Social Housing Managers and the Performance Ethos

In sociology, ‘the professional project’ is understood as a collective endeavour of occupational groups that only succeeds if those groups possess, and control access to, a unique stock of knowledge. Urban sociologists have been critical of public housing managers’ collective endeavours to present themselves as a profession because they use generic knowledge and common sense in their work. They also argue that ‘the professional project’ of housing management is being further under-mined by the ‘performance ethos’, since this now allows service managers to exert even more control over what public housing managers do and thus de-skills them even more. Our argument is that this analysis of the impact of the performance ethos is based on a conceptually limiting view of power as a repressive force that enforces ‘blanket restrictions’ on group activity, i.e. what professional groups are free to do. Conversely, we adopt a Foucauldian view of power because it better explains our research findings. Foucault suggests that power does not simply repress group activity. Power is also appropriated by individuals who use it to redefine themselves, e.g. who and what they are. We draw on our empirical data to show how individual housing managers were appropriating the performance culture in productive ways to achieve their own individual ends (i.e. to ‘work on’ their professional selves so as to re-define themselves and thus their individual claim to professional status). We use this analysis to argue that an individualized (as opposed to collective) ‘professional project of the self’ is emerging in housing management that has not yet been adequately captured in the sociological literature.