Legacies of Change: Probation Staff Experiences of the Unification of Services in England and Wales

A discourse of professionalism has proved crucial to driving recent organizational restructurings of the probation service in England and Wales. The Coalition Government argued that bureaucratic, state provision of services had stifled probation practice—for which the introduction of market logic, via the 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms, would restore professional discretion. And yet, the detrimental impact of TR on practice meant that re-professionalization was an important objective of yet more restructuring. This paper explores probation staff experiences of organizational change, particularly since services were returned to the public sector, in June 2021, through three dominant modes of workplace organization around which change has been articulated: professionalism, the market and bureaucracy. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 members of staff, it argues that the exercise of professionalism in probation has been, and continues to be, shaped by a legacy of organizational change that is both bureaucratic and dependent upon market(-like) mechanisms. It contends that the ongoing impact of a ‘discursive battle’ between market and bureaucratic forces has further eroded professionalism in probation.