How do empty signifiers lose credibility? The caseof commissioning in English local government

This paper critically analyzes how empty signifiers – demands which have been ‘tendentially’ emptied of meaning to represent an infinite number of demands – gain and lose credibility. I mobilize Laclauian discourse theory and a logics of critical explanation approach to examine the case of an English County Council and its Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) articulating ‘commissioning’ as an empty signifier in its new reform to address the Government’s post-2010 austerity agenda. The research characterizes how empty signifiers become formulated by discourses, gain appeal and lose credibility, demonstrating how such ‘universal’ demands require constant work from strategically placed individuals to avoid drifting into floating signifiers, i.e. becoming disputed. The paper makes two contributions: first to our understanding of how empty signifiers lose credibility; second, via its mobilization of concepts of empty and floating signifiers within a case study, into how ‘national’ signifiers such as commissioning have been mobilized by local authorities in diverse ways since the 2008 financial crash.