Rethinking scale in public administration: Scalecraft and frontline work in England's localism agenda

1 INTRODUCTION

The concept of scale has been used to guide some of the longest standing questions in the study of public administration. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine what form public administration studies would take if they ceased to rely on categories of scale, such as the ‘local’ and ‘national’, to structure their descriptions and analyses of the political world. This is particularly striking in the study of governance where key conceptual theories such as centralization–decentralization, multi-level governance, and network governance all focus on how the outcomes of governance are affected by the distribution of roles, responsibilities and powers across different scales.

This article argues that governance debates have a limited view of scale. Scale is typically used to describe geographical size, the level of governance, or a particular territory which has resulted in scale being treated as an objective feature of the political world that can be measured and identified (e.g., Newton 1982; Scharpf 1997; Hutchcroft 2001). By using scale as a supportive feature of political analysis, studies of public administration have overlooked how scales such as the ‘local’ or ‘national’ are fluid and full of meaning, and critically, that these meanings are politicized (Jones 1998; Marston 2000; Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008; Moore 2008; Papanastasiou 2017a). This article empirically demonstrates this claim and outlines why exploring the political meanings of scale matters in the study of public administration.

This issue is specifically explored by demonstrating how political meanings of scale are key to the construction of political agendas and that this profoundly shapes how public administrators understand their work. The article empirically explores the political strategies of frontline workers and introduces a concept called ‘scalecraft’ which allows for the investigation of political uses of scale in public administration. These theoretical arguments are developed through examining the political agenda of ‘localism’ in England. Localism broadly refers to the reallocation of power from the centre to ‘front-line managers, local democratic structures, local institutions and local communities’ (Evans et al. 2013, p. 405). It is a powerful statecraft ambition featuring in Westminster-style democracies which political administration scholars have revealed to take many forms and have debated its strengths and weaknesses (Parvin 2009; Crowe 2011; Hildreth 2011; Hodgson and Spours 2012; Lawton and Macaulay 2014).

This article approaches localism differently by using it as a lens which reveals the political uses of ‘the local’ and demonstrates how frontline workers directly respond to the political use of scale through adopting strategies of scalecraft. The article empirically explores this through examining a specific manifestation of localism in education policy called the ‘academy schools policy’. The policy has been framed as being part of the localism agenda because it gives greater individual freedoms to schools, for example in areas such as curriculum, management practices, and financial expenditure. The article's focus on the academy schools policy is highly significant because the policy has been at the forefront of government attempts to promote localism in England's education sector (Clarke and Cochrane 2013).1 The policy is understood to be radically changing school governance (Ball 2007), making it highly appropriate for exploring the political nature of scale and, in this case, how public administrators respond to political agendas whose political discourse is framed in scale terms.

The article makes two key contributions. First, it makes a theoretical contribution by identifying a problematic assumption that underpins public administration studies—that scales are objective, descriptive categories of the political world—by highlighting the political meanings of scale. This adds a novel dimension to the existing governance literature by demonstrating that the meanings of scale are inextricably linked to the process of governing. The article shows how frontline workers use scalecraft strategies to respond to the political agenda of localism. This demonstrates how political meanings of scale are an integral dimension of frontline work strategies which serves to augment existing understandings about discretion in frontline work (Lipsky 1971, 1980; Lowndes 1997; Sullivan 2007; Durose 2009, 2011). Second, it makes an empirical contribution by providing an in-depth study of the enactment of localism in schools policy, with analysis drawing on 30 interviews with local authority officers, school principals, school governors, and school sponsors from two local authority case studies. By examining the practices of frontline workers, the article shows how responses to localism expose ‘the local’ as having diverse meanings that are used to pursue particular political directions.

To convey these arguments, the article first briefly reviews how the concept of scale features in the governance literature in order to highlight how scale is treated as an objective and measurable category of analysis. The article then proposes how to conceptualize scale as political by introducing arguments from political geography. The next section outlines the methods underpinning the empirical investigation of the theoretical claims, and justifies why studying the localism agenda is a particularly useful empirical focus. After this the article presents the research findings which, first, identify the dominant ‘logics’ in the case studies and, second, demonstrate the political meanings of scale and how scalecraft is an essential feature of frontline work. The conclusion further clarifies the theoretical contributions of the article and outlines how the findings have augmented understandings of scale in studies of governance and frontline work.

2 IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM WITH SCALE IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Scale has been a fundamental concept used by public administration scholars in their investigations of key political questions. The governance literature heavily structures its analysis around scale concepts—at its core this literature explores how different political and administrative roles, responsibilities and powers can and should be distributed across local, regional, national and global scales. Studies of centralization and decentralization processes are preoccupied with what they perceive to be a tension between scales, exploring how best to distribute territory and power between local and national government and administrations, and investigating how different distributions produce different outcomes (e.g., Porter and Olsen 1976; De Vries 2000; Hutchcroft 2001). The multi-level governance literature is also embedded in questions about scale, namely, how to allocate roles and responsibilities across different local, regional, national and transnational levels of governance. This literature focuses on how ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ territorial scales produce different outcomes and how policy-makers can adjust the scale of governance to create particular kinds of political order (e.g., Scharpf 1997; Hooghe and Marks 2001, 2003). Even the literature on governance networks has questions about scale at its core; for example, the literature explores how different kinds of networks are created through the collaboration of different scales (levels) of (local, regional, national) government (e.g., March and Olsen 1995; Sørensen 2002; Provan and Kenis 2008). In short, a key theoretical question underpinning the study of governance is when to govern through particular scales and understanding the resultant differences in outcomes.

Studies of governance have experienced a recent resurgence of interest in understanding political reforms relating to the local scale. Investigating the effectiveness of local governance is hardly new, with local government scholars consistently posing the question of whether ‘small is beautiful’ (e.g., Newton 1982; Boyne 1996; Craig and Manthorpe 1998; Allan 2003; Avellaneda and Gomes 2015). This question relates to the ‘optimal size’ of local government and its associated effects on performance as well as exploring whether smaller units such as ‘the local’ are associated with greater democracy and participation. The latest re-emergence of these questions has been centred on analyses of ‘new localism’ (Pratchett 2004) in Westminster-style democracies such as the UK, Australia, and Canada (see for example, Lowndes and Pratchett 2012; Sanders 2013; Wilcock 2013). Localism is a broad and contested term encompassing a number of political strategies but has been usefully summarized by Evans et al. (2013, p. 405) as: ‘an umbrella term which refers to the devolution of power and/or functions and/or resources away from central control and towards front-line managers, local democratic structures, local institutions and local communities, within an agreed framework of minimum standards’. Public administration studies have made major contributions to the study of localism by identifying its different forms and strategies, and these have been crucial for understanding the mechanisms, strengths and weaknesses of localism as a powerful statecraft ambition (e.g., Parvin 2009; Hildreth 2011; Hodgson and Spours 2012). These analyses of localism continue to explore the question of whether ‘small is beautiful’ by investigating the extent to which localism's rhetoric of the local scale bringing greater democracy and participation in governance is happening in practice.

What this section aims to illuminate is that the literature uses scales such as the ‘local’ and ‘national’ to describe and explore governance questions (see, for example, the critique of multi-level governance by Jessop 2007). This article specifically identifies that the result of this is for scales to be treated as objective, measurable and identifiable features of the political world. Questioning the meaning of scales has thus far been considered peripheral to pursuing the aims of public administration studies, with scales instead being used to support analysis. Another issue that this section illuminates is how the literature uses scale as a highly malleable concept which, depending on a study's analytical focus, is used to refer to level of governance, size, and/or territory. This flexible use of scale further reflects how scales are used descriptively and are diverse supportive features in the analysis of public administration studies.

This article demonstrates that rethinking scale as an inherently political category brings into focus its underexplored potential for extending political explanations. The article also shows how investigating the meaning of scales reveals the political implications of intersecting understandings of level, size and territory, rather than considering this conceptual malleability as a problem for analysis. This argument is advanced through drawing on political geography and, by doing so, the article extends interdisciplinary dialogue to make visible previously unseen possibilities for enriching public administration studies by understanding scale as a political category.

The article advocates for public administration studies to move beyond using scale as a supportive concept for political analysis which escapes direct analysis and critique. It seeks to introduce a new dimension to the way governance studies—and especially the recent surge of interest from localism studies in the ‘local’—deal with the concept of scale. Some notable exceptions of public administration studies have already demonstrated the importance of analysing multiple perceptions and meanings when it comes to issues of size and territory (cf. Carter and Smith 2008; Corbett and Howard 2017); this article extends the critique of this work by identifying the lack of engagement with the political nature of scale. The section which follows proposes how to conceptualize scale as political.

3 SCALE: A FUNDAMENTALLY POLITICAL CONCEPT

In order to move towards conceptualizing scale as political this article adopts a poststructuralist theoretical approach advanced by the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Studies of politics have been inspired by their work which highlights how systems of meaning, language and discourse do ‘not just consist of an abstract cognitive system of beliefs and words, but also [are] … a constitutive dimension of social relations’ (Griggs and Howarth 2011, p. 219; Gottweis 2003). A core assumption of this poststructuralist approach is that politics involves struggles between particular discourses to become the dominant lens for understanding an issue. In short, this poststructuralist approach ‘stress[es] the radical contingency and historicity of social objectivity, as well as the primacy of politics and power in its formation’ (Howarth 2010, p. 311). This theoretical orientation is highly appropriate for understanding scale as a political concept in the study of public administration, as poststructuralism problematizes the taken-for-granted categories of politics (of which scales are one), examines how they feature in social practices, and questions their political implications.

There is an established literature which understands scale as a socially constructed and political concept which has mainly been articulated by political geographers, many of whom adopt a poststructuralist approach (Jones 1998; Marston 2000; Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008; Moore 2008). Adam Moore (2008) succinctly articulates the poststructuralist critique of typical uses of scale in social science by arguing that there is a conceptual blurring between ‘categories of practice’ and ‘categories of analysis’ (Brubaker 1996; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Categories of practice refer to ‘categories of everyday experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, p. 4). Categories of analysis, by contrast, are ‘experience-distant categories used by social scientists’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, p. 4). Moore argues that the crux of the problem is that scale is a category of practice used by social actors to make sense of their worlds, but it is being treated as a real feature of the world by social scientists using scale to describe social phenomena. The proposed solution to this problem is to begin to unravel how scale operates as a social practice which involves exploring how ‘actors use scale categories not just to interpret spatial politics, but to frame and define, and thereby constitute and organise, social life’ (Moore 2008, p. 218). This involves questioning how scales are used to frame arguments, how scales are constructed so that they convey specific meanings (and exclude others), and what is included (and excluded) in definitions of scales.

A significant concept that has emerged from examining the politics of scale is that of ‘scalecraft’. Initially coined by Fraser (2010), the term scalecraft refers to how meanings of scale are not simply constructed by social actors, but that this process requires skill, creativity and strategy (Pemberton 1976; Papanastasiou 2017b). Scalecraft is an interpretive frame for understanding the practices of social actors, making it a category of analysis. Focusing on scalecraft practices holds potential to reveal a new dimension of the strategic behaviour and discretion of social actors by investigating how scales are used as powerful political tools.

These theoretical arguments rarely appear outside the disciplinary boundaries of political geography and have been absent from political science and public administration. Some notable exceptions of work going beyond using scales descriptively include Griggs and Sullivan's (2014, p. 510) conceptualization of centre–local relations which ‘rejects any pre-determined categories of “centre” and “local”, preferring to examine the political construction of such spaces in practice’. Another exception is work by Blanco et al. (2014) who argue that the local should not ‘be reduced to the institutions and practices of the local state’ (Blanco et al. 2104, p. 3134) and that there is a need to engage with wider narratives linked to the local, such as proximity, community and citizenship. Similarly to the position adopted in this article, Blanco et al. prioritize revealing the multiple meanings allocated to scales, rather than considering the conflation of scale with concepts of level, size, and/or territory as problematic for analysis. These studies are focused on exploring local governance, highlighting how political struggles over defining the ‘local’ come to the fore in this particular area of public administration.

Building on these emerging innovative critiques of scale in local governance, the article breaks new ground by introducing a clear theorization of scale as a political concept. A focus on scalecraft practices involves focusing on the strategic behaviour of political actors, which for the study of public administration links very clearly to the study of frontline work. Studies of frontline work—which study the discretion, experiences and everyday decisions of political actors (Lipsky 1980; Lowndes 1997; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Sullivan 2007; Durose 2009, 2011)—stand to be enriched by the concept of scalecraft by incorporating an analytical perspective which takes seriously the political meanings actors give to scale. The article demonstrates how scale is used strategically by local public administrators and by doing so reveals the importance of the political nature of scale in wider understandings of governance and frontline work.

This section has outlined the conceptual arguments for considering scale as a socially constructed and political concept. The discussion now turns to how the study investigates this theoretical claim.

4 METHOD

The article empirically investigates the political meanings of scale in public administration by focusing on frontline work involved in implementing a policy linked to the localism agenda. An empirical focus on localism is highly appropriate considering that it is a political agenda that hinges on framing the local scale in relation to the ‘small is beautiful’ narrative. Exploring the validity of this narrative has been a long-standing interest of governance scholars; in this way, the article's novel approach to this empirical focus will be of interest to a wide audience.

The article specifically explores an education policy linked to localism's political agenda in England called the ‘academy schools policy’. While academies have been at the forefront of the localism agenda in education policy, they also reflect how a new localism has been accompanied by a new centrism in the governance of England's school system (Ball 2007). The policy aims at converting state schools into ‘academies’, which involves schools shifting from being accountable to their local authority to becoming directly accountable to central government. Despite this centralization of accountability, academies nonetheless promote a distinct form of localism and have been politically framed in this manner (Clarke and Cochrane 2013). Academies are permitted to have greater individual freedoms related, for example, to their curriculum, the structure of their school day, and their governance arrangements, all of which have been framed as giving greater power to local communities. Low-performing academies are obliged to have a private sponsor, whereas high-performing schools—called ‘converters’—can convert to academy status without external sponsorship. Currently 63 per cent of England's secondary state schools are academies (DfE 2017).

The academies policy promotes a form of localism aimed at devolving power beyond local government to ‘local’ actors and is understood as extending a long-term trend in the governance of England's education system where the role of local authorities is being increasingly side-lined (Bache 2003; Simkins et al. 2015). The direct exclusion of local authorities from meanings of ‘local’ education, accountability and community makes the academies policy a highly appropriate case for exposing the political nature of scale; the case is used to identify multiple meanings of the ‘local’ and to generate new insights about the political implications of these meanings.

The study investigated responses to the academies policy in two local authority case studies and four academy schools within each of these. The local authorities—which have been given the pseudonyms Northwestern and Eastshire—were selected using an ‘instrumental case study’ design (Stake 1994). The aim of instrumental case studies is ‘to provide insight into an issue or refinement of theory’ (Stake 1994, p. 237). The case functions as a means through which to develop new understandings of social processes rather than the cases themselves being of primary interest. There is a general lack of research about how the academies policy has been responded to and implemented in situated contexts (Simkins 2015), a factor which also made the instrumental case study design a highly appropriate one. The two case studies were chosen to reflect two different landscapes of the academies policy: Northwestern was dominated by sponsored (low-performing) academies and Eastshire was dominated by converter (high-performing) academies. This was compatible with instrumental case designs being appropriate for exploratory research: by investigating cases which reflected two variants of academies the case design held potential for maximizing insights about the multiple meanings of ‘the local’ and the political implications for implementing the policy. The same reasoning was used to select the four academy school case studies in each local authority; they were chosen to be as different as possible from each other (contrasting sponsor types in Northwestern and contrasting degrees of high performance in Eastshire).

Data collection was part of an ESRC-funded study and involved conducting semi-structured interviews with the frontline actors responsible for implementing academies: local authority officers (non-party affiliated civil servants), principals, private sponsors, and chairs of governors in Eastshire and Northwestern. Although these may appear to be a more diverse set of actors compared to Lipsky's (1980) initial conceptualization of street-level bureaucrats, this study considers them all to be ‘frontline workers’ because they are all public sector workers who are directly responsible for implementing national policy in a situated context (see Durose 2011). Fieldwork took place between September 2012 and May 2013. Interviews explored how policy actors had responded to the academies policy, why they responded in the way they did, and their accounts of the process of implementing academies.

Data were analysed by drawing on the ‘critical logics of explanation’ approach developed by Glynos and Howarth (2007), which is a critical problematizing approach rooted in poststructuralist discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The logics approach is one which ‘is not hostile to explanation but questions positivist explanations in political science’ (Palonen 2012, p. 932). The approach advances the poststructuralist interest in exploring politics through studying the struggle between different discourses to achieve dominance and is thus compatible with the article's overall theoretical orientation. The central category of critical explanation is the ‘logic’ of a discourse which reflects ‘the rules that govern a practice or regime of practices, as well as the conditions that make such rules possible and impossible’ (Griggs and Howarth 2011, p. 222). Glynos and Howarth identify three types of logic: social, political and fantasmatic.

Social logics characterize ‘the overall pattern or coherence of a discursive practice’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, p. 139); they can be thought of as guiding rules or norms which structure a particular dimension of social reality and help social actors make sense of it. There are also political logics which characterize the process through which social logics become established, contested, rejected or transformed. Political practices consist of two logics: equivalential and differential. The logic of equivalence incorporates a chain of meanings or identities into the same discourse, which results in the simplification of political space. The logic of difference fragments equivalential chains of meaning and thus involves the expansion and increased complexity of political space. Finally, fantasmatic logics relate to the way a particular discourse masks the contingent nature of social relations by conveying a sense of certainty or fullness. In other words, an understanding of fantasmatic logics ‘furnish[es] us with the means to account for the grip of an existing or anticipated social practice or regime’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, p. 107) as their narratives promise a version of a desirable social reality. Fantasmatic narratives consist of both beatific and horrific scenarios which evoke positive and negative affective reactions, respectively.

Before presenting the analytical findings, it is important to underline that the article does not suggest that political actors have unlimited freedom to shape the meaning of scales. Instead, the process of constructing meaning takes place within particular situated contexts which limit the possible meanings that can be attached to scales (Bevir and Rhodes 2003; Howarth 2010). These situated contexts include the role of particular histories, identities, and discourses which shape the prevailing rhetoric and practice of governance and administration. In order for political actors to be successful they therefore need to use scales in such a way that will be accepted by the political contexts within which they work, which is why the article's analysis of logics and scalecraft is placed within the particular context of each local authority case.

The next two sections present the empirical data analysis. Analysis first identifies the logics that dominate frontline work in each case. Second, political meanings of ‘the local’ are identified as a major feature of these logics and by doing so analysis demonstrates scalecraft as a key strategy of frontline work.

5 IMPLEMENTING ACADEMIES AND THE LOGICS OF FRONTLINE WORK IN TWO LOCAL AUTHORITY CASE STUDIES

6 OBSERVING SCALECRAFT: POLITICAL USES OF ‘THE LOCAL’

By utilizing the critical logics of explanation approach, the analysis has identified the key social, political and fantasmatic logics mobilized by frontline workers in schools and local authorities responsible for implementing academies in Northwestern and Eastshire. Exploring logics has enabled analysis to identify how frontline workers have resisted (in Northwestern) or enabled (in Eastshire) the dominant localism agenda which seeks to side-line the local authority from school governance and prioritize the market logic of individual choice.

This section extends the analytical findings further to demonstrate how political meanings of scale are a key dimension of the response to localism. The analysis argues that ‘the local’ is a dominant discourse driving the political agenda of the national academies policy and that this profoundly affects the way frontline workers have interpreted the policy. This argument is developed by demonstrating that scalecraft is a major feature of frontline workers’ practices and the discussion outlines how it is an essential dimension of the three logics guiding the responses to the localism agenda in the two case studies.

7 CONCLUSION

The responses to the localism agenda of the academies policy in the two local authority case studies of Northwestern and Eastshire help us to rethink a number of issues related to how public administration scholars use scale in their analyses. The most important theoretical contribution of the article has been to argue for public administration studies to go beyond using scale as a descriptive category of analysis to also question the multiple meanings of scales. It has achieved this by empirically demonstrating that scales are political, and presenting an analysis which treats scales as a category of practice. The academies policy seeks to redefine the meaning of ‘local’ schooling, and the local scale therefore became a key category around which political struggles centred when determining the dominant vision for school governance. The critical logics approach shed light on how the political agenda of localism was resisted or embraced by frontline workers mobilizing multiple meanings of the ‘local’ scale, where scale was associated with level, territory and/or size, depending on the discursive context. This supports the stance of Blanco et al. (2014) who do not focus on identifying one meaning of scale—such as territory, level, or size—but instead advocate exploring the political narratives of the local. Contrasting meanings of the local scale featured in assumptions around the role of local government in school governance (social logics), what was included or excluded in ‘local’ schooling (political logics), and the affective narratives of the local (fantasmatic logics). As a result, the political meanings of the local scale in each case study directly mapped onto the national localism agenda of academies being either supported or resisted in the local authorities. Thus, it is not enough to say that scales are political; they also matter. Meanings of scale are at the core of policies and political agendas, as well as being key dimensions of political strategies that support or resist governance reforms.

The literature on political actors’ discursive strategies in public administration studies is undoubtedly rich and well established. The novel insights offered by this article have centred on revealing an important gap in understanding the discursive repertoires of political actors which relates to scales overwhelmingly being used as a category of analysis rather than political concepts or categories of practice. Analysis has shown that continuing to use scales as merely descriptive concepts for political analysis would mean overlooking powerful differences in governance visions. Suggestions for how studies could integrate an approach which considers the political nature of scale include: studies of central–local relations may also engage with the subjective meanings of ‘centre’ and ‘local’; multi-level governance studies may question how different ‘levels’ of governance are perceived; and studies of governance networks may examine how different parts of the network—such as local and national elements—are understood by political actors. Public administration scholars’ enduring interest in studying the effects of scale stands to be strengthened by a consideration of the political meanings of scale. Studies could be developed further by clarifying whose scale meanings they are adopting, therefore increasing their reflexivity by stating what scale meanings are being considered, which are being overlooked, and perhaps suggesting how the effects of scale might vary if alternative meanings were to be adopted. This reinforces pioneering work in public administration by Corbett and Howard (2017) who identify how ‘size’ is typically unproblematized (in studying the effect of size on agency termination) and who stress the importance of engaging with multiple meanings of this political category.

The empirical analysis has also shown how frontline workers responsible for responding to governance reforms use political meanings of scale in their policy work. Analysis has identified a new technique of frontline work whereby actors strategically allocate specific meanings to scale—a practice which has been called ‘scalecraft’. By identifying the technique of scalecraft, the article contributes to ongoing conceptualizations of frontline work which seek to add new layers of understanding to the strategies, techniques, experiences, and skills demonstrated by actors working on the front line (Lipsky 1980; Lowndes 1997; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Sullivan 2007; Durose 2009, 2011). Scalecraft demonstrates how frontline workers engage directly with political meanings of scales—such as the ‘local’ in the localism agenda—and either reproduce or reshape these meanings to respectively support or resist governance reforms. The article has emphasized how it does not consider actors to have unlimited freedom to exercise discretion. Instead, scalecraft demonstrates how working on the front line involves strategically framing arguments in relation to scale in order to promote a particular political agenda, but that this is done in such a way that conforms to dominant ways of understanding governance in particular contexts. While the article has focused on the scalecraft practices of frontline workers, this is not to suggest that scalecraft practices will be restricted to frontline work; future studies could build on the insights developed here by examining scalecraft practices of other types of political actor.

Exploring the case of the localism agenda in the academies policy has shown how ‘the local’ is a powerful political discourse through its discursive association with democracy, participation, and individual freedoms. Analysis has supported the arguments made by Griggs and Sullivan (2014) and Blanco et al. (2014) regarding the valuable political insights that can be gained from problematizing the meanings of the local. These arguments which engage with the local as a category of practice rather than as a category of analysis remain infrequent exceptions in studies of public administration. This article therefore calls for the meanings and logics of the local to become an integral part of studies that engage with the politics of local governance.

This study supports existing analysis in the local governance literature which shows localism in England to have a distinct political agenda aimed at side-lining local government and privileging individual freedoms (Lowndes and Pratchett 2012). Engaging with the multiple and contrasting meanings of the local has helped to expose how and why the localism agenda has been so controversial in some places but accepted in others. The case studies showed that localism either clashed with or complemented beliefs about the role of local government, meanings of school accountability, whether a school landscape should be collaborative or competitive, and situated narratives about what constitutes a local community. Political meanings of scale mattered, and taking these seriously exposes a new dimension of the process by which powerful discourses of localism dominate or are resisted in the situated contexts of governance. Exploring how the local scale functions as a category of practice in other contexts of localism that exist in Westminster-style democracies would extend and enrich these findings.

Naturally, the article's claims are limited by its empirical focus on two local authority case studies, and future studies can build on and refine the theoretical arguments that have been put forward. Nonetheless, a case study design has been highly appropriate for investigating the construction and contestation of political meanings of scale and has produced empirical data of the necessary level of detail required for this type of analysis. Furthermore, the analytical approach has also followed the methodological assumption of case study research which argues that general theoretical lessons can be developed from detailed case study data (George and Bennett 2004; Flyvbjerg 2006). The article has aimed for its contributions to be complementary to the current questions pursued about scale in the governance literature. By rethinking scale as a political category, the study of public administration will develop an even greater understanding of the discursive processes which shape overarching political directions of governance.