Flexible framing: Analysing innovative austerity talk from a cultural perspective

Abstract

This article examines how local policy elites conceptualize and communicate potential innovations to overcome the fiscal crisis. is stressed to deal with the complexities of coping with the fiscal crisis in ways that are logical (given available views) and innovative (exploring alternative views), and highlight the importance of further developing understandings of such (municipal) coping. | INTRODUCTIONAs a result of the global financial crisis (GFC) municipalities around the globe have been dealing with austerity roughly between 2009 and 2016. Both in practice and academia a strong call for innovative responses has been expressed, in addition to straight financial cuts (e.g., Raudla et al. 2015;Schmidt et al. 2017). Innovation, however, is contested. In the field of public management, it is usually interpreted as a process of improving existing products and services of public organizations (see Gillinson et al. 2010;Pollitt 2010). It is discussed in terms of efficiency gains and 'doing more with less'. Although spending less money is great in austere times, doing more of the same might not always be a good thing. The relevance of looking only at improvements that fit with the fashionable doctrines can severely limit perspective.Following Sørensen and Torfing (2011), it is theorized that innovation is also about the exploration of new ideas and concepts that go beyond the dominant doctrine. Being innovative, then, requires the ability to link alternative worldviews and narratives to the major doctrines (see Hood 2000). It involves the capacity to explore unknown DOI: 10.1111/padm.12412 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. I study the presence and usage of different worldviews and narratives by highlighting four austerity frames, building on cultural theory (Douglas 1982). CT offers the possibility of tracing different conceptions of the crisis and innovative solutions to deal with it, and helps to make sense of the local austerity debate. Two distinct though not strictly mutually exclusive expectations are tested. First, drawing on Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011), I expect that the presence of the individualist frame is related to the importance attached to the NPM philosophy. The NPM-expectation suggests that the individualist frame is omnipresent in NPM-minded climates whereas it is largely absent in NPM-sceptic climates. Second, I expect that austerity management is framed in ways that go beyond the dominant worldviews to meet the desire for sweeping innovation. The variety-expectation suggests that more than one austerity frame is present in the debates by which local policy elites attempt to set the agenda and pave the way for broader innovation.I empirically analyse the rhetoric of local policy elites by studying austerity-related speeches. Policy elites are referred to as those 'actors who hold political resources to be utilized to exert pote...

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