Planning People: The Ideology and Rationality of New Labour

Abstract

This article discusses ways of understanding the ideology of New Labour, and argues that it would be better to explicate its ‘rationality’: the conceptual tools and frameworks that are employed in government thinking. It shows that this rationality is primarily concerned with ‘modernizing’ the state, the economy and people, all of which must be enabled to act in ways imagined to be appropriate for the new ‘knowledge economy’. The article then considers the specific policy domain of planning and argues that, here, reforms are primarily concerned to modernize planners and to ‘govern’ their visions of what planning must be.