Humanising the public services: the challenge to write

Jim Cowan

3 things in the paper

• While there is a lot written about the public services, virtually nothing written `from within`

• Unpacking these worlds viewed `from within`- unpacking their complexity-dehumanising/humanising and more

• The challenge to write

From within what?

• `relational` public services

• social care, education, health, housing, and the police

• staff `doing things` in person with individual members of the public

• shared understandings among staff: the meanings staff are make of their world

what isn`t being written about

• A very characteristic shared struggle(QUOTE all having our voices taken

seriously) • This is `joint action`-from which arises the

novel-but• It is nonetheless structured (QUOTE)• And we are talking about the , “pluralistic,

only fragmentarily known, and only partially shared ….”

Why is this writing so rare?

• “As professionals we have (mostly) ignored our embodied embeddedness in this routine flow of spontaneous, living responsive activity. Not only have we let it remain unnoticed in the background of everything we do, but we have ignored its importance as a sustaining and resourceful setting that is always present….” (Shotter, 2004: p40)

Part 2 unpacking these worlds

“What`s really distressing.....is that though my sister is surrounded by people spouting the `rhetoric of care` no one seems to give a damn about her personally.” (Council on Social Action, 2008: p3)

“The patient not only brightened but shifted her whole demeanour and stance.Where before she had appeared depressed and disconnected, now she became energised and present” (Katz and Shotter, 1996: p7) 

UnpackingOne strand is a basic competency or capacity of managers and professionals (or lack of it)

So we have degenerate strands in public sector worlds and those that are working well in this respect which we might call generate.

But there are other things going on to make the difference between `rhetoric of care` versus `energised and present`. I think we can understand more strands such as dehumanising and also humanising.

The UK public sector discourse has focused on the degenerate-generate, not the latter. But the latter corresponds to the purpose of these worlds

Dehumanising•Dialogic relations form between the speech genre of the practice world and the speech genre of the managerialists

•Staff whose job it is to respond to the members of the public, literally become the enforcers of agency agendas

•Agency agendas are further discoursed into frontline practices by the requirement to use an IT system

•The IT system produces information about information which is seen as `essential` in managing the purely informational `relationship` between this front line service, its senior managers and central government

Marcel wrote about a `spirit of abstraction` now a dominating feature of relational British public services.

Foucault gives us discursive formations, being discoursed into positions and governmentality

Thus well intentioned, professionally capable staff can end up generating the `rhetoric of care`

Humanising 1•Individual managers and staff adopting a very different superaddressee

•Collaborative efforts to re-work outmoded boundaries and territories by bringing people inside the system (managers and staff) and people on the receiving end of the system together, to talk with one another on terms that bring the concerns and views of those on the receiving end into the agency in such a way that its staff must find new ways to respond (i.e. services change)

•To have the shared internal struggle have enough going on in it that directly relates to service users (this is what is `shut off` by dehumanising)

•This may start with one person and de Certeau helps us understand how it can survive

“…the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals clearly caught in the nets of `discipline`” (1984: xiv)

Humanising 2•And through Shotter`s work we can appreciate how the `seed` can spread. Shotter puts this very simply, “In practice, shared understandings are developed, negotiated, or socially constructed between participants over a period of time, in the course of an ongoing conversation” (Shotter, 1997:11)

•I want to argue that the superaddressee of humanising that individuals can construct for themselves is a very special kind of superaddressee (which resists the spirit of abstraction). What is different is that it touches both the humanity of the person constructing it as superaddressee AND the humanity of those they are working with.

•And there`s is a lot of it already going on, even though the people doing it don’t explicitly refer to it.

Are there equivalents of Marcel & Foucault? The people we can look to for inspiration and direction in work which explicitly seeks to humanise are, in my view, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Daisaku Ikeda. For example, they have literally kept their focus on the individual, on the person literally in front of them. They have prized the holding together of words and action. At root they share the view that self directed transformation within the life of the individual, rather than societal or structural reforms, holds the key.

3 Writing these worlds•Independently from my work, Su Maddock researched UK civil servants trying to direct `Health Action Zones` on the ground with local front line service managers. It traumatised her! So hers is not quite the same viewpoint

•Its about collisions in ways of being, talking and thinking between those who those who make policy and those who `do`

•One of her conclusions was that we need a new way to think and talk about change in these front line worlds, which she described as `hidden under a rock`, and implying the need to bring these realities out into written expression;

“There is an urgent need for a theory of social change. The enlightenment was a real advance on fatalism, but the twenty first century requires a greater confidence in people to transform their relationships. Such transformation is not a rational process and requires confidence in the effect of learning about oneself and relationships. …There is a transforming theory of change waiting to emerge, which is much needed because it would provide an anchor for innovators and for transforming public bodies” (2002: p35).

Writing to reflect these worlds•Taking Shotter, Cunliffe, Katz and others writing as a kind of trajectory on from Maddock, we encounter `social poetics`: text expressing aspects of lived experience, as well as theorising, which is polyvocal

•A polyvocal writing of multiple strands, for the reader, can also create a `something else` which arises from how the reader understands the interactions between these various strands.

•This kind of polyvocal writing seems to do for the reader, what staff themselves directly do during their work within these worlds.

A polyvocal writing of multiple strands•Where the unique world is: the degenerate-generate strands (in which we might also hear the professional voice)

•Accounts of the dehumanising

•How humanising has happened

When working within a very controlling state organisations there are two other strands, which directly support humanising efforts

•Other relevant experiences which are drawn on

•As an activist-writer, am going on a journey in doing this work (questions I am asking myself about the world, about how change happens, about where all this work is on a larger scale of things, and my personal experiences -in so far as they connect in some way- as well as my own commitments)

theoretical issues1 Decentred accounts?

Foucault accuses traditional historiography of situating a self reflexive subject at the centre of the movement of history, when for Foucault, practices are discoursed into being

As MacNay puts it, in discussing the postructuralist dissolution of the `subject`, while the Archaeology of Knowledge accurately problematises the unified subject, “(it) is tendentious in its total rejection of any substantive notion of the subject” (1994: p79).

This `pure` version of Foucault would seem to block Maddock`s challenge to us. Put another way, how can this very pure discursive and decentred focus be supportive of a focus on the transformation of relationships and the relational between engaged people?

I think the short answer is that I don’t think it can. It is people who enact the dehumanising. Is there not a case for accounts of the dehumanising in which people figure? We can keep in mind the critique of traditional historiography. But crucially is it not the Shotter-like network of communication, of the joint-action of the many, that both dehumanising and humanising accounts need to communicate for the reader?

theoretical issues2 Voice

Traditional ethnography and modernist organisation theory places the researcher outside the frame of the study (Hatch:1996). To write from outside the frame (external) and not as a character in the story is to write as an anonymous external observer speaking with the voice of someone who is not directly involved with the events described. This is to write in a detached third person voice. But Hatch suggests 2 other voices

The first is writing `from within` as main character in the story told.

The second is to write outside the frame, but refer to oneself as a character in what is being written about. This has a distancing effect: a distanced acknowledgement of self in relation to other.

This suggests three strands written `from within` as main character: generate, humanising and the personal journey and the others moving between outside the frame but referring to oneself and third person detached voice (degenerate, dehumanising, professional voice, ideas drawn on)

To conclude•How do we bring these worlds out into writing in a responsible manner? I`ve been arguing that one sided accounts which only focus on the dehumanising are irresponsible. We need to be able to see the social purpose of these worlds also being worked on

•I want to podcast the material I write going back over 35 years and build an interaction with a live public service audience before working it into a book

•There arent too many places to go now in Britain. The fall from grace of the private sector. Can we really continue to have such a proportion of GDP `hidden under a rock`. Writing these worlds is re-thinking the local state i.e. understanding the creativity of the staff groups invested in and their powerful interaction with civil society. That this is about what kind of country we want to live in. Do we want a participatory culture?

As Shotter puts it

“the great unresolved struggle of our time, that of ordinary people to

gain control over their own lives to get out from under schemes

imposed on them externally by powerful elites and to build a genuinely

participatory culture” (1993)

And it is through these disarmingly ordinary, but strangely invisible `conversational realities` that Shotter has brought out for use by us, the activists within civil society and the local state, these important resources. This too is humanising.