The Social Construction of Housing Management Discourse: Objectivity, Rationality and Everyday Practice

This paper explores the ways in which housing management is socially constructed as bureaucratic reality. Housing management is the function in local authorities and housing associations that provides and manages subsidized rented housing. Increasingly, public housing is taken up by people dependent on welfare benefits who cannot afford any other form of tenure. As a result, housing staff have to take on a welfare role that sometimes gets blurred with that provided by other welfare agencies. At the same time, cuts in budgets and subsidies available to housing organizations means that public housing is a scarce resource that has to be rationed. This process of rationing is usually based on a system that prioritizes people's housing needs. These needs are defined and determined differently by different housing organizations. Similarly, the provision of social housing is allocated differently by different organizations. However, a dominant discourse within housing management and other welfare bureaucracies is that the ways in which they deliver and manage their services is an objective and rational process which treats people fairly and consistently. Drawing on a social constructionist framework, this paper challenges these concepts and argues that the allocation and management of housing is essentially subjective. It is argued that these concepts are used to justify and legitimate an unequal process of allocation of a scarce resource. The analysis of data generated by in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in two housing organizations reveals the competing discourses and practices which take place within a version of reality constructed as objective and rational.