Regulating Scotland's social landlords : localised resistance to technologies of performance management
Abstract
Influenced by Foucault's later work on governmentality, this paper explores the regulation of social landlords as a 'technology of performance' concerned with governing the conduct of dispersed welfare agencies and the professionals within them. This is a mode of power that is both voluntary and coercive; it seeks to realise its ambitions not through direct acts of intervention, but by promoting the responsible self-governance of autonomous subjects. Through an analysis of the regulatory framework for social landlords in Scotland, this paper highlights the creation of a performance culture that seeks to mobilise housing organisations to reconcile their local management systems and service provision to external standards, whilst simultaneously wielding punitive interventions for non-compliance. However, housing professionals are not passive in all of this, and indeed, actively challenged and resisted these top-down attempts to govern them at arm's-length.
Citation
McKee , K 2009 , ' Regulating Scotland's social landlords : localised resistance to technologies of performance management ' , Housing Studies , vol. 24 , no. 2 , pp. 155-171 . https://doi.org/10.1080/02673030802704345
Publication
Housing Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0267-3037Type
Journal article
Rights
(c)2009 Taylor and Francis. This is an electronic version of an article published in Housing Studies. The definitive version is available at http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=journal&issn=0267-3037
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