Projects are ubiquitous throughout the management of public services and the implementation of public policy but implementation processes often remain a ‘black box’. This article argues that technical approaches to project management neglect the role of power. Combining Foucault’s concept of the productive power of governmentality with the notion of timescapes into an analytical lens, the ethnography opens up the black box to reveal how project management functions as a powerful disciplinary technique. I show what escapes the imposed boundaries of the project as, in contrast to rational representations of the linearity of the project life cycle, decisions are retrospectively framed and the past rewritten. Simultaneously, project managers attempt to bring an uncertain future under control, discursively enrolling actors into their visions. Discursive and symbolic meanings of projects link to materiality as resources are represented as plentiful or meagre. Financial year-end exerts a disciplinary force so that time gets compressed and decision making becomes expedient. As resources move between budgets, governmentality is enacted, while budget headings of ‘other’ account for inevitable remaindering. Creative ‘time tactics’ are an adaptive response to achieving externally imposed targets while performing local project success. It turns out that time is at once metaphysical and mundane.
Governing at a distance has been much discussed in relation to welfare reforms but debates tend toward abstract theorization, neglecting Foucault's instruction to study mundane practices in specific sites. Although sociological concepts of place, positioning and boundaries carry particular resonance for public policy, ethnographic studies are scarce. A multi-sited ethnography of welfare reform reveals how seemingly discrete governance sites turned out to be linked in a complex policy assemblage. Findings suggest that governing at a distance may be ineffective and may necessitate governing at close range, although scales may fold over. Local spaces of network governance may not be autonomous but imbricated with national and local government and broader scales of governance. Apparently inclusive spaces exhibited exclusionary features, with spaces doing representational work that was simultaneously political, material and symbolic. Complex, shifting sociospatial relationships thus influence the uneven development of welfare reform.
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