A competition and an hexperiment

Wow, well my hexperimental post certainly kicked things off on my blog. It got 116 page views and it's ramped up traffic to my blog generally. I might have to start writing some more good stuff regularly and think about improving the design!

But, I've only got eight comments and four of them are me. I'm off on my holidays tomorrow, so to drum up some more comments I'm proposing a competition (a la Times Higher Ed). The best comment on my post about my Pathways to Impact statement gets a prize from Canada. I'm not sure what it will be, but it will be Amazing and Canadian.

And, I'll switch off comment moderation as I doubt I'll be able to manage the blog quite so successfully while I'm away. Horrible anonymous comments will get deleted and possibly prompt be to give up on this whole exercise in impact. Bonne chance y'all.

An hexperiment....

Hello folks.This is an experiment. Basically, I'm going to post a bit of an ESRC research proposal I'm working on on this blog and I want your comments. Please comment. Pretty please. Pretty please with cherries on top. The initial idea was to actually "crowd source" my "Case for Support" - this is the most important bit where you outline what you're going to do. However, I've personally come across cases where people have just completely stolen research ideas. So, as a bit of a cynic, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to post my "Pathways to Impact" statement. I'm presuming the UK research councils will now get sick of seeing this copied and pasted into research proposals. Or I humour myself, anyway....

In these hellish days of further education we now have to think about what "impact" our research will have. This has caused quite a bit of hoo-ha as the argument that "Einstein didn't have social and economic impact" keeps cropping up. I'm not sure what I think about the whole debate. However, I do think it is quite important in the social sciences because I just think research should make a difference, or want to make a difference, particularly when it's policy research like mine. It's me political mission.

Anyway, as part of the impact agenda, we have to produce this "Pathways to Impact" statement. And I want your comments on it. I want you to check whether it makes sense, spellink and grandma, whether you think the impact is achievable, whether it's "good" impact. So I want "lay" and professional (from other academics) views, please. Pretty please etc. Unfortunately, I can't reveal too much about the rest of the research proposal, but if you look at my other posts you'll probably be able to work out what it might be about:

"As policy analysis this research aims to have impact through increasing the effectiveness of public services. The proposed routes to impact are both instrumental and conceptual, aiming to develop a network of interested public sector policy-makers and developing an ongoing dialogue. This will be part of the researcher development for the PI, producing a partnership with policymakers.

In instrumental terms, the research is directly aligned to the most immediate concerns of policymakers. In the discourse of the “Big Society” at Westminster and in the policy agendas of the devolved administrations and local government, policymakers are increasingly interested in involving citizens in policy delivery through co-production. By focusing on those immediate interactions that can then lead onto service provision and expenditure, this research will unpack consumer relations with local authorities. Specifically, the research questions aim to:
• Provide new research knowledge to understand these interactions, how they are managed and their links to service delivery;
• Provide analysis of how the spatial pattern of interactions may be linked to quality of life and social cohesion within local authority areas;
• Provide tools for local authorities to understand and change their systems to handle these interactions more effectively.

At a conceptual level the research moves policy analysis from a focus on formal arenas for governance and participation – such as local partnerships or committees – to a focus on the everyday interactions of being a citizen. This will immediately fill a research gap between the literature on citizen participation and that on street level bureaucrats. The knowledge produced will enable local authorities to better understand who participates in the production of the local state and why.

Key stakeholders who will be interested in the research processes and findings are: policy-makers within local government – both those who manage and develop customer-focused “front-line” roles and those involved with wider citizen participation; policy-makers in central government focused on working in collaboration with local government in improving the delivery and efficiency of local services; and increasingly third-sector providers who will be entering the market to deliver local services. Initial contact has been made with a Scottish local authority suggesting there is strong interest in this research and a willingness to develop an ongoing partnership.

Being embedded in the policy-making environment through ethnographic research will allow networks with key stakeholders to develop. These will be complemented through forming a virtual sounding board of policymakers to comment on emerging findings and advise on how impact can be enhanced. Accessing communities of practice through the Local Government Improvement and Development Agency and the Improvement Service, in Scotland, will also widen the instrumental impact of the research.

The Institutes of Building and Urban Design and Housing, Urban and Real Estate Research at the School of the Built Environment have existing partnerships with government and industry. Through the research these networks and the knowledge gained from colleagues in their work will be accessed to ensure thoughtful and useful impact. In their research career so far, the PI has developed a public face and been keen to engage communities and policy-makers through direct interaction and developing research proposals, and indirectly through social media. This research project will be able to take advantage of these existing networks – indeed this Pathways to Impact statement was published on a blog to allow this community to comment on the quality and feasibility of the proposed impact."

So there goes guys, get commenting. Please?

Edit: appreciating the comments guys (and noticed quite a few people have favourited the tweet with the link). Just to clarify, there's no rush. I'm off on my hols next week, so was going to come back to this when I get back mid-August.

A very bad blog post....

Right, I promised to my Twitter followers that I'd blog about the Christie Commission report when it was published a week ago. So far I've failed to read it.

For readers who don't know Scotland or the Scottish Government exist, the Christie Commission was set up in January after the Cabinet realised they'd fudged the budget in November and the "Scissors of Dooms" (reducing income from the Barnett Formula, growing demands on public services) were coming to get them. It put difficult decisions off until after the election and then put the decisions in the hands of a "commission" so the Cabinet could remain Teflon coated when it came to blame. A lot like the Independent Budget Review that was published this time last year.

Luckily, a former colleague in the Government has sent me a neat little summary of the Christie Commission report:

"The report confirms that there is a pressing need for reform of public service delivery (future demand pressures would compound current fiscal tightening) and maps out a way forward founded on four key objectives:

o       building services around people and communities

o       more effective work between delivery organisations to integrate services

o       prioritising prevention and tackling inequalities

o       improved accountability and transparency, leading to improved performance and lower cost.

The priorities identified by the Commission include maximising scarce resources, prioritising preventative measures to reduce demand and driving continuing reform across all public services based on outcomes

The Commission’s recommendations include introducing a new set of statutory powers and duties, common to all public service bodies, to embed community participation in the design and delivery of services."

This repeats a lot of the stuff I've heard about the report. Oddly enough the launch was met with quite a damp squib in the Scottish Press...

Anyhoo, it get's me angry. And puzzled. Let's start with the puzzled. It really does just continue a lot of the political discourse that's been around in Scotland for moons. Since the old Regional Council days we've been obsessed with finding a "corporate" or "strategic" approach to joining up public services to make them better. The Christie Commission also really echoes a lot of the messages in the old Lib/Lab Scottish Executive produced around their 2003 Budget Closing the Opportunity Gap and the 2002 Community Regeneration Policy Better Communities in Scotland: Closing the Gap. So, just in the Ministerial forward of the latter it's stated:
"Social justice is at the heart of the Scottish Executive’s work. Breaking the cycle of deprivation, raising personal and community ambitions, and lifting children out of the misery of poverty are important aims of this government"
And:
"more needs to be done and we believe that community planning is the best way to make sure all agencies work together with deprived communities – and with each other – to deliver better and more responsive services."
See? It seems nothing is new here...


The thing that angers me is the continued focus on early intervention. There is some evidence that early intervention does have an impact on children's later lives. But the evidence is mixed. And from my experience in Government, the discourse around "poor parenting" very easily slips into a much more stigmatising language that implicitly is about "poor parents". Early intervention is widely presented as a solution that will solve all our social problems overnight (c.f. debate on social investment bonds). Yet evidence from longitudinal studies shows the greatest predictor of a household experience poverty is a previous experience of poverty. The Scottish Government's very own Growing Up in Scotland study shows that most poor outcomes are most strongly related to income inequality and poverty. What is more, 40% of Scottish children will experience poverty before the age of five. What we need is income redistribution, not a few more parenting classes. Jam today.

Street level bureaucrats and the middle classes

"I'm going to write to my councillor and complain!" This is my usual, somewaht ironic, refrain whenever anything mildly irritating crosses my path. To be honest, the last time I contacted the City of Edinburgh Council was about that listed building consent application. The thing that annoys me most if the many potholes designed to kill cyclists on Edinburgh's roads, and if I reported them my full time job would be emailing Clarence. And yet, in a lot of our work on concentrated deprivation - it's an implicit theorisation behind mixed communities and community development - we presume that middle-class professionals do more regularly contact our local service providers and are more likely to get a better service as a result. This is something I'm intrigued about...

And, after my previous post, I've now finished Street Level Bureaucrats. By the end, a few things really struck me. Firstly, was Lipsky's real sympathy for public sector workers. He paints a bloomin' horrible picture of the many structural constraints that go against public servants doing what they want to do - provide a very good level of service to all. Secondly, in producing the new edition of the book, all he did was add a new preface and a new concluding chapter. In this concluding chapter he asserts that the book has stood the test of time - and I agree. And I also agree with him is that all that has happened since his book was first published is things have got worse as the ideological attacks on the state have increased. The obsession with managerialism, efficiency and all the rest of it just produces perverse incentives and ineffective services.

Finally, and more broadly, I really liked that his category of analysis was so broad - street level bureaucrats. Those everyday people who make decisions that distribute resources that make up "policy". Not policeman, not teachers, but bureaucrats. Interestingly, I just searched Web of Knowledge for "street level bureaucrats" and the 83 results all focused on single service areas, rather than the broad sweep. I particularly like the broad category of analysis because it resonated with the literature review I'm slogging through on middle class community activism. We're trying to develop a "middle theory" of how public sector agencies and the middle-classes (people like us) engage. We're having to focus on specific policy areas, for example education (pushy parents), planning (rural NIMBYs) because that is the way policy research is broken down. But I think the broader sweep will be more interesting. Already it's quite clear that pushy parents and rural NIMBYs use similar cultural capital to exclude non-middle class people and improve things for themselves and I wouldn't be surprised if this happens across services. With the move to local authorities and other organisations using call centres, and the generic nature of staff who support elected officials, for me the greatest interest is in the general engagements between staff and the public.

History and NHS reforms

Doing something completely different and came accross this abstract:

The proposals contained in the White Paper ... have been described as an attempt to introduce competition into a non-competitive situation. Together with the introduction of practice budgets for family practitioners, the granting of self-governing status to NHS hospitals is the principal mechanism by which this aim will be achieved. Very little is known about the effects of competition on the delivery of health care. Evidence from the United Kingdom is non-existent and from the United States of America is inadequate and contradictory. Yet, despite the inconclusive nature of this evidence, the U.K. Government is implementing the most radical reforms of the NHS since its inception without any systematic attempt to monitor the extent to which the reforms achieve the desired ends. In the absence of any systematic evaluation the responsibility for monitoring the effects of self-governing status will fall to the managers and public health specialists in the purchasing authorities. A variety of methods are described which would enable the reforms to be evaluated without holding back their implementation. No radical reform of the NHS can be expected to have an unambiguously beneficial impact on the delivery of health care. If the U.K. Government is genuine in its desire to improve health services, it should be prepared to subject its proposals to the sort of evaluation described in this paper.

Guess when the paper dates from?

1991. Plus ca change...

The Big Sock, Hacking, Suberversion and other stuff...

I've got research funding from the AHRC's Connected Communities programme (discussed in my last post) which is causing much brouhaha for it's links to the Big Society. Because of this, at a Connected Communities event I was at recently, people were very reticent about using the term "Big Society" (hence the Big Sock). I think the AHRC have got themselves in a right mess here. Yes, they shouldn't have mentioned the Big Society so often, but the Research Councils are going to research government policy. You just have to look at all the ESRC grants on community engagement and social exclusion during the New Labour years (most of which were quite critical of the government's agenda) to see that. And I have to say, I've not seen one Connected Communities project yet that is helping the Big Society in the way the Tories might want to.

Which leads me to subservience. I had an interesting lunch with Chris Speed from Edinburgh College of Art and his work, to summarise too bluntly, hacking and QR codes. He's beginning to work with Prospect Housing Association, linking his work to their From There to Here work. I really liked his idea of hacking because from my research the history of deprived neighbourhoods is always subversive and "hacking". In Wester Hailes case, the fight for basic improvements and better services in the 1970s and 1980s that led onto an enormous amount of community development and regeneration, was the community "hacking" a political discourse in Edinburgh that stigmatised and belittled the neighbourhood. I'm really interested (now) in using hacking to really get into the problems that residents face in Wester Hailes and give them a voice and also let them celebrate what's wonderful about their lives and community.

Which leads me onto... more clumsy writing. No, for me, my knowledge of the history of community engagement and development just shows what a disaster the Big Society will be because of this "hacking". The history of radical community development is that communities know that their problems are actually problems of wider society and they will get very angry about that. As the wonderful "Gilding the Ghetto" put it back in the 1970s: 

"Their [the CDP team’s] brief rested on three important assumptions.  Firstly that it was the ‘deprived’ themselves who were the cause of the ‘urban deprivation’.  Secondly, the problem could best be solved by overcoming these people’s apathy and promoting self-help.  Thirdly locally-based research into the problems would serve to bring about changes in local and central government policy.

A few month’s field-work in areas suffering long-term economic decline and high unemployment was enough to provoke the first teams of CDP workers to question the Home Office’s original assumptions."

So when the Tories last had a go at the Big Society in the late 1980s early 1990s, with the hideous responsibilisation agenda of Housing Action Trusts, City Challenge and New Life for Urban Scotland, the policies quickly found very organised communities that knew that the problem was inequality and poor services (in Scotland see: Hastings 1998 and Collins 1999 [£]). Community groups just shoved two-fingers up at the government. And that's what will (arguably is) happening with the Big Society. So don't worry.

One final positive thing. There's loads of really good bottom-up stuff happening in Wester Hailes now: from There to Here, the West Edinburgh Time Bank, and the Calders Community Garden for a start. This is the Big Society, and it's flippin' superb.

Free school meals - the new middle-class badge of choice

I'm currently doing a literature review, in the form of a realist synthesis, on middle-class activism and its impact on local public services. In the initial trawl of literature we found about 30 articles. An immediate, striking fact was that only researchers in education and rural housing regularly explicitly referred to the "middle-classes" as an important group in understanding patterns of service provision.

Anyway, because of the education stuff, from researchers like Gill Crozier, this morning's story about Academies and Free Schools being able to prioritise access for pupils receiving free school meals caught my eye. You hear the apocryphal stories of middle-class parents pretending to be Catholic and other things to get their children into good schools. But what evidence there is out there really does suggest that this is what middle-class parents do. What is worse, when this is done it often actively excludes others from school - such as working class or African American parents. Knowing this I can guarantee we will see middle-class parents hiding household income so they can get free school meals and get their children into a good school.

This is all very worrying. But one thing that struck me with the stuff I've read on education and rural housing is that it does portray a very stereotypical view of the middle-classes. In the latter case, it's a bit like reading an academic analysis of social relation in The Archers. In the former case it's all about supermums and pushy parents. This is predominantly because most of the evidence is qualitatively. I've no problem with this - it's all useful evidence for the realist synthesis. And on the education side, I know that the anxiety of middle class parents is widely known about. However, this body of work presumes that for all their pushiness and anxiety, the middle-classes are successful at, for example, getting more money spent on their child's education. The only evidence I've actually seen for this are a couple of ropey regression models from the states.

From what I know, schooling quality only impacts on a tiny amount of the eventual outcomes for children. So, it might not actually matter that middle class parents are pushy. What matters is income inequality. And if schools don't get more money from having a more middle class intake, why worry about pushy parents?