Against accountancy governance: Notes towards a new urban collective consumption

Abstract

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, power brokers of our urban system assumed other managerial roles, other controlling roles more market-driven, more fiscally prudent. They started to recede from public view, dabbled with privatization, with contracting-out service delivery, doing it at minimum cost. After a while, this dabbling with the public budget became damn right babbling: entrepreneurial managers turned into managerial entrepreneurs and soon into middle-management technocrats, each with their own private hegemony of meaning. Before long, a new nobility assumed the mantle of political and authoritative power, a para-state of accountants and administrators, of middle managers and think-tank ‘intellectuals’, of consultants and confidants who reside over our privatized public sector, filing the paperwork and pocketing the rents and fees, together with the interest payments and bonuses, in our ever-emergent rentier and creditor society. This paper critically investigates the sweeping changes that have transformed urban governance since the 1970s.

Key words:

• urban governance
• accountancy
• collective consumption
• capitalist reproduction
• rentier and creditor society

Notes

1 Interestingly, when Christopher Lasch wrote Minimal Self in 1984, Pynchon's Vineland wasn't yet published. But what Lasch said about other Pynchon books that had appeared—Crying of Lot 49, V. and Gravity's Rainbow—equally holds for Vineland: ‘Pynchon's ambitious but intentionally inconclusive novels dramatize the difficulty of holding the self together in a world without meaning or coherent patterns, in which the search for patterns and connections turns back on itself in tightening solipsistic circles … as Pynchon implies, the only feasible alternative to paranoia seems to be resigned acceptance of irreversible decline: the gravity that pulls everything irresistibly down into nothingness.’

2 The accountancy profession seems to single-handedly manage Britain's NHS; it's hard to keep track of those spinning doors, between private plunder and public health. In 2002, a PWC accountant, Simon Leary, got seconded to head up strategy at the Department of Health. Once on the inside, Adrian Masters, another PWC man, followed him, becoming Director of the Health Team at Blair's Delivery Unit. Masters has since gone on to run the health service regulator, Monitor, illustrating how even the regulators need regulating—just as Marx thought the educators needed educating! In 2009, moving in the opposite direction, Gary Belfield, Head of Commissioning at the Department of Health (under Gordon Brown), joined KPMG, soon followed by his former colleague at the Department of Health, Mark Britnell; the latter is now hotly tipped to return inside the government and head of the NHS.

3 Such an intellectual project would need to put a new spin on sociologist Ray Pahl's old ‘urban managerialism’ thesis. Now we need its beefed up ‘urban middle-managerialist’ counterpart. Those public sector managers that Pahl pinpointed back in the 1970s, who gate kept scarce housing, education and health resources, now conspire as private sector bureaucrats who affect the whole allocative process around public goods and services—and hence the ‘life-chances’ of ordinary people everywhere. This is what Pahl said in Whose City? and which still holds with respect to those urban middle managers: ‘We need to know not only the rates of access to scarce resources and facilities for given populations but also the determinants of the moral and political values of those who control these rates. We need to know how the basic decisions affecting life-chances in urban areas are made … The controllers of the urban system seem to control more completely than the controllers of the industrial system.’

Additional information

Andy Merrifield is a writer, urbanist and fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.