Public Management and Vulnerability

Contextualising Change

Gareth Addidle, Joyce Liddle, Gareth Addidle, Joyce Liddle, Gareth David Addidle, Joyce Liddle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000167924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Management

This book locates the issue of 'vulnerability' in an international context, within public-sector reform processes, and goes beyond the conceptualization of existing concepts of policing and vulnerability to include multi- and intra-agency working. It uncovers many competing and contradictory conceptualisations of the phenomenon and shows how a variety of agencies in different jurisdictions prioritise and operationalise this escalating 21st-century social problem.

Two recurring themes of this edited collection are the ways in which non-state organisations and agencies have become an acknowledged feature of modern service delivery, and how the withdrawal of the state has heralded a perceptive shift from collective or community provision towards the stigmatization of individuals. Increasingly, public service professionals and 'street level bureaucrats' work in collaboration with non-state agents to attempt to ameliorate vulnerability. Chapter contributions were deliberately drawn from combinatory empirical, theoretical, policy and practice fields, and diverse academic and policy/professional authors. Editors and authors deliberately cast their nets widely to provide integrative scholarship, and contributions from international perspectives to confirm the complexity; and how socio/cultural, political and historic antecedents shape the definitions and responses to vulnerability.

This collection will appeal to academics, policy makers and practitioners in a wide variety of disciplines, such as public management and leadership, criminology, policing, social policy, social work, and business management, and any others with an interest in or responsibility for dealing with the issue of vulnerability.

1 Introduction

Contested Perspectives on Vulnerability: Which Groups Are Vulnerable and Why?

Gareth David Addidle and Joyce Liddle

The overall collection of chapters addresses a number of important policy questions, such as

• Why is Vulnerability an important topic for academic enquiry, for policy makers and for professionals who are dealing with the consequential rise in individuals and groups now categorised as Vulnerable?
• Why is it a contentious and slippery concept to define? Which definitions make more sense?
• Which groups and individuals are now defined as Vulnerable and why?
• Where are there gaps in knowledge and understanding of the concept?
• What historical legacies are there?
• Which agencies have traditionally dealt with Vulnerable groups? Has the coverage and ability to deal with Vulnerable individuals and groups changed, and if so why?

This introductory chapter sets the context for the discussions in subsequent chapters by analysing some literature on conceptualising vulnerability, as well as examining the types of individuals and groups now defined as Vulnerable. There are many and varied definitions on this very contentious and politically charged concept, and historically different individuals and groups have been categorised as Vulnerable from different professional, policy and academic perspectives. As editors we are interested in drawing out the antecedents and ways of analysing what it is to be Vulnerable in 2020 in different contexts and examining why it is an important topic for academic enquiry. Moreover, we want contributors to consider how policy makers and front-line professionals respond to the rise in Vulnerable individuals, depending on the specific context under the microscope, who is attempting to define it, but more importantly, the types of policies and decisions to be implemented in dealing with a ‘wicked issue’, that has many unintended consequences of policy action (or inaction).

The two editors demonstrate integrative scholarship by drawing on their expertise in criminology and public management and leadership to bring together a wide range of current academic, policy and practitioner understandings of vulnerability; a key issue within 21st century society (Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s 2018 speech to the Police Federation, 23rd May 2018, Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper Building stronger, more united communities, March 2018).

Vulnerability is a complex concept that can result from a set of primary vulnerabilities, such as economic, housing, physical, family, cultural, and for each individual or group a set of variables can be used to define varying levels of vulnerability. It is also influenced by age, class, occupation, gender, ethnicity and disability, and adverse events of natural hazards within the broader social, economic, political and institutional structures can produce differential outcomes for different individual groups. Vulnerability can be manifested as poverty, marginalisation and lack of assets. It arises at many levels and over time as many varied and different processes deprive people of coping and leave them physically weak, economically impoverished, social dependent, humiliated and psychologically harmed. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) define vulnerability as

The exposure to contingencies and stress, and difficulty in coping with them. Vulnerability thus has two sides- an external side of risks, shocks and stress to which an individual or household is subject- and an internal side which is defencelessness, meaning a lack of means to cope without damaging loss.

(Freyssinet, OECD, 2019)

But the concept has also been defined in numerous global reports and statements (e.g., The World Bank, IMF and EU), and national, regional and local agencies have also tried to develop ‘Vulnerability Indices’ to capture and measure economic, social and environmental vulnerability. Specific public agencies such as local authorities, social service departments, police and Mental Health Trusts have all developed their own definitions of the term to identify and classify disadvantaged groups. Moreover, some business organisations and companies have produced Vulnerability Assessment Tools (VSAT, Birmingham Resilience, UK, 2019), but there is no universally agreed definition. To add to the confusion, in some literature it is linked to sustainability, resilience, continuity management and risk management agendas. The 2010 UK Government led by Prime Minister David Cameron produced a National Well Being Index, but this was superseded by a Vulnerability Index based on a variety of models to measure the incidence of vulnerability across various professional environments.

Vulnerability, if not dealt with effectively across society, has potential to affect overall economic, businesses and service productivity and performance, and can bring disastrous ramifications for societal cohesion and integration across communities. In response to turbulent environmental forces and globalisation, many businesses have strategies to cope with emergencies and risks such as terrorism, pandemics and other such threats they also recognise the need for better deployment of human resources because Vulnerable citizens and workforces can have detrimental effects on personnel issues such as absenteeism, sickness and mental health issues. Mental health issues are now prevalent across society, and worryingly in the UK, at least, there is evidence to suggest that children as young as five years of age in primary schools are experiencing vulnerability and anxiety. Indeed, the current Prime Minister Johnston’s predecessor, Teresa May introduced a policy of placing mental health nurses in every primary and secondary school, such was the scale of the identified problem. In communities too, many families are feeling Vulnerable due to instability, loss of employment, general safety and other significant forces impacting on their lives.

To respond to the increasing number of calls surrounding public welfare, tackling vulnerability through early intervention has emerged as a key theme in contemporary policing (Bartkowiak-The´ron and Asquith, 2012). Indeed, police forces in the UK are individually graded on how effective they are at protecting Vulnerable people from harm by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC, 2016). However, the way to do this remains ambiguous. Whilst some working definitions do exist in policing (Rogers and Coliandris, 2015), HMIC noted that there is no accepted definition of vulnerability across all police forces of England and Wales as each ‘continues to define a Vulnerable victim in different ways’ (2016: 74). To compound this, there is limited guidance as to who merits intervention, and the types of interventions to be made. As we shall see in the practice chapter in this collection, Emergency and Blue Light Services have all adopted different mechanisms appropriate to their operational capacities and strategies to decide when and when, not to intervene.

The concept of vulnerability is very complex with fleeting contours and is expressed differently in the USA, Europe and China as later chapters will demonstrate. The debate was largely re-framed in the USA by the loss of life experienced during the September 11th atrocity, but across Europe it has been defined as individual precarity and exclusion due to the abandonment of individuals to naked forces of the market. In China, as Wu in particular illustrates in his chapter, vulnerability is treated from a wholly different perspective by police who seek to maintain social order, above all else.

Vulnerability, apart from the case we include on China where different cultural norms apply, is generally characterised by instability, turbulence, insecurity and the fragility of individual relational integration in society (Ferrarese, 2016: 149–159). This is not to say that there is an absence of vulnerability in China because in fact the opposite is true as millions of people live precarious lives in poverty. However, vulnerability and protests are used interchangeably by academics in a Chinese context, and the need to maintain social order is paramount in such a non-democratic and authoritarian state.

Over the past ten years, research on community safety, and safety and security highlighted the fact that vulnerability moved from a ‘collective’ understanding, to the stigmatisation of the ‘individual’, as both contributions from Brookes and Hunter and co-authors confirm in their analysis of sex workers (prostitution), modern slavery, youth extremism and females experiences of care UK system. Both sets of authors urge professionals to understand the holistic nature of vulnerability, and the contextual drivers that lead people to become Vulnerable. This shift in emphasis has been underpinned by policies that shift focus from vulnerability as a broader societal concern to one in which individuals are blamed for their own pathological weaknesses. In turn, lack of state support for Vulnerable individuals and groups has been reflected in numerous attempts to enforce ‘self-help’ due to withdrawal of state forms of support, and front-line responses by ‘street level’ bureaucrats. Lipsky’s highly influential work on street-level bureaucracy (30th Ann. Ed, 2010), Goodsell (1981), Hupe et al. (2016), Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003), Zacka (2017) and others have taken an ethnographic approach to studying frontline work, in police, social work and education. Bartel (2015) collection of institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work, and communication in public encounters have both informed theoretical and practice debates.

In responding to vulnerability, there are numerous Australian examples of policing and multi-agency and inter-agency working (Bartkowak-Theron and Asquith, 2013, Asquith et al., 2017), whereas in the USA a merging of social work and policing has led to the creation of police social workers. In Western Europe, the changing context of public-sector reform has heightened the need to find solutions to the ‘vulnerability’ question, as indeed is true for all societal ‘wicked issues’ and governmental responses have been varied, as the varied chapters in this collection demonstrate. In China, however, as ably demonstrated by Wu, vulnerability has an altogether different connotation, and government officials deal with this problem in a culturally appropriate way to existing societal norms. In their day-to-day dealings with poor and Vulnerable people, Chinese police adopt what Wu refers to as ‘relational repression’. Within a political system of centralised authority and under-developed legal standardisation, vulnerability is treated in a much more stringent fashion, in the interests of maintaining social order at any costs. This is facilitated by the use of informal and culturally grounded personal ties to impose constraints on the poor and Vulnerable, rather than the accepted Western adherence to the more formalised criminal justice systems and welfare organisations.

The articulation of strong historical narrative of how different individuals and groups have been categorised as Vulnerable from different professional, policy and academic perspectives, elucidates what it is to be considered Vulnerable in 2020. As all chapters demonstrate, policy makers and front-line professionals respond to the rise in Vulnerable individuals and groups in very diverse ways, and the choice of policies and decisions to be implemented in dealing with such a ‘wicked issue’ can also have numerous intended and unintended consequences of policy action (or inaction). However, in lesson drawing within, and between varied policy responses we can usefully highlight key issues, and in some cases enable learning in other jurisdictions.

In the UK public service budgets have been severely constrained for over ten years, and despite Prime Minister Johnston’s promises since the December 2019 General Election to relax stringent spending targets, local authorities, police and other statutory services on the front line, those dealing with Vulnerable groups have suffered the most Draconian cuts. Indeed, local authorities will be required to be almost self-sufficient over the medium to long term. A Better Care Fund has also been introduced to integrate health and social care (as demands on mental health services continue to grow). Furthermore, all local councils can now set a precept for social care on council tax bills. Many of the new Combined Authorities (UK-specific combinations of Local Authorities) are developing health and social care strategies at the same time as individual local authorities are reducing the support they have traditionally provided for charities, third sector and community organisations. Paradoxically, just as traditional state providers withdraw from direct service provision for Vulnerable people, they no longer have the capacity to fund arms-length service deliverers such as third and community and charities. There is evidence, as shown throughout this collection that nowadays many non-statutory agencies are stepping into the breach as state agencies withdraw, or severely limit their coverage in dealing with social policy problems. Investigating the scale of Vulnerability, as one the most challenging social policy problems of the early 21st century reveals that many state agencies lack sufficient capacity to deliver services and cope with the growing demands placed upon them.

State officials increasingly work alongside a multitude of stakeholders to deal with numerous global and internal environmental forces; primarily amongst these, as we argue throughout this collection, are on-going budgetary and fiscal constraints. The pressu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Contested Perspectives on Vulnerability: Which Groups Are Vulnerable and Why?
• 2 Beyond Public Services: The Era of New Public Populism
• 3 The Impact of Brexit on Vulnerability: Using a Theoretical Lens of Transnational and Local Linkages
• 4 Vulnerability a Collective or Individual/Agency Issue? Has Vulnerability Replaced Community Safety in the UK and Are We Stigmatising the Individual?
• 5 Responding to Vulnerability in Practice – Ambulance, Police and Fire and Rescue Services
• 6 Professional Vulnerability in the UK Public Sector: The Social Work Operational Environment
• 7 Virtually Vulnerable: Why Digital Technology Challenges the Fundamental Concepts of Vulnerability and Risk
• 8 Relational Pressure and Policing Vulnerable Populations in China
• 9 UK Immigration Policy: Asylum Seeker and Refugee Vulnerability
• 10 Responding to Ageing Demographics: A Positive View from a Public Administration and Public Policy Perspective
• 11 The Important Voices of Care Experienced People in Relation to Services
• 12 Lesson Drawing for Theory, Policy and Practice: Developing a Future Research Agenda
• Index