Corporatizing Canada: Making Business out of Public Service by Jamie Brownlee & Chris Hurl & Kevin Walby

Author:Jamie Brownlee & Chris Hurl & Kevin Walby [Brownlee, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2018-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

City Politics as Corporate Decision-Making

The corporatization of urban policy-making is also evident in the managerial discourses and calculative schema that are marketed by professional service firms to civic officials. Over the past three decades, the Big Four firms have each worked to establish branded forms of assessment that can be uniformly packaged and sold across jurisdictions. Through the application of benchmarking and best practices drawn from the private sector, consultants have worked to recast municipal politics in the mold of corporate decision-making. Corporatization, in this sense, involves extending “a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics” to different aspects of urban governance. (20)

Big Four firms have assumed a prominent role in packaging and circulating performance metrics—around competitiveness, efficiency, and lean management—that promise to alleviate policy-makers’ anxieties about their competitive position relative to other cities. From the late 1980s onwards, William Davies notes that these firms were central players in fabricating “a common global language through which business and political leaders could discuss how public policy influenced corporate and entrepreneurial performance, and a measurement framework through which all public policy, public investment and executive political decision making could be subjected to a blanket economic audit.” (21) Along these lines, a range of studies have recently highlighted how rankings, benchmarking, and other performance metrics have been marketed to public agencies and governments as a means of setting policy priorities, establishing new accountability frameworks, and achieving economy in service provision. (22)

While these studies have noted the role of such technologies in fabricating moral economies of “excellence” in which institutions compete for top positions on league tables, civic officials have also commissioned such programs in operationalizing austerity policies. Rather than serving as a point of departure for urban coalitions that prioritize growth, city branding, and entrepreneurialism (which was the focus in the late 1990s), recent studies note that in the wake of the 2008 crisis these programs were taken up by local political and economic elites to “naturalise the contraction of the state as value free and without alternative.” (23) Drawing from private sector management philosophies of “core business”—popularized in management strategy books from the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Moss Kanter’s When Giants Learn to Dance—consulting firms have recently developed benchmarking technologies that aim to achieve greater “focus” in service delivery through shedding activities that do not directly contribute to an agency’s “primary goals” (see also Mehra, Chapter 2 in this volume). In the context of austerity, this kind of rationality was taken up as a means of circumscribing public sector imaginaries, embodying a “retreat from older expansive conceptions of public service” through “narrowing frameworks for the evaluation of services to assessments of their ‘performance’ and ‘efficiency’ as a business.” (24)

In Ontario, Municipal Service Delivery Reviews (MSDRs) have served as a vehicle for the diffusion of economic metrics across local governments. Framed as a “fresh approach to managing municipal spending,” these reviews have been encouraged by Ontario’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs since 2004, when it first published its Guide to Service Delivery Reviews for Municipal Managers.

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