Journal of Political Ideologies (June 2005), 10(2), 165183

New Labours information age policy programme: An ideology analysis

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GILES MOSS AND BEN OLOUGHLIN

New College, Oxford, OX1 3BN, UK

ABSTRACT Since its election in 1997 the New Labour government in the UK has initiated an ambitious and wide-ranging public policy programme for information and communication technology. The authors of this article consider how an analysis of political ideology can help to understand and explain these policy developments. The case is made that New Labours distinctive policy approach to technology is structured, dened and made sense of by preceding ideational change, both epistemological and conceptual in form. To understand and explain New Labours response to new technologies at the level of policy, it is therefore necessary and productive to interpret its broader response to the information age at the level of political ideology. Carrying out such an analysis, the article examines how New Labours ICT policies are framed and shaped by new conceptions of networked order and technological citizenship. The article concludes by suggesting that a productive avenue for future research would be to address the often messy translation of ideology and policy in practice.

Introduction Information and communication technology (ICT) has been a recurrent theme in the New Labour governments modernisation agenda in the UK. It is said that the capacities afforded by new technologies hold out the promise of transforming the delivery of public services, reforming education, tackling social exclusion, stimulating democratic renewal, and making the UK a leading knowledge-based economy. Indeed, New Labours policy programme for ICT is now well underway, adding empirical fuel to the growing number of books, journals, research programmes, institutes and academic posts dedicated to studying the effects that new electronic technologies are having on social phenomena (e-government, e-administration, e-democracy, e-participation, e-commerce, e-shopping, e-learning, e-health, and so on).1 Much of the literature that studies the social and political implications of ICT use in government begins by eschewing technologically determinist theories of
ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/05/02000165-19 q 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/13569310500097307

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social and political change. There is no cause-and-effect, technologically determined path by which technologies will automatically result in the transformation of government, public services or democracy. The effects of technology are complex and always contingent on various socio-political factors.2 In our view, this general theoretical premise is a useful starting point for the social and political research of technology. Yet a commonly neglected explanatory factor when researching the application of technology in government is the role of political ideology. We argue that government policies for new technologies are framed, dened and made sense of in the context of particular ideological congurations. These ideological congurations have effects on government policies by providing warranting conditions that render certain policy actions and beliefs (and not others) conceivable, plausible, justiable or appropriate.3 So to understand and explain New Labours response to ICT at the level of policy programmes and practice, it is necessary and productive to analyse its broader response to the information age at the level of political ideology. Our argument will proceed as follows. We begin by briey introducing the reader to our understanding of ideology. Following Mark Bevir, we reject reied models of political ideology in favour of a representation of ideology as something whose elements are subject to continual internal change and renegotiation, where change in one ideational element brings about subsequent change in others.4 We isolate three different levels for analysing ideologyepistemology, concepts and programmatic beliefswhich we then employ to investigate change in New Labours ideology and, in particular, its response to the information age. From this analysis, we show how recent technology policy programmes in Britain are framed, dened and made sense of by preceding epistemological and conceptual developments in the broader host ideology of New Labour. A change at the level of epistemology, brought about by new social scientic understandings of advanced modern societies and economies, necessitates and warrants a political response to the contemporary realities of reexive modernisation, the global information age and the knowledge-based economy. Certain key conceptual redenitions also follow from this, with citizenship being recast as technological citizenship and order as networked order. After analysing these ideational developments, we conclude by briey commenting on how New Labours information age policy agenda may have been instantiated and realised thus far, pointing to early signs of adaptation and resistance to New Labours ideological response to the information age. This indicates that consistency of ideational integration and political language amongst policy makers is no guarantor of effectively enrolling other actors during policy implementation and practice, thereby raising questions over the translation of ideology and policy in local institutional sites of implementation.5 I. Ideology: A taxonomy
Ideologies are in a constant process of change, with every one of their elements being open to such change, and with change in one element having spillover effects on others.6

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To examine the role of ideology in dening and shaping policy programmes this article makes use of a taxonomy of ideas which breaks the category of ideology down into different analytical levels. We also follow Bevirs rejection of a xed and reied notion of ideology, and his representation of political ideology as something subject to a constant process of change.7 For analytical purposes, ideologies can rst of all be understood as constellations of concepts, where concepts are dened as linguistic items that play a recurring role in political debates and whose meanings are contested and decontested by different ideological groups (e.g. freedom, citizenship, or economic growth).8 At any one time a political ideology will have a nucleus of key concepts. Most strands of conservatism, for instance, have at their core an organic concept of order and a concept of human nature as inherently awed. Concepts alone, however, tell us little about how ideologies are put into practice. Some headway has been made in the political institutions literature which, having failed to predict the end of the Cold War, made efforts in the 1990s to bring ideas back into policy analysis. For example, Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane,9 and Sheri Berman,10 each disaggregated the notion idea into various types to trace the role of each in policy change. Goldstein and Keohane distinguished: (a) principled (normative) beliefs; (b) causal beliefs (e.g., meansends rationality); and (c) worldviews (e.g., religions). Berman provided a more action-oriented category of ideas. Between ideologies and detailed policy positions lie programmatic beliefs, dened as the ideational frameworks within which programs of action are formulated.11 Her examples include the various policy paradigms of European social democratic parties. We might also consider Keynesianism and monetarism as ideational frameworks within which policy programs were formulated in post-war Britain. Programmatic beliefs is a useful second category. But programmatic beliefs are always also underpinned and legitimated at the level of epistemology. For instance, until the 1970s policy programmes in Britain were technocratic in nature, depending on a rationalist, pragmatic epistemology whereby human planners relied on social scientic research (e.g., the research ndings of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) or analyses by the Treasury). The New Right and Margaret Thatcher sought to discredit this epistemology by promoting recourse to Victorian values and the seemingly incontestable wisdom of the likes of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.12 Signicantly, this epistemological shift redened the problems that required policy attention as well as the nature of conceivable and appropriate policy programmes and responses. For Hayek, because the knowledge humans have is always imperfect, any social order based upon collective planning contradicts the way the world works and will inevitably have pernicious effects. Collective state planning is thereby rendered problematic and is considered responsible for the existence of other policy problems, such as welfare dependency, the underclass, or poor economic performance. By denition, then, scaling back state involvement in public life and removing barriers to the free market become the most appropriate solutions to policy problems for governments.13 In other words, 167

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a problematisation is constructed at this point that posits an equivalence between two problems [e.g., underclass and state planning] that requires those who wish to solve one to accept a proposed solution for another.14 The three types of idea in our taxonomyepistemology, concepts and programmatic beliefswill be employed in this article to examine the role that ideology plays in framing and shaping policy change. In what follows we apply this taxonomy to investigate New Labours ideological and policy response to certain social facts, and, in particular, its response to the so-called imperatives of the information age. As a matter of clarication, we would like to emphasise that this analysis will be necessarily interpretative in form, and that it only aims to establish broad conjunctions and ideational linkages between the different types of idea located in our taxonomy. New Labour is a diverse and eclectic ideology, assuming ideas from a variety of traditions and sources. To invoke New Labour in analysis, no less than old Labour or the New Right, is always, to some degree, to simplify complex patterns of ideas and beliefs.15 But in our view this caveat should not invalidate or nullify an interpretative ideology and policy analysis that sets itself the task of investigating and setting out broad conjunctions and ideational linkages between ideology and policy. II. New Labour, the Third Way and epistemology On an epistemological level, New Labour views the world primarily through the lens of social scientic theory and research, rather than via a divine extra-human source or philosophical rst principles. New Labour has certainly drawn on various ideological and party traditions. In prizing individual freedom and choice (e.g., freedom to choose schools and health care), as well as equal worth, opportunity for all, responsibility and community,16 liberal, socialist and Christian values have all been invoked and assembled. Nevertheless, it is social scientic research that is New Labours main epistemological resource.17 One aspect of this is public opinion research, where knowledge of the world is created as the opinionated public views or values it, through opinion polls, focus groups, consultations and other social scientic techniques.18 But it is broader social scientic accounts of contemporary global society and economy that have played the greatest role in framing New Labours ideology, concepts and resultant policy programmes. Policies are presented as functional and pragmatic responses to new challenges and opportunities brought about by what Anthony Giddens described as the social revolutions of our time (e.g., globalisation, individualisation, social reexivity, the knowledge economy and manufactured uncertainty).19 Principles gleaned from the Labour Partys ideological tradition play a lesser role in supporting and warranting policies when compared with that of sociologically derived facts. As Alan Finlayson put it, New Labour is not much concerned with political philosophy. Policy is legitimated not by ethical principles but by the truth of certain social facts (this is the nature of its pragmatism).20 Three pivotal and interrelated facts that appear to warrant and necessitate certain policies and not others are globalisation, reexive modernity, and the information 168

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age. Globalisation was presented as a key problematisation in New Labours discourse from circa 1995 onwards. By that time several interpretations of globalisation existed in academic and public discourse, ranging between hyperglobalist zeal for free markets and cultural ows to denials of globaloney and the assertion of national autonomy.21 As documented by Matthew Watson and Colin Hay, New Labour assumed a particular discourse closer to hyperglobalist than globaloney, which reinforced the ideological and policy repositioning of the party: In this way, the distinction between the inevitable and the desirable was subtly and . . . strategically blurred.22 New Labour adopted the globalisation discourse to avoid political responsibility for radical social and economic reforms and to discipline the expectations of others.23 After all, as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder state, Modernization is about adapting to conditions that have objectively changed.24 Legitimacy was thereby conferred on necessary structural reform of the state. The state was now re-conceptualised as one governance mechanism amongst several, whose role was to facilitate economic activity and global economic forces. The second problematisation for New Labour was reexive modernisation. The economic imperatives of globalisation were matched by macro-sociological changes. After a wave of theorising about the post-industrial and post-material society from the 1960s onwards, a second and more politically inuential wave emerged in the 1990s, mainly through the writings of Giddens.25 For Giddens, globalisation, detraditionalisation (the end of traditional social roles), and the emergence of the reexive individual created a new politics beyond left and right. These changes constituted reexive modernisation, an era in which the individual is alone to make the best of life, with the freedoms, responsibilities, and insecurities this brings. The concept of work is redened to include domestic labour and voluntary work, since the individual must be rewarded for nding a meaningful life amidst bewildering uncertainty. The concept of welfare is also redened as part of a life politics in which individuals must be empowered to help themselves. The states role must change again also. Now it must provide resources and opportunities rather than direct nancial assistance, for any more interventionist path would be irresponsible and doomed to failure. The source of this second problematisation is not exclusively the thinking of Giddens and the like. As Mark Bevir and David OBrien note, the universal welfare state came under sustained attack from the neoliberal government of 1979 1997 on the grounds that it fostered welfare dependence, bureaucratic inefciency, and uncontrollable costs.26 These were critiques derived from New Right thinking, from Thatchers electoral considerations, and from the economic imperatives of scal tightening after the oil crisis in 1973. Labour leaders from Bevin to Blair have recognised the welfare state model as the embodiment of socialist values such as equality, social justice, and community, and as the expression of an ethic of fellowship in which no individual is left desolate. Yet, having taken on board many of the neoliberal critiques, New Labour has sought to identify solutions to the problems of a lack of individual 169

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responsibility and of the underclass in a manner that seemingly jeopardises this ethic of fellowship. Consider, for instance, the conditionality of welfare to work. The information age, and the related idea of the knowledge-based economy, is a third problematisation for New Labour. A technological account of social change suggests that developments in ICT, in particular, the growth of personal computers, the Internet and a corresponding convergence between telecommunications and computing, mark an upheaval as signicant as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The ubiquity of new interactive and networked technologies is heralding a new information age, or Our Information Age in New Labours inclusive terms.27 On this account technology is a self-determining force that works independently of the social, economic, and political elds, but which subsequently impacts on societies and impels states, businesses and citizens to respond. In the political language of New Labour, as Norman Fairclough puts it, Technology is represented as itself an agent in a process rather than something that is acted upon [by social, economic or political forces].28 By proclaiming the emergence of an information age in this way, New Labour echoes themes evident in earlier futurologist and social scientic literature regarding the notion of a paradigm shift brought about by new ICT,29 as well as on Giddens Third Way writings on the novel challenges and opportunities of a new knowledge-based economy and society.30 As with the previous two problematisations, structural changes associated with the information age and knowledge economy are given an air of historical inevitability to which it is necessary for governments and citizens to respond. Instead of economic or social transformations, it is new network technologies that will change the whole pattern of our lives and which offer novel opportunities for those willing to take the appropriate action. For Blair, The potential of the new electronic networks is breathtaking . . . The prize is there for the taking. We must stretch out our hands and grasp it.31 Individual responsibility will bring economic efciency and national prosperity, since in the information era, the more people who have the skills and opportunity to use these new networks, at work or at home, the richer those networks will become. Again the state is dened as facilitator, with the role of stimulating enterprise, exibility and innovation.32 It liberalises markets and upholds competition; it helps citizens to attain the requisite technical knowledge and skills (the human capital) to harness the potential of new technology and to prot from participation in the new information age and knowledge economy. It is these social scientic readings of contemporary reality that form the epistemological frame for core problematisations in New Labour ideology and which provide the warranting conditions and justication for its public policy repertoire. The three problematisations identied by our readingglobalisation, reexive modernisation, and the information ageare respectively depicted with the sense that they are economically, socially, and technologically determined historical inevitabilities that necessitate specic actions and policy programmes and rule out alternatives. Since reexive modernity and a global information age are our future, we must bring our politics up to date and tailor our policies to suit. 170

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As we suggest subsequently, policy actions then propagate and reinforce the trends and understandings identied, establishing something of a self-fullling prophecy. III. The renegotiation of concepts and ideology The adoption of an epistemological position based upon new sociological research ndings and the presentation of three problematisations has coincided with and contributed to a renegotiation of the ideology held by New Labour, and the elucidation of several specic political concepts. To begin with the former, New Labours ideology revolves around four main ideological tenets: a narrative (futurism), a notion of how progress is achieved (pragmatic managerialist governance), a belief in social order (systemic, networked), and a particular moral persuasion (responsibility and duty). One: New Labours ideology is futurist. There is a perceived need for modernisation and radical reform so that Britain keeps apace with social changes. As Giddens had set out, one of the characteristic features of Third Way politics is a thoroughgoing policy programme for modernising institutions to meet the demands of reexive modernisation and a globalising information order. Contrasted with the outmoded solutions of the Old Left and New Right, now labelled dogmatic and fundamentalist, New Labours approach is pragmatic and elastic.33 Those who fail to embrace reform and so obstruct future progress are cast as forces of conservatism, a category that includes trade unions, intransigent public sector workers, fat cats, the Old Left, and the Conservatives themselves. Two: progress is to be achieved through pragmatic managerialist governance. It proceeds through target setting and standards monitoring or what has been termed a utilitarian achievement-oriented measurement culture.34 This is logical for a party that wishes to reject the comprehensive nature of the traditional solutions of Left or Right. The market cannot altogether be trusted, but neither can state planning. While the public, the private or the voluntary sector may all be used to deliver public services where pragmatically appropriate, to ensure progress the performance of all must be made subject to standardisation, auditing and monitoring directed by the centre.35 The effect, as Fairclough has put it, is that New Labours commitment to dispersal of government . . . is analogous with the dispersal of production amongst subsidiaries and contracted suppliers in modern business corporations.36 Three: New Labours ideology is based on a particular notion of social order. New Britain exists, positively and normatively, as a clearly dened social system or set of networks within which the good life (moral, economic, and civic renewal) takes place. The boundaries between and within the private, public and voluntary sectors become increasingly permeable and exible, overlapped by crosscutting networks. Working on the inside of this exible and adaptable system of networks are partners and stakeholders, such as government, citizens, NGOs, universities, hospitals, and business. On the fringes of these networks are the socially excluded. Four: New Labours ideology is overtly moral. In contrast to the hedonistic 1960s and late-1980s, New Labour demands that citizens exercise responsibilities 171

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if they want rights, and is prepared to use the state to enforce this moral code.37 The liberal separation between public and private spheres is belied as government intervenes in what are traditionally considered private matters such as childcare,38 curfews,39 sperm-donor anonymity,40 sexual conduct,41 and diet.42 The logic is prescriptively clear: if the government is to help citizens then they must also take responsibility by learning to help themselves. These four ideological tenets of New Labour invoke specic political concepts. To esh out New Labours ideological position further, a few of these will be mentioned here. A clear embodiment of futurity pinpointed by Ruth Lister is New Labours concept of the child-citizen becoming worker. The citizen-worker has long been a concept in British political life, connoting the idea that social rights are earned through work. Moreover, the concept of childrens rights has ourished internationally in recent decades. While Britains Commission on Social Justice (CSJ) has announced Children are 100 per cent of the nations future,43 Chancellor Gordon Brown rephrased this in the 1999 Budget as children being 20% of the population but 100% of the future.44 With the concept of spending replaced by social investment, children are to be invested in as the citizen-workers of the future. The implication is that children are now not valued intrinsically, but instrumentally, as a means to economic growth, lower crime, and a healthier population of future adults. This, in turn, ts with New Labours belief in progress through managerialist governance. Children become the objects and subjects of goals, targets and numbers, to be tested and monitored regularly in order to ensure future progress. The notion of networked social order rests upon concepts of human and social capital. New Labours supply-side economic prism, supplying the infrastructure, resources, and regulatory framework required for a smoothly owing networked market order, necessarily entails investment in people as human capital. As The Learning Age Green Paper stated, investment in human capital will be the foundation for success in the knowledge-based economy.45 The skills and capacities to enter into and prosper in the global information economy and society must also be constantly updated through life-long learning. Alongside human capital, social capital refers to the strength of bonds between individuals in social networks, with the sociologically derived assertion, espoused by Robert Putnam and others, that stronger, wider social bonds lead to greater economic efciency and productivity, and stronger democracy, less crime, better health, and other social benets. Two other related political concepts adopted by New Labour are duty and network. Duty is a concept pivotal to the moral thrust of New Labours ideology mentioned above. When faced with the problems of globalisation, reexive modernity and entering the information age, it is the duty of individuals to be equipped to face new challenges. Rejecting the hedonistic brand of individualism associated with the New Right, the new individualism of the Third Way demands that a contractual balance is struck between individual rights and responsibility to others (the latter revealing the communitarian aspect of New Labours ideological project). There are to be no rights without responsibilities. For all the supply-side action taken by government, it is the obligation of citizens (and businesses)46 to 172

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embrace the opportunities presented. In other words, something like a principle of reciprocity is established, in which provision from the state in the form of services and rights imposes reciprocal obligations on the individual to assume the responsibility to make the most of these opportunities through personal effort.47 The network is perhaps the key concept or conceptual metaphor associated with social order and the information age in New Labours political phraseology.48 Coinciding with the increased popularisation of the Internet brought about by the World Wide Web, society increasingly becomes understood in terms of networks rather than through an ontology of classes, markets or hierarchies. Societies are made of individuals and groups included in (or excluded from) networks based on key societal nodal points such as schools, hospitals, businesses, governments, NGOs and citizens. These networks are taken to connote complex but exible relations of synergy and interaction among individual and groups. In addition, they are also commonly presented as if they were inherently inclusive and non-hierarchal in form. As a consequence, attention focuses on those who are socially excluded from networks and on the ways that government can include them (or, more accurately, on the ways that government can help the socially excluded to include themselves), while asymmetries of power and conicts of interest that may exist between those individuals and groups that are included in networks are elided. The network concept is employed by New Labour in a way that supports the claim to be moving beyond the old forces of Left and Right, each of which advocated worn-out metaphors or structures, be they statist or market-oriented in form, neither of which work in contemporary conditions. Networks represent a third way more organised than the market, yet more exible than the centralised and bureaucratic state. As a well-known purveyor of the network concept, Manuel Castells, puts it, Networks have extraordinary advantages as organising tools because of their inherent exibility and adaptability, critical features in order to survive and prosper in a fast-changing environment.49 Networks are also considered to be more ethical than the market in that they reect the mutual connections between individuals and groups within a moral community of rights and responsibilities.50 The network metaphor promises much, therefore. Flexible, networked rms pledge innovation and economic productivity; networked government and public services better and more responsive multi-layer governance; and social networks (packaged with the concept of social capital) more democratic, ethical, fullling, healthier and less crime-ridden communities.51 Network systems contain tensions. Productivity depends on the nature of connections, and so individuals with no or few connections are unproductive. But given that ideas, innovation and wealth creation come from forming new connections, the level of connectivity cannot be too high otherwise capitalisms driving, creative destruction would seize up. Should the conceptual metaphor hold, then the network system should be self-organising and driven forward through the energy of endogenous connections. Yet if the aforementioned delicate balance of not-too-much but not-too-little connectivity is to be maintained then the network 173

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must be organised by an external authority.52 Again, the logic of the metaphor, and its internal tensions, legitimates a role for government to manage and monitor as well as to facilitate. Having given examples of the tenets of New Labour ideology and some of the political concepts those ideational elements legitimate, we see in the next section how a concept of technological citizenship has emerged, and we outline the programmatic beliefs and policy actions that aim to realise it. Here our focus narrows to the third New Labour problematisation: entering the information age. IV. New Labours policy programme for the information age Having traced how New Labours ideas have been renegotiated and framed in light of three problematisations, we now turn our attention to New Labours policy agenda and programmatic beliefs as they relate to the information age. Earlier we argued that a social-scientic research epistemology underpinning the Third Way ideology presented certain facts that required policy action. But now, focussing on programmatic beliefs, we can trace how that ideology helps constitute the very conditions to which it claims to be responding.53 At this point, policy measures are put into play that seek to realise a vision of information-age Britain, characterised by networks of convenient, fast and responsive governance and a exible knowledge-based economy, and which is to be populated by active and responsible technological citizens. We will focus on New Labours programmatic beliefs in the areas of e-government, e-democracy, education, social inclusion, and national economic performance. In keeping with its futurist ideology, the New Labour governments concern with developing e-government renders its modernisation agenda dependent on ICT. In the 1999 White Paper Modernising Government, subsequently developed in the 2002 Channels Framework, the following goals are outlined: joined-up policymaking, primacy of the service user (citizen) not provider (government), and efcient, quality, responsive services. Following the belief in progress through managerialist target setting, Modernising Government pledged that by 2008 all government services would be available electronically, which has since been pushed forward to 2005.54 It is argued that joined-up government will emerge through networked data integration, technical standardisation, and interoperable computer systems between government departments and other intermediary organisations (public, private or voluntary sector). The result will be services that are no longer delivered department-by-department but in a holistic manner. This is to be achieved via citizen portals, such as the Directgov website and the former UK Online, which organise information not according to department but by the citizens needs, such as getting advice about childcare, nding a job, booking a driving test or applying to university. The policy of e-government is aimed at making life easier for citizens. The use of ICT is said to offer citizens new, convenient and efcient ways of receiving public services. For citizens, barriers of place or time become meaningless, as 174

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access to government and related services becomes remote (at home, at work and in the community), high-speed and round the clock. Furthermore, the goal of efciency in service delivery is facilitated. The cost of service provision is reduced since the marginal cost of providing or processing information is said to fall rapidly when the Internet is used, rather than human interaction during ofce hours. Both interactive services such as submitting ones driving licence application online or information gathering services such as seeking medical information on an NHS website become (at least in theory) much less costly for government. A key focus of the e-government modernisation agenda is the value and importance of knowing the customer and his/her needs. Delivery of services is to be based on an understanding of the customer base and tailored to particular customer segments, according to age, socio-demographic group and location, rather than assuming that citizens share the same preference structures.55 Obtaining more detailed knowledge of the customer base may be supported by using the new technology. Since government websites can store data about the user, citizens face the prospect of government offering more personalised services redolent of customer relationship management in the private sector.56 On top of this, interactive mediums such as the Internet provide channels for people to give feedback to improve government services, allowing those responsible for public services to develop and deepen the dialogue with people about improving delivery. In the 1980s and 1990s the Conservative party had initiated a marketisation of public services, whereby consumers must be active in maintaining pressure on public services to work efciently by exercising choice. For New Labour, the emphasis is partly shifted towards open channels of communication and voice. New technologies not only allow the government to deliver faster, more convenient and multi-channel services to its customers, but also offer opportunities for government to listen and work with citizens interactively. Government is said to become a listening and learning organisation, able to respond to the needs of citizens who can now have more inuence on government service delivery through feedback mechanisms. Citizens are expected to assist in the e-government agenda. Once again, rights come with responsibilities. According to the governments E-Envoy at the time of writing, Ian Watmore, citizens must accept that e-government will only be efcient if all departments can access a common dataset for all citizens.57 To facilitate this, each citizen will have an identity card, as proposed in former Home Secretary David Blunketts Identity Cards Bill of April 2004. Further, government is investigating how citizens could use their credit cards to validate their identity.58 Citizens are also expected to be content that government service delivery is not a purely public sector activity, but a mixed networked economy featuring public, private, or voluntary sector bodies. For instance, the commercial YouGov website has advertised a facility that allows users to pay their council tax bills, while the UpMyStreet website allows homebuyers to check properties available in an area and then access government data on local schools, crime levels, and unemployment rates.59 As well as service delivery, e-government includes an emergent programme of e-democracy and e-participation with the intent of stimulating democratic renewal. 175

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As part of the e-government agenda, local government authorities have been encouraged to set up a website which contains relevant political information and which provides citizens with new ways of contacting their authority. In addition to information gathering and customer feedback, more ambitious e-participation projects are beginning to emerge. At the local government level there are online citizens forums, panels, consultations and surgeries with councillors that provide citizens with new ways to have their say. There are also community websites that allow citizens to build and strengthen social network ties.60 To this effect, two centrally organised initiatives, the National Local e-Democracy and Practical E-Democracy in London projects, have been established. Last, but not least, there have been experiments with e-voting. The hope is to modernise the electoral system and increase the opportunities that citizens have to register their vote. As it is, the government aims to hold a multi-channelled, e-enabled General Election some time after 2006.61 In this emergent vision of e-democracy, where gathering political information, participating politically and voting are increasingly electronic, not only will citizens receive public services online, they will also exercise their political rights on electronic networks as well. Alongside e-government, one of the major programmatic beliefs arising from the problematisation of the information age concerns education:
We are in a new agethe age of information and global competition . . . The types of jobs we do have changed, as have the industries in which we work and the skills they need. At the same time, new opportunities are opening up as we see the potential for new technologies to change our lives for the better. We have no choice but to prepare for this new age in which the key to success will be the continuous education and development of the human mind and imagination.62

Signicantly, education and the information age are understood as mutually supportive. For New Labour, networked ICT facilitates education at all levels and at all ages (lifelong learning), whilst education will equip all people with the necessary skills (the human capital and social capital) to prot from the information age. Education is here not intrinsically valuable, as it had been in social democratic and ethical socialist traditions of the Labour Party.63 Since the acquisition of skills and knowledge are now closely tied to the demands of the labour market, education becomes a site for the realisation of the concepts of social investment and the child-citizen becoming worker. Education in the information age becomes an individualised process, resting as much on the autonomous effort and sense of responsibility of the individual as on the efforts of the state. ICT is seen to involve a redenition of education as a bottom-up process based on individual choice, rather than on didactic direction by the paternal state. The interactive nature of technologies allows individuals to make choices and experience education in their own way, equipping them with the skills and way of dealing with the world in an era of reexive modernisation and insecurity. By acquiring skills in an interactive way the citizen becomes an active and reexive subject who is not disciplined but allowed.64 The reality may be that the interactivity of these technologies is limited and that choice amounts to 176

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little more than navigating around a set of pre-determined options in carefully constructed educational environments. However, drawing on positive, empowering connotations of the term interactive, the suggestion is that education is freed from inexible top-down expertise and becomes an open realm of personal experimentation (and responsibility, of course). How successful this e-learning strategy will be remains a moot point.65 In higher education, for instance, the e-university (UKeU) launched by government in 2000 has already collapsed, but then many universities and other educational outlets already offer online modules, degrees and courses. With equality redened as inclusion, and the means to inclusion being access to services and government online, government recognises that not all individuals necessarily have the skills, interest, aspiration or condence to use new networked technologies.66 This reinforces the dark underside of the information age: patterns of social exclusion. A new stigma is created. Those who fail in the face of universal access have failed to live up to their duties as citizens and are thus not mere information have-nots but want-nots, a group that is considered to be especially large in Britain compared to other countries.67 In the meritocratic era of reexive modernisation a new underclass emerges, a group who have the most to gain but fail through their own fatalism and faults. As a result they effectively lose citizenship. Predictably, New Labour turns to new technology to help solve a problem partly created by new technology. For instance, 2003 saw the Get Started scheme, involving voluntary (Age Concern, The Princes Trust) and private organisations (BT, Intel, Granada Media), to encourage the elderly, unemployed and ethnic minorities to use the Internet by providing access and education.68 Another project, the Learning and Work Bank, was launched in 2001 promising public access kiosks and the posting online of 400,000 vacancies and information on training courses (citizens online).69 The logic of this approach to ending social exclusion is simply to expand the network of the included by providing both access to new technology and the know-how to use it. This approach, based as it is on New Labours depiction of the opportunities and challenges of the information age, is the most justiable and appropriate. Not only do the new socially excluded miss out on the new political and social rights, but also their economic exclusion is reinforced. New Labours representation of the knowledge economy implies that wealth is generated by increasing ows of information and the use of that information in more creative ways. In the knowledge economy, the information-processing and knowledgegenerating skills of wired workers play an increasingly vital role in productivity and economic growth. Seamlessly, as government facilitates the generation of a more skilled, networked populace, all contributing to the twenty-rst-century creative industriesscientic, artistic, and business designso participation in the global knowledge economy will enrich those networked British citizens. The policy programmes to realise Blairs 1998 target of making Britain the best place in the world for e-commerce by 200270 included investment in broadband and electronic networks,71 education in ICT skills to meet the needs of technology industries,72 and lowering the cost of ICT through deregulated markets 177

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(e.g., for Internet service providers). By 2004, it was claimed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) that Blairs target was almost met, with Britain ranked only second to Demark in its survey of e-readiness. If we draw these strands together to sum up, key elements of New Labours construction of citizenship in the information age become clear. There is an ideal notion of an active, reexive and responsible citizen who is technologically literate and skilled, participates fully in opportunities provided by the information age, and transacts and interacts with the government and others via interactive information networks. These citizens are one stakeholder or nodal point amongst others (e.g., government, rms, NGOs, universities, hospitals) who are included and active in the various networks of the information age. Active and reexive citizenship in the information age is ultimately linked to the ownership of human capital, understood, at base, as the individual possession of technical literacy and skills. So if the Thatcherite notion of active citizenship rested on property ownership, it is the possession of technical literacy and skill that enables individuals to be citizens in the networked social order of information age Britain. Following Raymond Plant, we might understand this more broadly as a move from status citizenship to supply-side citizenship. In new social and economic conditions, as Plant puts it, there cannot be a rich and growing form of status citizenship; that is to say, a bundle of goods which are due to a citizen as a right outside the market.73 Instead citizenship is an achievement, rather than a status, and it is available from full participation in the information age and through reaping the rewards that accrue from that. The ip side of this active technological citizen is the passive and excluded one. Although they have the most to gain in terms of empowerment from the new information age, the socially excluded are not need to be making the most of their opportunities. Such individuals have failed to grasp responsibly the opportunities that the new information age presents, and remain excluded from participation in the new networks. To be sure, pervasive technologies such as ID cards mean that these individuals and their lives will form part of these new information networks whether they like it or not, since, as Castells notes, if you dont care about the networks, the networks will care about you, anyway.74 But rather than participating actively in information networks, the socially excluded are involved only in the most passive and marginalised sense. From this perspective, the new information and communication networks assume a quite different political meaning. The new networks of the information age do not just connote a great new potential for economic well-being and a better quality of life, in terms of community, democracy and economy. In delineating the arena in which active technological citizenship is attained and enacted in New Britain, access to the new information networks connotes a new set of rights and powers available only to those who fully participate. Whether an individual is an active participant in the new information networks or not is a critical part of what distinguishes the included from the excluded, the active from the passive, in the new networked order of the information age. 178

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V. Conclusions and future directions for translation research This article set out to show how an interpretative analysis of ideology and ideational change enhances our understanding and explanations of policy developments. In making our case we examined New Labours ambitious policy programme for the information age in terms of e-government, e-democracy, digital social inclusion, and e-commerce. We have argued that New Labours public policies or programmatic beliefs for ICT are structured, dened and made sense of in terms of preceding ideological change, both epistemological and conceptual in form. These policies then contribute to the constitution of the economic, social and technological conditions (i.e., those associated with the information age) to which they claim to be responding. We have in this way defended a research agenda that employs political ideology analysis to understand the meaning and shape of public policy programmes. Such an approach interprets the ideological warranting conditions that underpin policy actions or programmatic beliefs and which render certain policy actions and beliefs (and not others) conceivable, plausible, justiable, and appropriate. In closing, we should emphasise that to uncover how policies are framed and dened by ideologies, however necessary and fruitful this may be, is not to explain the success or failure of these policies in practice. This would only be possible if ideologies, or resultant programmatic beliefs, were spread through unidirectional processes of diffusion. But an ideology or programmatic belief, no matter how formidable in itself, will not simply and ineluctably enrol the various subjects of its concern (e.g., citizens, businesses, public sector workers, voluntary bodies, technologies) and thus have effects. Anne Barlow and Simon Duncan offer a clear example of this from the eld of social policy. New Labours welfare to work policies and encouragement of marriage had assumed that citizens were driven primarily by their economic interest and so would respond to nancial incentives. In contrast, many citizens aspired above all to being a good mother and were more concerned with successful relationships than with marriage per se. When New Labours prescriptive policies met resistance, the government decided to make compliance with the policy compulsory. But going against citizens expressed aspirations in this way only engendered more resistance and did not make for effective policy.75 Like Barlow and Duncans example from social policy, there is already evidence that New Labours vision of the information age is not being adopted seamlessly, with a great many government technology projects being plagued by embarrassing problems during their development and deployment.76 One high-prole example of abortive failure was the UK benets payment card project. The objective was to introduce a magnetic card payment system for social security benets, which would be developed by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative. The project was eventually stopped after just three years, at the cost of approximately 1 billion, because the date for the delivery of the new technology was put back again and again. Likewise, the desire to integrate public services through information sharing has been hindered either because local councils or government departments had not 179

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got round to it,77 because of the Data Protection Act, or because certain organisational cultures, such as the police, are resistant to openness.78 David Wastells study of the implementation of New Labours 1999 White Paper Modernising Government in one local government authority offers an example of how New Labours e-government policy programme is being adapted in practice. His analysis nds that the e-government agenda was adopted only as a means to make local services more efcient, missing the New Labour governments hopes for improved policymaking and democracy. In particular, directors within the local authority remain wedded to a paternalist discourse, feeling that they knew what their communities needed, and so denied, misheard, or simply repelled New Labours e-government discourse that prescribed the re-orientation of services to t consumers needs and demands.79 These and other instances of policy failure, reversal and adaptation suggest a need for empirical study of the often messy translation process by which new programmatic beliefs, and the ideology that warrants and frames them, are interpreted and re-interpreted in local institutional sites during their implementation. While interpretative ideology analysis can inform the study of policy by locating broad ideational linkages, it is not possible to explain policy practice and outcomes from ideological discourse alone. As an ideology moves from policy to practice, as it translates from one time and space to another, it confronts other ideational and institutional elements which may resist, re-interpret, or transform it. Rather than talking of the diffusion of a new ideational element or programmatic belief, which connotes the unidirectional dissemination or transfer of a given entity from a single source, we here talk of translation, which connotes something dialectical and reciprocal, in which an entity is dened and constructed in the process of its movement and enactment.80 The concept of translation, in this way, captures how the transfer of ideas from one context to another is also an interpretative matter, a question of adaptation as well as adoption/non-adoption. With this in mind, we wish to promote a research agenda that continues to trace the effects of political ideologies as they move down through the various points of translation involved in policy implementation and practice.

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Notes and references

1. We would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their useful comments. Also, we would like to thank Rowan Tomlinson and David Berry for reading earlier drafts, and our doctoral supervisors, Stephen Coleman and Elizabeth Frazer respectively, for their general support. 2. D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd edition (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999). 3. To be clear, we are not suggesting that ideas and ideologies directly or inevitably determine actions and beliefs in the form of a rigorous causal explanation (if A, then B). Individuals act in terms of interpretations, and so interpretations do have (quasi-causal) effects, but they are never governed directly by them. Interpretations can be understood as providing warranting conditions that make particular actions or beliefs more conceivable reasonable, justiable or appropriate. For a discussion of the notion of quasi-causality in interpretive analysis see: F. Fischer, Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) pp. 15759.

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4. M. Bevir, New Labour: A study in ideology, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3 (2000), 277 301. 5. M. Callon, Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and sherman of St. Brieuc Bay, in J. Law (Ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge, 1986); S. Clegg, Frameworks of Power (London: Sage, 1989); B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987); J. Law (Ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination (London: Routledge, 1991). 6. Bevir op. cit., Ref. 4, p. 277. 7. Bevir, ibid. Also see M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 8. W.E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); M. Freeden, Editorial: Essential contestability and effective contestability, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9(1) (2004); W.B. Gallie, Essentially contested concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (19561957). 9. J. Goldstein and R.O. Keohane (Eds) Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change (Cornelly University Press, 1993). 10. S. Berman, The Social Democratic Moment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 11. Berman, ibid, p. 21. 12. Epistemology and ideology have a circular relationship. For example, Hayek viewed science through a conservative ideological lens coloured by his experience of the failure of states in Europe (K.R. Hoover, Economics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littleeld, 2003)). 13. See Chapter 3 of N. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) for a discussion of how the crisis of the welfare state and appropriate responses were dened in British political discourse. 14. M. Callon, J. Law and A. Rip cited in A. Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), p. 87. 15. M. Bevir, Narrating the British State: An interpretative critique of New Labours institutionalism, Review of International Political Economy, 10(3) (2003). In addition, in the New Labour political project, conceptual links and ideational developments may be empirically attachable to (though in our opinion not reducible to) the actions of certain key political actors. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article. However, OLoughlins forthcoming doctoral thesis, New College, University of Oxford, offers an example of this approach. 16. A. Blair, The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century (London: Fabian Society, 1998), p. 3. 17. A. Finlayson, Third Way theory, Political Quarterly (1999), G. McLennan, Travelling with vehicular ideas: The case of the Third Way, Economy and Society, 33(4) (2004). 18. In our view, the ideological role of opinion polls and increasingly used government consultations is a potentially interesting and fruitful (though often overlooked) research avenue for students of political ideology. Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose have plausibly argued that the opinionated public is a phenomenon that was historically made up or created (rather than simply discovered) by social scientic techniques of opinion polling. T. Osborne and N Rose, Do the social sciences create phenomena, British Journal of Sociology, 50(3) (1999). 19. A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Oxford: Polity, 1994), pp. 78104. 20. Finalyson op. cit., Ref. 17, p. 271. 21. On the former, see The Economist and Financial Times in the mid-to-late-1990s and K. Ohmae, The Borderless World (London: Collins, 1990). On the latter, see P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 22. M. Watson and C. Hay. The discourse of globalisation and the logic of no alternative: rendering the contingent necessary in the political economy of New Labour, Policy & Politics, 31(3) (2003), p. 390. 23. J. Dearlove, Globalisation and the study of British Politics, Politics, 20(2) (2000). 24. A. Blair and G. Schroeder, Third Way/Die Neue Mitte (London: The Labour Party, 1999), italics added. 25. A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford: California University Press, 1995); A. Giddens, The Third Way and Its Critics (Oxford: Polity, 2000); A. Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Oxford: Polity, 1998). 26. M. Bevir and D. OBrien, New Labour and the Public Sector in Britain, Public Administration Review, 61(5) (2001). 27. Central Ofce of Information, Our Information Age (London: Central Ofce of Information, 2001). 28. N. Fairclough. New Labour, New Language? (Routledge, London, 2000). 29. See F. Webster, Theories of the Information Society (London: Routledge, 2002), for a discussion of social scientic theories of the information society and related concepts.

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30. Mclennan, op. cit., Ref. 17. 31. Central Ofce of Information, op. cit., Ref. 27. 32. Department for Trade and Industry, Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Economy (London: HMSO, 1998). 33. K. Jayasuriya, Capability, freedom and the new social democracy, The Political Quarterly (2000). 34. R. Lister, Investing in the citizen-workers of the future: Transformations in citizenship and the state under New Labour, Social Policy & Administration, 37(5) (2003). 35. Rose, op. cit., Ref. 13. 36. Fairclough, op. cit., Ref. 28, p. 120. 37. D. Marquand, Moralists and Hedonists in D. Marquand and A. Seldon (Eds) The Ideas That Shaped Postwar Britain (London: Fontana, 1996). 38. For instance, the Sure Start initiative and child tax credits. 39. Home Ofce White Paper: Respect and ResponsibilityTaking a Stand Against Anti-Social Behaviour, March 2003. 40. Donor Information Consultation: Providing Information about Gamete or Embryo Donors, Department of Health, 19 December 2001. 41. Home Ofce White Paper, Protecting the Public, November 2002. 42. In September 2004 the Food Standards Agency launched a campaign to reduce the level of salt in diets. 43. Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 311. 44. A. Blair, Beveridge Lecture, Toynbee Hall, London, 18 March, reproduced in R. Walker (Ed.) Ending Child Poverty (Bristol: Policy Press, 1999). 45. Cited in Fairclough, op. cit., Ref. 28, p. 49. 46. Labour has made efforts to encourage risk-taking and entrepreneurialism amongst businesses. In 1999 Blair offered a 50 million fund for entrepreneurs, administered through regional development agencies; 2001 saw a Research and Development Tax Credit for small rms; and in 2003 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, doubled the investment limit for Venture Capital Trusts and Enterprise Investment Schemes from 100,000 to 200,000. 47. S. White, Rights and responsibilities: A social democratic perspective, in A Gamble and T. Wright (Eds) The New Social Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 48. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990) suggest that given that some concepts structure our everyday lives, and that some concepts are metaphorical, then metaphors can structure everyday lives. Network is a metaphorical concept, a visual notion of what society looks like. Another would be Durkheims metaphorical concept of society as sui generis, a whole pez, Society and its Metaphors (New York: Continuum, organism that is more than the sum of its parts (J. Lo 2003). However, Thompson (G.F. Thompson, Is all the world a complex network? Economy and Society, 33(3) (2004)) suggest that in the social science literature network is no longer a mere metaphor. Incorporating concepts and theories from the physical sciences, several works now assert that physical structures, biological evolution and social life all contain the same network logic as an underlying principle. Thus, their social aspects can be accessed immediately by considering them as mathematically specied systems directly analogous to physical ones (ibid, p. 414). Given that social science literature has informed New Labours ideological developments, this new use of the network concept might be expected to have effects on future ideological change. 49. M. Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reection on the Internet, Business and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 1. 50. M. Bevir, op. cit., Ref. 15. 51. See Chapter 4 of A. Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: Athlone, 2001). 52. G.F. Thompson, op. cit., Ref. 48. 53. S. Bastow and J. Martin, Third Way Discourse: European Ideologies in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). 54. A gure of 90 percent seems more likely (BBC Big changes for government site, BBC News Online, March 1, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3522649.stm (2004) falling short partly because of a realisation that getting people to use services was more important than simply getting services online (M. Cross, Hoping to become a favourite, The Guardian, 7 October, 2004). This was mainly because simple, single-department services were e-enabled rst, whilst left until last have been multi-departmental services such as renewing tax discs for cars, which requires access to MOT and insurance records held by private companies. 55. Cabinet Ofce, Channels Framework (London: Ofce of the E-Envoy, 2002), http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/ documents/channels_framework_2002-09-30.pdf 56. J. Hudson, Digitising the structures of Government: The UKs information age government agenda, Policy and Politics, 30 (2002).

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57. M. Cross, New head on the block, The Guardian, 9th September 2004. 58. Kable (2004) ID plans cause alarm, 9 June. http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Frontpage/B672AA24734E98C580256EAE003A1F2C 59. J. Hudson, op. cit., Ref. 56. 60. Consider, for instance, the current work of the London Borough of Camden, in collaboration with the Greater London Authority, to develop a modular e-democracy tool-kit as part of the Practical e-Democracy in London Project. For details of the larger Local National e-Democracy project see http://envoy.northlincsnet. com/ (consulted 3 February 2005). 61. Electoral Commission, European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill, section 6, 2003. 62. DfEE The Learning Age (London: HMSO, 1998). 63. R. Prabhaker, Capability, responsibility, human capital and the Third Way, Political Quarterly, 73(1) (2002). 64. Barry, op. cit., Ref. 51. 65. See http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy/ 66. UK Online, Annual report, 2002, http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/00/04/01/04000401.pdf 67. Accenture eGovernment Leadership: High Performance, Maximum Value, The Government Executive Series, 2004, http://www.accenture.com/xdoc/en/industries/government/gove_egov_value.pdf 68. See http://getting.ukonline.gov.uk/oee/getstarted.nsf/sections/xhomepage/$le/home.htm 69. See www.worktrain.gov.uk 70. By 2002 government humbly announced it was only the second best, in the report The Worlds Most Effective Policies for the E-Economy. See http://www.eenvoy.gov.uk/Resources/ITReportsArticle/fs/ en?CONTENT_ID 4000004 & chk R7qwkr 71. Performance and Innovation Unit, Electronic Networks: Challenges for the Next Decade, 2002, http://www. number-10.gov.uk/su/en/downloads/su_electronic.pdf 72. Department for Education and Skills, Survey of Information and Communications Technology in Schools, 1999, http://www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SBU/b000125/ictnal.pdf 73. R. Plant, The Third Way (Working Papers, 1998; available from www.fes.de/fulltext/bueros/london/ 00203.html.) 74. M. Castells, op. cit., Ref. 49. 75. A. Barlow and S. Duncan, Supporting families? New Labours communitarianism and the rationality mistake: Part I, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 22(1) (2000); A. Barlow and S. Duncan, New Labours communitarianism, supporting families and the rationality mistake: Part II, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 22(2) (2000). 76. H. Margetts, Information Technology in Government: Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1999). 77. G. Jones, Efciency drive could release billions, says study, Daily Telegraph, February 17, 2004. 78. S. Whittle and M. Cross, Two tier trail blazers, The Guardian, March 24, 2004. 79. D.G. Wastell, Organizational discourse as a social defence: Taming the tiger of electronic government (paper presented at the IFIP Working Group, 8.2 Conference, Barcelona, 2002). 80. M. Callon, op. cit., Ref. 5; S. Clegg, op. cit., Ref. 5; B. Latour, op. cit., Ref. 5; J. Law (Ed.) op. cit., Ref. 5; Wastell, op. cit., Ref. 79.

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