Urban Managerialism: A Concept of Relevance?
Author(s): Peter Williams
Source: Area, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1978), pp. 236-240
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the
Institute of British Geographers)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20001355
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Urban managerialism: a concept of
relevance?
A notion critically reviewed by Peter Williams, Centre for Urban and
Regional Studies, University of Birmingham
Recently a number of geographers (Gray, 1975; Williams, 1976; Robson, 1975) have
argued the need for attention to be focused upon ' the managers of the urban system'
rather than upon the individual consumers. In putting forward this argument they
were drawing upon an important debate within urban sociology which related to the
concept of ' urban managerialism '. It is, therefore, appropriate to outline the develop
ment of the urban managerialist approach and to consider some of the criticisms
related to it. By doing so, it is hoped that geographers can avoid the traps of ' naive
managerialism' yet at the same time be made aware of the value of this approach.
The managerialist approach is generally seen as stemming from the work of Ray
Pahl although he did not use the term 'urban managerialism'. His analysis of the
'socio-spatial system' was developed in a number of publications but is drawn
together in his book Whose city? published in 1970. Basically, Pahl proposed an
examination of the social and spatial structure of cities in terms of the constraints
upon, and the conflicts between, individuals and groups in situations such as the
housing market. He suggested that these are the realities that have been ignored. He
stated that ' the built environment is the result of conflicts in the past and present
between those with different degrees of power in society. As the balance of power
changes and ideologies rise and fall so the built environment is affected. It is a con
tinuing situation with the past constraining the present and together binding and
limiting the future'.
It should be made clear at the outset that urban managerialism is not a theory
nor even an agreed perspective. It is instead a framework for study. Drawing upon
notions developed in industrial sociology Pahl was seeking to develop a new urban
sociology. He argued that urban resources were not distributed randomly, nor in a
pattern which followed the structures of the work place. He suggested that there were
major constraints upon the levels of access enjoyed by different groups and that within
this pattern of constraints, managers or controllers of resources had special significance.
Pahl proposed that the study of cities should be focused around the notion that there
were fundamental social and spatial constraints upon access to scarce resources; that
there were important controllers or managers of access; and that there is, and always
will be, conflict in the urban system and inequalities in the outcome of any allocation
Thus Pahl argued that ' there can be a sociology of the organization of urban
resources and facilities; the controllers (or gatekeepers), be they planners or social
workers, architects or education officers, estate agents or property developers, repre
senting the market or the plan, private enterprise or the state, all impose their goals
and values on the lower participants in the urban system'. It was no fully developed
structure that Pahl proposed, rather it was the types of questions that he was asking
which were most significant. More recently (1974) he restated the position: ' The
managers of the urban system exert an independent influence on the allocation of
scarce resources and facilities which may reinforce, reflect or reduce the inequalities
engendered by the differentially rewarded occupational structure'.
Pahl did not follow his outline with a series of closely worked studies, although he
conducted research into .the role of the private developer (with Craven, 1970) and
supervised Barbolet's work (1969). Pahl recognized from the outset that certain
weaknesses existed in his proposal. For instance, what are the goals of those who
manipulate the urban system, and indeed can one identify such a system? He agreed
236
Urban managerialism 237
readily that the identification of such factors was easier in industrial sociology. Al
though weakly developed the approach has been adopted in a number of studies.
But whereas access, constraint, and gatekeeping have been emphasized, aspects of
power and conflict in society are generally ignored. This is understandable given
Pahl's emphasis on the controllers of access as independent variables in the equation.
Many writers have recognized the importance of controlling institutions and
constraint within the urban system (e.g. Edwards, 1973; Murie, 1973), but few have
engaged in empirical work. In arguing the need for institutional research, Edwards
states that an alternative way of explaining socio-spatial structure lies not in seeing
where people choose to live (or where and in what they would like to live) but in the
competitive structure of the housing markets, and he suggested that although the
focusing of attention upon managers, gatekeepers and institutions may only be a
temporary phase in academic research it was likely to be a very fruitful one.
Briefly, empirical research within the managerialist perspective includes: Davies
(1972) on planners; Burney (1967) on racial discrimination in housing; Hatch (1973)
on estate agents; Norman and others at the University of Glasgow on slum clearance
and housing allocation (English, 1976); Lambert, Paris and Blackaby (1975) at
Birmingham on community groups, housing management and redevelopment; Ford
(1975) and Williams (1976) on Building Societies, and Harloe et al. (1974) on housing
in two London boroughs. Not all of these writers actually define their work as being
urban managerialist but all are concerned with the roles played by a variety of mediating
institutions: they demonstrate the value of a perspective which is concerned with this
interface between allocators and consumers although many of these studies do not
in any way explain the behaviour of managers except in terms of internally derived
priorities.
Norman (1975) distinguishes between early managerialism which focused upon the
specific nature of the management exercised (in which category most of the above
studies can be placed), and the more recent forms of managerialism from which
emerges a far more explicit concern with power relations, the nature of cities and the
social and economic structure. The work of Harloe et al. and Lambert, Paris and
Blackaby can be placed in this category.
Harloe et al. in their study The organisation of housing look at' the goals and ideolo
gies of the organizations concerned and the constraints they faced in the implemen
tation of policy'. As they note, a study of the organizations' ideologies reveals the
constraints imposed upon the consumer but the authors move one step back and
' concentrate on what the constraints facing organizations tell us about the constraints
facing people'. The outcome of the interaction of the ideologies of the housing
agencies and the constraints operating on them is a geographically differentiated
distribution of opportunities. Thus partly as a result of a variety of constraints ranging
from lack of staff to conflicting policies, conflicts in inter-authority relationships, and
lack of profit for private agencies, housing needs were not being met. This study is a
useful if somewhat limited study of housing which represents a considerable broadening
of the perspective of the ' early managerialists '.
The research of Lambert et al. has been a sustained exploration of local management
structures and is concerned with ' the processes of change, decay, regeneration, the
management of change and the popular response' in the inner areas of Birmingham
(Lambert et al., 1975). Basing much of their work upon ideas advanced by Castells
in relation to social movements (Castells, 1976), they state ' we have concentrated
on power relations from a "managerialist perspective"; however we seek to avoid
the traps of naive managerialism' (or early managerialism?-my comment). This
they attempt to do by recognizing that one cannot disentangle completely the relation
ship between ownership and control; they focused on management control because
of its obvious link to the work in hand. In addition, by stressing the political nature
of management they link back into Castells' propositions regarding local struggles.
They found that in Birmingham the management function of the local authority
238 Urban managerialism
' mystifies and obscures the systematic nature of inequalities and deprivation both of
individuals and in neighbourhoods in relation to housing'. By the very way major
issues are defined either as ' private troubles ' or as ' technical concerns ' the struggle
for decent housing is depoliticized and individualized and thus Lambert et al. conclude
that ' those agencies involved in urban management perform the classic function
of the State, namely that of managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie'.
From the nature of the conclusions drawn there does appear to be a distinct shift
between the 'early' and ' late managerialist ' work even though they are so clearly
linked. But, ignoring the difference, it is apparent that through an analysis of managers
these contributors have been able to draw out important insights into the nature of
cities and the social and economic structure of our society.
Evaluation
It is with this success in mind that we can now turn to criticisms and evaluations of
the managerialist perspective. Despite the limited amount of work in the field, heavy
criticism has been aimed at it, notably by Pahl. In his revised edition of Whose city?
(1975) Pahl specifies a number of criticisms. In brief, the first of these is that if managers
do not systematically work together to reinforce or recompense a particular distri
butional form then the thesis of managerialism cannot be sustained. Similarly he says
that managerialism in the context of a local authority is too crude, in that it implies
that councillors have no power. Thirdly, he suggests that the thesis gives too much
power to the managers, ascribing to them an independence of action which they do
not have, and fourthly he argues that if there is no systematic deprivation of the
indirect wages or benefits which can stem from the management of the urban system
then again the thesis cannot be supported. Similar criticisms were made by a variety
of contributors to the York Conference on' Urban change and conflict ' (Harloe (ed.),
1975).
These criticisms seem entirely removed from what most people appear to have
thought of as the managerialist thesis. The first point Pahl makes regarding managers
working together systematically is something which has never been proposed. Similarly,
in ascribing some power to managers no one has said counciJlors have none nor that
managers are unconstrained. Both of these criticisms seem a little too extreme. Finally
he comments upon a systematic deprivation of indirect wages-or rather the lack of
it-but it does not appear to me that his point has ever been proven one way or the
other. The confusion that appears to be in Pahl's mind is neatly mirrored in one of
his final statements in which he appears, having made all his criticisms, to be returning
to his original formulations regarding the importance of managers: 'The urban
managers remain the allocators of this surplus, they must remain therefore, as centra
to the urban problematic' (1975, p. 285). l
It is useful at this point to consider two of the major issues which exist in urban
managerialism, both of which Norman discusses in his review. The first is how far
we can ascribe independence of action to managers and secondly whom we identifv
as being appropriate for study.
There are several aspects of the first problem. In ascribing independence to managers
we may not only be making ideological statements but we may obfuscate the real
issues. As Gouldner (1970) has said: 'While sometimes moved by a humane concern
for the deprived and the deviant, the liberal technologies of sociology are creating
in effect a new ombudsman sociology whose very criticism of middle level welfare
authorities and establishments serves as a kind of lightning rod for social discontent
strengthening the centralized control of the highest authorities and providing new
instruments of social control for the master institutions ' (p. 501).
Pahl has commented in the same vein: 'By focusing urban resources and facilities
and by alerting urban populations to their relative deprivations in the field of con
sumption, attention is shifted from the main sources of inequality in society, namely
the field of production... If workers are made to think that their main interests are
Urban managerialism 239
in the field of consumption, and if sociologists adopt a form of urban managerialism
to explain the allocation of resources within an urban system, then clearly basic
inequalities arising from the productive process may remain hidden'.
Clearly this danger does exist and as we have seen Pahl believes that people have
failed to recognize it, although as already stated this is almost certainly an incorrect
view. The view has been put forward that ' managers' have no independence from
the economic base-a view which largely stems from a Marxist perspective which
sees managerialism as an ideology, implying as it does that such a relationship can
exist in reality. Whether it is an ideological position or not is something which can
be exposed by study. The point may be made that, however narrow the limits, managers
might well have sufficient choice and discretion to materially effect the outcome of a
particular situation. (There is clearly a problem of scale of analysis here. The more
localized the study the greater the evidence of local control may be. One problem
is to relate these aspects to the wider context.) Again this is something for research
to reveal. It should be noted that Pahl (1975) argues against the deterministic viewpoint
which considers managers to have no freedom of action, although it is difficult to see
how he does this on the basis of his other comments. There is an interesting parallel
to this debate within Marxist literature itself in which questions of the role of the state
and its autonomy have become important issues.
The second problem is that of who the urban managers are. There has been con
siderable debate as to whether urban managerialism should simply be concerned with
the role of government officials (at both central and local levels) as mediators, or
whether it should encompass a whole range of actors in both public service and private
enterprise who appear to act as controllers of resources sought by urban populations.
Pahl's original formulation supported this latter view whereas his more recent work
and the reported discussions of the ' Urban change and conflict ' conference suggest
that the former is the more common view at present. This position has not been
arrived at through research.
Norman addresses himself to this problem. He recognizes the difficulty of isolating
the management or mediation role in the private sector from what that sector is a
part of-the capitalist economic system. For instance, is an estate agent a mediator
or a capitalist? The distinction appears easier in the public sector, though one might
argue that the local authorities are an inseparable part of the capitalist system. Norman
suggests that one way to resolve the issue of ' private sector managerialism' would
be to focus on the employees of private sector organizations rather than their owners
or directors since these persons might mediate between the urban population and
the capitalist system rather than express ' the priorities of the capitalist system '.
He also suggests the adoption of an ideal type of capitalist against which to measure
the actions of managers. There are significant problems with either of these approaches
and Norman himself seems unresolved as to the best solution, suggesting in the end
that it is best left to the personal predilection of the researcher.
It seems necessary to cut through all of these problems by returning urban mana
gerialism to the simple framework from which it began. It is generally recognized that
there exist a variety of managers or institutions that allocate scarce resources to the
population. This allocation can be of publicly or privately provided facilities and
assistance, for example it could be mortgages or social security. We also recognize
that the allocation policies adopted could or indeed do produce particular patterns
suggesting that there is some consistency in the way in which they are made-to return
to Pahl's original formulation, they are not random. We have then a variety of tasks
to accomplish. We can seek to see whether there is any allocative pattern and to
explain why the pattern takes the form it does. Part of the answer may lie with the
managers themselves, and their ideological position. But this position must come from
somewhere and it is likely that in seeking to explain any particular allocative structure
we have to proceed beyond that structure and those within it. Thus, I would argue
that it is perfectly justifiable to study managers but it is simplistic to expect to explain
240 Urban managerialism
their behaviour in terms of the managers themselves. In my opinion no one has ever
sought to do so, although others have suggested otherwise.
The development of Marxist and other radical approaches to the study of urban
phenomena is a welcome development in relation to urban managerialism since these
approaches naturally focus on questions of power and conflict and the relationship
between individuals and groups and on the processes of economic development.
Harloe identified the study of managers or mediators as being an important sector
for research, though as Harvey has warned ' the relevance of doing so is lost ' if one
tries to abstract them ' as autonomous units rather than relating them to a general
conception of the political economy of urbanization ' (Harloe (ed.), 1975). It is signi
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