4
Stories of Change
I have already announced the purpose of this chapter. This is to
listen carefully to social-control talk: the inconsistent and varied
words used by the workers, managers and ideologues of the system
as they explain what they think they are doing and announce what
they would like to do.
I have also made some preliminary judgements about the status
of all this talk. Words neither 'come from the skies' (as Mao reminds
us) nor can they be taken as literal explanations of what
is happening. Nonetheless, we must still listen to them very carefully.
Words are real sources of power for guiding and justifying
policy changes and for insulating the system from criticism. In
this sense, they are Naipaul's 'statues' which are built to reassure
the powerful about their intentions. But these stories are important
in another sense: as ideological constructions, they are full of
contradictions, anomalies and paradoxes. These internal impurities
reveal a hidden agenda, a message which is not as simple as the
surface tale. The arena of social policy is the place where such
hidden contradictions are resolved. Leaving aside any putative
'implementation gap' between rhetoric and reality, itisthe rhetoric
itself which becomes the problem.
But let us reserve for the end of the chapter a further assessment
of how words work. I will now set out separately three representative
stories of control: the quest for community, the ideal
of the minimum state, and the return to behaviourism. There are,
of course, other stories being told, but these seem to me to be the
most important. In each case I will look at the surface message,
the popular appeal of the tale, its deeper structures and then the
ways in which it is being used.