4 - Organisational settings and everyday practices

Summary

Introduction

The previous chapter explored the political and ideological context in which planning unfolds, highlighting the importance of understanding what drives current crises, in order to imagine a better collective future. In this vein, it is also necessary to step back and gain some perspective on everyday spatial planning work, and how this relates to emerging organisational and labour trends. Looking beyond town planning to the wider literature on work and organisations, this chapter critically explores the nature of contemporary knowledge work, examining how this is unfolding under neoliberal regimes oriented to instrumental capitalist goals. Tracking the movement towards a knowledge- based economy attended by strong cultures and flexible working practices, we highlight the pervasive nature of managerialist doctrine across all aspects of UK society, and the profound impact this has had on professional work in both the public and private sectors within planning.

Here we see the rise of organisational narratives based on employee autonomy, often under the rather contradictory and sometimes troubling banner of shared values and a strong workplace culture. Emphasising workers’ self- determination, organisations aim to boost commitment and retention by catering, sometimes lavishly but more often tokenistically, to the needs of their employees. As we will explore in this chapter, this tendency has some positive implications. Yet, as critical organisational theorists have argued effectively, such ‘humane’ practices have a dark side, implying the excessive colonisation of employees’ affective, deliberative space as well as masking (often ineffectively) the instrumental, extractive logic that underpins work in a neoliberal regime.

Indeed, such ‘humane’ organisational tendencies exist in tension with a drive for efficiency and control that remains alive and well in the contemporary knowledge organisation. This manifests as neo- Taylorist tendencies, characterised by instrumental micromanagement of people and processes, as well as a quest for ‘leanness’ based on an organisational drive to get more out of less. In the public sector, the drive towards increased control and formalisation of tasks has, perversely, led to bloated regulatory structures, which can in turn legitimise the dismantling or privatisation of public services.