findings presented here have been sensitive to the problems of privileging either structural neoliberal or situated agency accounts for determining wholesale the local E&Rs of reforms. Instead it has attempted to present some of the complexity between cases as well as the more ‘generalised’ LPA E&Rs and evaluations of structural reform pressures. For example, pressures for LPAs to become more commercial and financially self-sufficient in response to austerity was broadly shared and evident across all 40 cases, but the details behind the ability of individual LPA cases to respond to these pressures was heavily dependent on the different combination of factors that allow them to (re)act in different ways, which shaped their overall approach and ‘resilience’ to reform.
So whilst the focus here emphasises structures, it should be clear that these cannot be separated from some consideration of individual agency when examining local experiences and responses to reforms.
Therefore the 40 LPA cases have not been explicitly placed into a typology here because each has a different combination of factors whereby structures are filtered and mediated in situated local contexts by different agents to produce specific outcomes. Even the descriptive containers used for the LPA cases as ‘urban’ or ‘rural’, ‘south east’ or ‘north east’ or ‘Conservative’ or ‘Labour’ masks the messy variations and physical and social histories that weave together to shape ‘space’ and ‘place’ (Massey, 2005). The urban-rural classification, regional geography and local politics applied to LAs here, whilst necessary to provide some background to orientate the reader, can at best only provide the reader with a limited understanding of the context. Suffice to say a typology based only on such characteristics would very likely mask the unique variables that produce specific outcomes within and between cases.
The above methodological discussion was necessary to ‘clear the decks’ and explain the broader frames of reference that have shaped the overall approach to this research. This is necessary at the outset to set up how these methodological/theoretical/epistemological framings have influenced the more
‘practical’ research methods issues of how the research was designed and implemented. Having developed this groundwork, the proceeding sections in this chapter can move on to discuss the practical research design decisions. The next section begins this by outlining the research case selection process.
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