The research for this book was never intended as a prescriptive study, an analysis of how to ‘do’ policy or government better, or a vision of ‘what should be’. The project was formed from my own experience of uncomfortable positions in local government, and curiosity about what it might mean to make these discomforts explicit. I wanted to get at the work policy practitioners do to create, maintain, obstruct, manipulate or change policies and institutions – including, often, work on themselves.

Project origins

Before the research began, I was employed as a policy manager in a local authority (London Borough of Hackney, LBH). My work involved working with the chief executive and senior management, the elected Mayor and his cabinet, people in similar roles in partner organisations such as health and the police, and other interest groups within and outside the local authority. Much of the time my work was about working out compromises of policy, intervention or simply language, in which all of these interest groups could feel that their own interests, and the demands on each of them from outside agencies (such as central government) had been met. This is where my interest in the knowingness of uncomfortable positions in local government began.

An illustrative example was an incident when I was involved in developing new governance arrangements for children's services. This emerged after sitting with a group of the most senior managers from health, education and social services and trying to agree on a shared definition of ‘commissioning’, a term each of the three professions used to describe slightly different relationships to designing and delivering services. There were many meetings on this subject, covering similar ground and objections, after which I or other colleagues would draft another version of a policy paper attempting to reconcile different definitions and practices, only for it to be discussed and revised again. Finally, in one meeting it seemed all three heads of service had reached agreement about the word ‘commissioning’ and how it could be used in joint planning. But as we left the room, I realised that what had actually been agreed was that colleagues would not dispute the others’ use of the word ‘commissioning’, yet would continue to operate within each service with the existing practices.