Spatial entrepreneurs and scalecraft

This chapter focuses on the practices of frontline workers in policymaking processes and makes a key intervention by arguing that practices of scalecraft are an overlooked dimension of frontline work. It explores how frontline workers construct and strategically mobilise scale in their policy work by presenting an empirical study of frontline actors tasked with implementing England’s academies policy in a local authority case study. Analysis demonstrates how practices of scalecraft are a key feature and strategy of policy actors’ work which is key to understanding how a counter-hegemonic strategy was pursued in the empirical case. By identifying how frontline work involves the creative and strategic use of scale the chapter proposes that this new dimension of frontline work is called ‘spatial entrepreneurship’ and the discussion concludes by outlining the key features of this type of work.

Exposing scale hegemonies

The first aim of this chapter is to present an introductory discussion to the book’s empirical focus on education governance. It demonstrates that education governance is a field that is teeming with politics of scale and therefore constitutes an ideal focus for exploring the book’s overarching conceptual puzzle. The second aim of the chapter is to present a useful entry point for policy scholars seeking to explore possible practices of scalecraft in policy contexts. The discussion outlines the key tenets of a genealogical perspective which draws on political discourse theory and pays particular analytical attention to the ‘dislocatory moments’ of policy. By tracing how European education policy evolved over time, the discussion empirically illustrates how a genealogical perspective is an invaluable lens for exposing the contingency of scale hegemonies and that this serves as an essential starting point for problematising scalar politics.

The practice of scalecraft

The book’s final chapter discusses how the lens of scalecraft has helped to generate new readings of policy which take into account the scalar politics of policymaking. The discussion reflects on how scale played out in each of the empirical chapters, and how analysis has shed light on the under-examined relationship between policy, scale, and hegemony. Key features of the practice of scalecraft are also developed, including a description of three scalecraft techniques, and by doing so the book offers scholars of policy a clear framework for integrating a critical approach to scale in their analyses. The chapter also discusses how scalecraft contributes to the wider literatures of policy studies, political geography, and education governance. The book concludes by outlining the potential which lies in future work engaging with conceptualisations of spatial politics that go beyond scale.

Problematising scale in the study of policy

This chapter discusses how scale is fundamental to interpreting and defining social life, and explores the implications of this for the study of policy in order to present a clear case for exploring the politics of scale in policy. Working at the crossroads of policy studies and political geography, the chapter sets out the book’s chosen conceptual approach which innovatively integrates critical policy studies with poststructuralist political geography. Specifically, the discussion critically analyses what assumptions about scale are reflected in the field of policy studies, reviews the political geography debates on scale, and outlines the book’s use of political discourse theory and the ‘critical logics of explanation’ approach (Glynos & Howarth 2007). The chapter concludes by introducing the concept of ‘scalecraft’ as a hegemonic practice of policymaking which captures how meanings of policy are co-constituted by ordering political space according to concepts of scale.

Knowledge, policy and scale

This chapter argues that critically engaging with scale can extend understandings of the co-constitution of knowledge and policy, and that this stands to develop further insights into how knowledge hegemonies are sustained in contexts of policymaking. To explore the possible practices of scale embedded in hegemonic regimes of knowledge, the chapter uses the case of Europe’s Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the area of education policy. Drawing on documents and observation data, the empirical analysis discusses how the OMC privileges benchmarks, peer learning, and best practices as powerful types of knowledge and ‘ways of knowing’ and reveals how these mobilise important scalar narratives. By highlighting the politics of scale featuring in European education governance, the empirical analysis highlights the co-constitutive relationship between knowledge, policy and scale, and argues that scalecraft is a hegemonic regime of practice which is central to building coherent narratives for powerful knowledge in policymaking.

Policy, scale and the importance of space

This chapter clarifies why the book explores the politics of scale in policy through a cross-disciplinary lens that integrates policy studies and political geography. Specifically, the chapter argues that in order for policy studies to engage with scale as a political concept, the study of policy needs to engage in a dialogue with human geography literature on ‘space’. A space-sensitive approach to policy analysis would involve being receptive to the idea that spatial concepts and categories are crucial to shaping the practices of policymaking. Its discussion introduces what the study of ‘space’ implies for the research interests of social scientists, suggests a number of reasons for the lack of engagement with space in the field of policy studies, and finally turns to outlining the exciting potential for policy studies to engage with theories of space.

Hegemonies of statecraft and scale

This chapter argues that scalecraft is a key strategy of statecraft. It presents empirical analysis of the localism agenda in England’s school system, focusing on the academy and free schools policies. Analysis explores how practices of scalecraft feature in both national policy narratives and the implementation practices of policy actors in a local authority case study. The discussion illuminates how localism constructs local ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, which in the case of England’s schools policies contributes to the continuous side-lining of local authorities and responsibilisation of individual schools. By outlining how the experiences of policy actors contradict official policy narratives of ‘local freedoms’, scalecraft reveals policy actors experiencing a form of ‘scalar entrapment’. Scalar entrapment is an effect of scalecraft which does not only identify exclusionary meanings of scale but also reveals how epistemologies of scale impact actors’ sense of agency.