Exploring Acts that Challenge and Transform Governing Practices

Introduction

Resistance is defined as acts that provide an alternative to the governing practices that are currently in application in a given society (Bevir, et al., 2017). Acts of resistance can be minor, but can even be major and may lead to broader change in the governing practices (Power & Bergan, 2019).

This essay critically assesses how far, and in what ways, human actors resist statutory policy. Using empirical studies and examples, this essay explains how human actors may resist the actions and decisions of policy-makers and practitioners. The essay first discusses the theories of power and resistance, particularly using Foucault’s and Gramsci’s work in the field. Then the essay discusses how far and in what ways human actors resist statutory policy. The essay argues that resistance to social policy is not always explainable in terms of power and resistance because power is organised in complex forms in the society and cannot be understood solely in terms of the subject and object of the policy. Essentialising terms such as objects (state, policy, organisations) and subjects (practitioners and the users of services) do not always correctly define how power is situated and exercised.

Theory of power and resistance

Foucault described theory of power in terms of social control, oppression, and surveillance and saw it as deeply threatening to individual agency (Schulzke, 2016). Foucault saw a deep interconnect between power and knowledge and their relationship to the ‘subject ’ and in particular saw in ‘government’ an adversary or problem with relation to power and freedom dynamics (Foucault, 2019). Proceeding from this, Foucault viewed rationalities of government, such as, the civil society itself, as the inventions that serve purposes of negotiation and transactional realities, that serve as a vehicle for the “common interplay of relations of power and all those things that ceaselessly escape their grasp” (Foucault, 1979).

The concept of ‘governmentality’ adopted by Foucault (1991) sees governance placing ever‐increasing interest in responsibility often through a three tiered model where people work through themselves, through others and through the state. Thus, self-regulation can also be done by citizens to circumnavigate state responsibility (Foucault, 1991). Power and knowledge are interdependent and networks formed on the basis of governmentality can facilitate empowerment as well as lead to domination and coercion (Foucault, 1991). Based on the Foucauldian idea of governmentality which sees three tiers of governance, it may be argued that power relationships can operate within and across networks, institutions and regimes. Power, according to this perspective, is also not limited to state, but is a more complex phenomenon. Although pastoral power, is described as administrative intervention in, and control over, the social world, power in modern society is not wielded only in terms of state intervention, but is circulated “through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures, and all their daily actions” (Foucault, 1980, pp. 151-152). Foucault also played down the repressive and negative aspects of power and presented power as positive and productive (Foucault, 1980).

It can however be argued that power can be both positive as well as negative because if it has the ability to engender good, it also has the ability to engender evil to those it is aimed. This problem is also relevant to why there could be resistance to power. Foucault did not view resistance as necessarily a force that is opposed to power, but saw resistance as a consequence of the disjunctive nature of power relations (Widder, 2004). In this sense, power itself can be used by individuals for their own purposes because power is infused in everyday discourses. The difficulty with this approach is that power may become difficult to locate and contest or resist because it is not emanating from a single source (Schulzke, 2016).

However, Gramsci described a theory of resistance through the political party, but which can also provide some context for resistance by human actors to statutory policy (Schulzke, 2016). Gramsci theorised resistance for the purpose of responding critically to the systems of hegemony or disciplinarian power (Schulzke, 2016). Resistance depends “on being able to exercise some measure of deliberate use of power” (Schulzke, 2016, p. 66). In context of government policy, Gramsci can help understand the way in which power can be structured around hegemonies, and how even when such hegemonies are multifaceted composites where policies are defined in terms of what composite or collective forces desire, there is possibility for resistance because of the multiple subjectivities of individuals (Schulzke, 2016). In terms of institutional levels, it is possible for policy to exclude, marginalise, or even suppress some identities and interests where collective policy creates an ‘illusory community’ that seemingly desires the policy and this opens the space for resistance and demands for reform by those who have been excluded or marginalised (Schulzke, 2016).

The implementation of new policies can involve transition, which can see dynamics of power and resistance play out. In one study, the authors discuss how a neo-Gramscian perspective can help in sustainable transition (Ford & Newell, 2021). They argue that transition can see both resistance and accommodation when dominant groups exercise hegemony which is based on a broad consent, coalitions and compromises (Ford & Newell, 2021). In such situations, there can be political and material accommodation with other social groups based on mutuality of interests, which can allow the processes of accommodation to induce a sustainable transition to a new policy. An example of accommodation can be seen in the findings of a Swedish research study which demonstrates how conceptions of knowledge and learning in Swedish local teacher education culture related to state governance when local teachers adapted to national curriculum so long as the ideological standpoints were in harmony with state governance and there were no strategic losses for the culture (Eliasson, 2013). Thus, adaptation also occurs when there is possibility for coalition and compromises. In the Swedish study, the compromise occurred between the devising of a national curriculum with national objectives and respect for local knowledge and learning strategies (Eliasson, 2013).

It has been argued that the tension between those in power and those who are subject to that power can arise because those in power may have access to social resources that are not available to subordinate agents while those who are subject to power can mobilize other social resources in a contribution to power relations through resistance (Barbalet, 1985). Applying the concept of power and governmentality proposed by Foucault, it can be argued that power is subject less and not concentrated in the government alone. Nevertheless, Barbalet’s (1985) argument is that those in power and those subject to power, have all access to different kinds of social resources that are reflected in the dynamics involving power and resistance. Even where it is agreed in principle that power is discursive in nature, diffused in everyday practices, and not concentrated in the government alone, it can be argued that at different times, different persons may exercise powers even with relation to the application of statutory policy. This may see the organisation of power-resistance dynamics through the access to social resources for those who are applying the policy and those who are subject to it.

The argument here is that Foucault’s idea of discursive power does not provide an adequate explanation of resistance because he sees power as subject less conceptualisation. On the other hand, Gramsci provides an explanation of power as hegemony, which gives us some scope for organising resistance. Foucault’s conceptualisation of power and governance does however provide us with an explanation of social models that see governance being exercised when people work through themselves, through others and through the state. This can help us understand the complex forms in which statutory policy is revealed in the society. The implementation of Big Society measures in England in particular can be seen here to provide an explanation of how reforms and social policy cannot be confined to the application of government power alone. Individuals, civil society, and non profits, can also play an important role in the application of the social policy which sees diffusion of power and resistance in complex forms (Manzi, 2015 ). In the next section of this essay, examples of social policy are discussed with reference to the power and resistance dynamics involved in the application of such policy.

Resistance to social policy and welfare policy

Housing and homelessness

Social housing in the UK comes within the domain of local authority or housing association housing (Power & Bergan, 2019). Housing policy is one of the areas where resistance by human actors to statutory policy may be witnessed in the western countries where neoliberalism is often used to effect change in governmental policy related to social housing (Power & Bergan, 2019). In 1999, Saugeres had provided an analysis on how front-line housing managers resisted power structures within housing organisations (Saugeres, 1999). This was reflective of power relations within the housing organisations as well as power relations organised between the managers and the agencies of the government (Saugeres, 1999). There is also the problem of restructuring of social housing in liberal welfare states with an emphasis on market-based reform (Power & Bergan, 2019). Such reform has seen the use of governmental techniques that have promoted the private market as the model for institutional management (Power & Bergan, 2019).

Although local factors in different liberal democracies may differ due to historical organisation of social housing and national cultures, neoliberal approaches have had the common impact of refashioning government conduct with the state coming within the supervision of the market instead of the market coming in supervision of the state rather than a market under the supervision of the state (Foucault, 2008, p. 116). These approaches understand care as an individual responsibility, and it is argued that the housing sector has undergone reforms that ae associated with diminution of social care (Power & Bergan, 2019). Consequently, it is argued that housing or home ownership is increasingly promoted as a central citizen responsibility. On the other hand, the caring traditions of housing and tenant management are historically traced to Octavia Hill’s work in the UK in the late 1800s, which often contrasted with the ‘impersonal’ property management by local authorities where focus is on contracts and administrative procedures (Clapham, et al., 2000 ). Therefore, in order to understand resistance to housing policy, it is also important to contextualise the broader relationship between the government, market, agencies and the human actors because the relationships of power and resistance are built into such broader frameworks.

As noted in some research studies, there are ways in which social housing and promotion of market-based solutions to housing needs have transformed the working practices of housing employees and affected the ways in which tenants experience and respond to policy of housing (Byrne & Norris, 2017). An interesting research study in this context is done by Manzi (2015) who writes about the development of the "Big Society” in the regulation of welfare. This is explained in terms of radical restructuring of welfare provision with implications for the social housing provision in England (Manzi, 2015 ). The Big Society reforms in the UK were based on the use of voluntary sector provision and local level service provision and the radical reduction in state bureaucracy with focus on public service reform, empowerment of local communities and developing cultural change to support neighbourhood groups and social enterprise (Manzi, 2015 ). These changes in the way social housing is delivered and managed in terms of government/agency and human actor contexts have meant that there is incorporation of social groups and social enterprise. This accords with the objective of the reforms to reduce state control and replace it with social responsibility so that the voluntary and private sector institutions take responsibility for public services and power is decentralised to the lowest possible level (Manzi, 2015 ).

Ostensibly Big Society meant to reduce bureaucratic constraints, regulation and oversight (Manzi, 2015 ). It is also important that the networked governance institutions have been criticised for their neglect of conflicts of power, conflict and class relationships (Manzi, 2015 ). However, it is to be seen whether there is reduction of power-resistance conflict. It may be mentioned here that one of the key initiatives of the reforms has been to provide incentives for social housing residents so as to reduce their dependency upon welfare assistance through the Welfare Reform Act 2012 (Manzi, 2015 ). These measures were bolstered with the application of the Affordable Housing Programme in England with time‐limited tenancies. These measures have been received with hostility and resistance from the human actors who are the objective of these reforms (Manzi, 2015 ). One of the reasons for this is that the measures do not address existing imbalances of power while they do exacerbate the marginalisation of lower‐income groups and stigmatise social housing (Manzi, 2015 ).

Empirical data on welfare practice has been analysed in research and literature in three broad and overlapping ways (Dobson, 2015). The first is to identify the difficult conditions that ‘bear down on’ welfare organisations and workers. The second is to uncover realities of human agency at the ‘frontline’ as it relates to ‘gatekeeping’, discretion and oppressive practice. The third is to highlight deviation, resistance and subversion from and to pernicious policy intentions and political cultures (Dobson, 2015). In an important point that can be linked to Foucault’s conceptualisation of power, Dobson (2015) argues that there is a tendency to think of objects and subjects of social policy and welfare scholarship “as naturalised, self-evident and completed entities” so that social policy and welfare is more preoccupied with the relationship between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’ (p. 690). Dobson (2015) further argues that essentialising terms are used with respect to the object and the subject of welfare policy, with state, policy, organisations, and institutions represented as objects and practitioners and the users of services represented as subjects of policy. Such representations in essentialising terms lead to the issues of power and agency being constructed as the properties of human actors and/or institutional entities and also lead to the conceptualisation of the welfare user and practitioner resistance to institutional power and governance regimes (Dobson, 2015).

The consequence of such essentialist constructions is that individuals and social ‘groups’ are “represented as subject to, or as railing against ‘the social’ or ‘the structural’, which is given a type of institutional, material and physical quality as government, the state, policy and organisation” (Dobson, 2015, p. 691). This can be related to the argument made by Foucault where he refuses to see power as something that is related only to the government and rather conceptualises it as something that is more discursive and even subject less. Dobson’s argument is that power and resistance in terms of welfare policy are complex phenomenon, that cannot be reduced to the discussions around over-rationalised concepts of power and resistance.

Relating this back to the discussion around Big Society reforms in British housing policy, the reforms were aimed at ‘decentralising power’ so that it would rest in the individual who would be the decision maker; this has been explained in Foucauldian terms as self-regulation by individuals (Manzi, 2015 ). However, this has met with considerable resistance. A reasonable question to ask is that if resistance is only to power, then why resist against a policy that seeks to devolve power to the lowest level? A possible answer can be that resistance in terms of social policy is not necessarily to power although in essentialising terms it could be argued that resistance corresponds to power. Resistance could also be to social policy that makes it difficult for people to access social resources. In the new housing reforms, there has been a moralistic view to seeing people in public housing as shirkers, so that while the policy ostensibly seeks to devolve power to these very people, it does not really provide access to housing and welfare.

Education

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy implemented in American schools sees resistance from refugees and immigrants and there are struggles and contestations between entities trying to establish authority and legitimacy of ideas and practices of schooling refugees and the refugees who speak languages other than English (Koyama, 2015). This policy is another example of the complexities involved in resistance to social policy because this reflects on how people may resist policy for complex and varied reasons and not just as a response to oppressive exercise of power. Koyama’s (2015) research applied ‘assemblage’, which is associated with actor network perspectives in order to understand how different actors came together to implement the plan of NCLB. It is interesting that the findings of the research demonstrated that the project of NCLB saw the contestations between various entities, and just the ones who were in ‘positions of power’ on issues of authority and legitimacy of ideas and practices of schooling refugees (Koyama, 2015).

The research showed that a combination of actors were involved in the formulation of the curriculum, new actors, including refugee parents and community leaders, were involved in the assessment and sanctions of the curriculum which brought into the process some unexpected elements like emotion, challenge to expertise, questioning of motives, and resistance of the practices produced by the policy actors (Koyama, 2015). Eventually, the dynamics of these actors led to the complexities associated in the resistance to the curriculum. At this point, it may also be mentioned that the term power may be used here in a discursive sense, because while the policy makers exercised the power to make the policy on curriculum, the parents and community leaders also have power over their children and members of communities, which they have exercised to resist the policy. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to see power and resistance in essentialising terms because the dynamics of the ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are complex with a variety of actors involved in the policy application. If parents and children can both be marked as subjects of the policy in terms of being subject to the power, the children are also subject to the power of their parents, which impacts their own interaction with the social policy in this scenario.

It has been argued that policies like NCLB or Race to the Top (RTTT) ‘make up’ minority children through double gestures of inclusion and exclusion which are based on the hope of progress and fears around degeneration of minority children through schooling (Jahng, 2011). It is argued that the ways in which such projects are applied in schools is a reflection on institutionalised discourses that eventually lead to social inequity for young children (Jahng, 2011). Thus, while ostensibly the policy is meant to facilitate the progress of minority children in schools, it is implemented through test-based accountability where the school stands to lose federal grants and students if it does not perform well in the tests. The framing of the policy therefore sees the schools in the position of authority (for implementing the policy) but also subject to the power of the federal government (through their test-based accountability) (Jahng, 2011).

It can be argued that the schools then become not only the sites where the policy is to be applied to students but also the sites that are subject to power of the federal government. Resistance to the policy then not only comes from the students and their parents, but also schools, which are otherwise part of the institutional machinery that is supposed to wield power. Clearly, this does not align with the essentialist constructions where individuals and social ‘groups’ are “represented as subject to, or as railing against institutional, material and physical quality, such as, government, the state, policy and organisation” (Dobson, 2015, p. 691). This shows how power and resistance cannot be conceived in essentialist terms and how the dynamics of power and resistance are complex. With regard to the NCLB policy in the United States, it has been said that the policy tends to subject both the individual and the institution to the power, with minority students being conceptualised as individuals who need the American education system to correct the inequities of not being white or

middle-class and the schools being conceptualised as sites that need more accountability and surveillance under the umbrella of academic achievement (Jahng, 2011).

Layers of governance and impact in resistance

Tensions between central and local government in the British plan-making process can also be affected by the extent to which human actors are included in the plan making process as local networks have more room for manoeuvre with ‘councils’ and ‘planning officers’ including human actors in the process of plan making (Tait, 2002). Different ‘layers’ of government can mean that there are more possibilities for resistance in different stages, spaces, sites, and periods of the policy implementation.

Tait (2002) provided some insights into how central and local government conflicts emerged with regard to the writing of development plans for new house building in a Welsh local authority and an inner London borough. This research and its findings provide evidence of how power and resistance are organised in complex ways because of the network of relations between agencies and individuals involved in the urban development plans (Tait, 2002). Tait (2002) defined agencies as “accomplishments which are composed of many connections between different objects” (p. 72). Tait (2002) argued that in such situations agency is negotiated, while individuals and entities fight over identities and roles and power relations. In other words, it is not possible to see the identification of subjects and objects in essentialising terms as the complex networks see the manoeuvring of identities, roles, and powers. When there are layers of governance, these manoeuvring becomes more complex and opens up spaces for conflict and resistance at different stages and sites.

Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony also reflects on how systems of hegemony or disciplinarian power can evolve and how resistance can build to such use of power. However, hegemonies can be multifaceted composites and not necessarily identifiable power sources and as such they are formed of individuals with mutual interests that they negotiate on.

Conclusion

While resistance to power is often used as a way to explain why human actors may resist or challenge welfare and social policy, this essay has argued that power and resistance dynamics are complex and cannot be served as essentialising terms to explain the resistance to social policy. Power does not vest only in the subject, which is defined in terms of government or its agencies. In modern societies, power is complex and to some extent discursive in nature. As such, power may be exercised by different people at different times, and although not subject less in Foucauldian terms, power may also not be rationalised as only residing in governmentalities. Individuals, who have the powers of self-actualisations can also be source of power and may exercise it in day to day activities. Thus, while education policy may be devised through those in power to make curriculum, the implementation of this policy may be affected by the power exercised by parents and community leaders who may resist it and even cause it to change or reform. Moreover, power is not what the resistance it always built against because even when power is devolved, such as, in the case of Big Society, resistance can occur because of other factors.

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