Culture Change as Identity Regulation: The Micro-Politics of Producing Spatial Planners in England

Abstract

Attempts to reform planning systems often draw into question the attitudes and commitments of the planners charged with realising change. Since 2001 the English planning system has been subject to a complex series of reforms designed to modernise its workings. Central to this have been calls for a culture change, focusing on professional planners in the public sector. The discourse of culture change is rooted in the managerialist thinking that has been central to long-term processes of state restructuring. Du Gay describes this as a project designed to change the identities of public servants. This article therefore explores the messy ways in which reform has sought to re-regulate the identities of English planners, and the response from planners themselves as they have begun to negotiate these changes to their identities and practices. It is argued that attentiveness to the lived experience of change can help to inform a more critical and nuanced account of the normative promises of planning reform.

Keywords:

• Culture change
• identity regulation
• identity work
• planners' identities
• planning reform

Acknowledgements

This article draws on doctoral research that was generously funded by an Oxford Brookes University Studentship from 2005–2009.

Notes

1. For example, the government's “Changing the Culture” supplement to the sector's leading magazine Planning only makes reference to the change required of public sector planners (ODPM, 2004), suggesting that they have been a particular target of culture change.

2. Though it should be noted that there is also scope for tension between the goals of participatory planning and those of partnership-based governance which may also require quite different dispositions amongst professionals.

3. Before being adopted, strategies produced under the new planning system must pass an examination conducted by a government-appointed inspector using a series of “tests of soundness” (see CLG, 2007a for up-to-date details).