Appendix on methodology

Summary

In this appendix, we briefly describe the methodology of the ESRC funded ‘Working in the Public Interest’ (WITPI) project, which involved data collection and analysis between 2018 and 2020. The data from the project forms the basis for this book.

Aims

The overall aim of the WITPI project was to explore whether and how the privatisation of spatial planning activities was reshaping professional practices, including justifications for planning and how it serves the public interest. Five research questions (RQs) were identified to direct the research:

• 1. How have the respective roles of the public and private sectors in delivering public interest planning goals changed over the postwar period?

• 2. Through what public/ private organisational forms is planning now delivered?

• 3. How have professional planners working in diverse settings adjusted to changing organisational configurations, and how do they define and understand their professional identity in relation to these?

• 4. What effects do different organisational configurations have on the ways that planning's contested public interest purposes are defined and realised through planning work, particularly in relation to the complexities of place, democracy and local politics?

• 5. How can public service professional labour be reimagined as a means of better realising public interest goals, and challenging dominant understandings of what public services can and should legitimately deliver?

The first two RQs focused on producing a descriptive account of recent changes to the delivery of planning services, while the final three were concerned with how those changes have been understood by both professional planners and other groups, and the implications of those understandings for conceptualisations of the legitimacy of ‘public interest’ planning.

Conceptual approach

We looked to explore how processes of privatisation were changing ideas and practices of professionalism in spatial planning, starting from an understanding of professionalism as a set of claims to socially useful expertise made by organisational groups seeking to secure and control employment opportunities for their members (Larson, 1977). The planning profession in the UK grew as a postwar ‘state- bureau profession’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997), and has therefore exercised only limited control over the definition of its work.