Taran Leeks

Between Control and Commons: Reframing Street-Level Bureaucracy under Austerity

Name: Taran Leeks
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Peter North
Year: 2
Discipline: Geography and Planning
Presentation type: Academic Poster
Project Title: Between Control and Commons: Reframing Street-Level Bureaucracy under Austerity

Abstract:

This project explores how street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), particularly social workers, navigate austerity while upholding commitments to care, ethics, and social justice. It challenges dominant behavioural and managerial framings, instead theorising discretion as biopolitical labour shaped by both constraint and possibility.

Drawing on Hardt and Negri’s (2009) dialectical materialism and Geertz’s (1973) thick description, the research situates SLBs as both governed and governing agents who enact, resist, and recompose power through everyday decisions.

Qualitative interviews with frontline workers in Merseyside provide empirical grounding for this analysis. The study reframes discretion as a political practice that can reinforce control but also seed collective agency and care beyond scarcity.

In doing so, it contributes both to critical scholarship and to practitioners seeking to reflect on their roles under austerity. Rather than merely surviving austerity, it imagines public service as a site of common production and constituent power.