Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

In Search of Ordinary People: The

Problematic Politics of Popular Participation
John Clarke
Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

In this article, I explore the contemporary political and governmental enthusiasm for the
participation of ordinary people in fields of economic, social, and political life. I sketch
some examples of this growing enthusiasm, beginning with the transformation of welfare
states. I then explore different accounts of the centrality of ordinary people to contemporary
political and governmental strategies, considering the emergence of advanced liberal efforts
of construct responsible subjects; the role of popular participation in neoliberalisms
de-politicizing tendencies; and the ambiguous place of the people in authoritarian populist
politics. I consider the capacity of the idea of ordinary people to connect different sites of
political and governmental innovationand the failure of ordinary people to live up to
their idealized status.
doi:10.1111/cccr.12011

Ordinary people are the object of proliferating political and governmental strategies
that seek to activate them, enroll them, and make them responsible for their own,
and others, well-being. They are addressed as the potential agents of enterprise,
development, renewal, governance, well-being, order, andin the UKa Big
Society (Cameron, 2009). Rather than being merely the objects of governmental
interventionspopulations to be managed or improvedordinary people are
increasingly identified as the objects, subjects, and modality of governing the social.
Governments seek to discover and enroll ordinary people; they seek to empower
them as agents; and they are the means through which desired social, economic, and
political transformations might be accomplished. In what follows, I explore some of
the incarnations of ordinary people in political and governmental practice in the UK
context, and some of the ways in which their current salience might be explained.
Ordinary people represent a significant political and analytical puzzle. After
exploring what constitutes the virtuous quality of ordinary people, I consider three
possible routes to accounting for their contemporary visibility. I begin from the
Foucauldian with constituting empowered and responsible selves, suggesting that

Corresponding author: John Clarke; e-mail: john.clarke@open.ac.uk

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although this view illuminates many contemporary governmental strategies, there are
important questions about how the enrollment of ordinary people works in practice.
Second, I consider critical accounts of the deployment of participatory strategies
in contemporary neoliberalism. Again, while acknowledging the importance of the
analysis, I suggest that the peculiar, or even perverse, confluence (Dagnino, 2007)
between insurgent and dominant conceptions of participation is worth further
attention. Finally, I ask whether the current coalition government in the UK forms
part of a wider authoritarian populism and, if so, how we might deal with the
paradox of unpopular populism. In each of these discussions, I am keen to keep
ordinary people in a sort of double focusas idealized objects of governmental
desire and as rather intractable and potentially recalcitrant sites of agency which
might not fit perfectly with the ways in which they are imagined and addressed.
Activate the ordinary: New modes of governing the social

Ordinary people are being activated as citizens and workers in the transformations
of welfare states. The discourse of moving welfare from a process in which passive
recipients absorb publicly provided welfare (more or less gratefully) to a situation in
which people actively promote and manage their own well-being draws on a variety
of political perspectives, but at its center is a vision of ordinary people as active,
self-governing, citizens. Studies of reform reveal different models and practices of
activation (e.g., Betzelt & Bothfeldt, 2011; Hvinden & Johansson, 2007; Newman
& Tonkens, 2011; van Berkel, 2010), but in this context what interests me most is
the conception of activation as a process of bringing to life the capacities, talents,
and self-knowledge of ordinary people. As welfare users and consumers, ordinary
people are being addressed as such knowledgeable selvescapable of knowing their
own needs and identifying how they should best be met (see, e.g., Clarke, Newman,
Smith, Vidler, & Westmarland, 2007; Needham, 2011). Whether parents selecting
schools for their children, patients seeking medical treatment, or adults needing
forms of social care, welfare reforms in the UK have sought to position ordinary
people as knowledgeable, decision-making agents whose active involvement in these
processes will both deliver better results for them (as individuals and families) and
improve system efficiency and effectiveness at the same time. This view was central to
the changes to public service developed by New Labour governments between 1997
and 2010, as articulated by then Prime Minister Blair in 2004:
In reality, I believe people do want choice, in public services as in other services.
But anyway, choice isnt an end in itself. It is one important mechanism to
ensure that citizens can indeed secure good schools and health services in their
communities. Choice puts the levers in the hands of parents and patients so that
they as citizens and consumers can be a driving force for improvement in their
public services. We are proposing to put an entirely different dynamic in place to
drive our public services; one where the service will be driven not by the
government or by the manager but by the userthe patient, the parent, the
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pupil and the law-abiding citizen. (Tony Blair, quoted in The Guardian, June 24,
2004, p. 1)
This view of empowering ordinary peoplein their various situated
identitiesextends well beyond the fields of welfare and public service reform. For
example, approaches to reforming public government and governance have placed
an increasing premium on the active participation of ordinary people. Anxiety
about declining political legitimacyof both national and local governmenthas
produced an enthusiasm for participatory processes and practices (e.g., Barnes,
Newman, & Sullivan, 2007; Mahony, 2008; Mahony, Newman, & Barnett, 2010;
Neveu, 2007). Although such participatory practices certainly take very different
forms, they are mobilized through a discursive register in which the value of engaging
ordinary people in the mix of political and administrative decisions affecting them
and their locality is a central and typically uncontested value. Such participatory
orientations contain a more or less explicit critique of both existing forms of political
representation and the technocratic culture of governmental administration. Such
contrasts are visible across a wide set of institutional settings: For example, Nancy
Thumim (2009, 2010) has explored the ways in which museums invite ordinary
people to engage in processes of self-representation. In the following section, I will
return to these contrasts and the positive gloss that they attribute to the ordinariness
of ordinary people.
Such participatory orientations are paralleled in approaches to governing forms
of social or public provision. In the UK, particularly, public service reforms have
been accompanied by an approach to organizational governance that allocates a central role to lay representation: from parent governors in schools, through tenant
representative in social housing, to lay participants in apparently scientific domains
(e.g., the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, established by New Labour to
advise on medical best practice issues). Such developments have identified lay
perspectives as an essential element of governing, even though, in practice, there are
important issues about who represents the lay perspective and what is at stake in
such representation (see, inter alia, Davies, Wetherell, & Barnett, 2007; McDermont,
2010; McKee & Cooper, 2007; Saward, 2009, 2010, on the problem of political representation more generally). Equally, ordinary people are constantly being summoned
to the processes of self-governance in the guise of communities. Neighborhoods,
localities, and communities have become one of the favored scales, levels, or sites
of governing the social in the UK and elsewhere (Mooney & Neal, 2009). Previous
New Labour governments were strongly committed to mobilizing communities (for
community development, community safety, community regeneration, community
cohesion, and more). For example, in the 2008 White Paper Communities in Control:
Real People, Real Power, the government argued that:
As well as the feelings of satisfaction, fulfilment and personal growth that active
citizenship brings, community empowerment can also have wider benefits for
society. It can:
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support more cohesive and integrated communities. As individuals engage with

their neighbours, with community groups and local decision makers on how
to tackle shared concerns, there is more interaction between people of different
backgrounds and more emphasis on shared goals. Greater openness about decision
making and greater involvement in those decisions can remove perceptions of
injustice that can fuel extremism
help revive civic society and local democracy as more people become directly
involved in the things that affect themwhether it is their local neighbourhoods,
schools, things to do for young people, or practical steps in tackling big problems
like climate change
create mechanisms of citizen participation (for example systems of accountability,
redress and compensation) which help drive forward continuous improvements
in the quality and efficiency of public services such as the NHS, police, criminal
justice system and local council services, and engage people in delivering successful
outcomes
it can build a strong civil society where committed individuals, community
groups, voluntary organisations and social enterprises seek solutions to some
of the difficult problems facing contemporary society, strengthening public
debate and building support for change. (Department of Communities and Local
Government, 2008, pp. 2122)
This view of communities as the site of an ordinariness that can be activated to add
social and political value has been maintained by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat
Coalition government that came to power in 2010. In that alliance, a long-standing
Liberal Democrat enthusiasm for localism and communities encountered an equally
long-standing Conservative antistatism, glossed by the Conservative leader David
Cameron in terms of a commitment to create a Big Society. Much discussed, and
attracting little enthusiasm, Camerons idea of the Big Society nonetheless continues
the theme of transferring power to ordinary people:
The first step is to redistribute power and control from the central state and its
agencies to individuals and local communities.
That way, we can create the opportunity for people to take responsibility. This is
absolutely in line with the spirit of the agethe post-bureaucratic age . . .
So I am confident that a major redistribution of power can really help us tackle
our stubborn social problems and our three key approaches will be
decentralisation, transparency and accountability. Our plans for decentralisation
are based on a simple human insight: if you give people more responsibility, they
behave more responsibly.
. . . This decentralisation of power from the central to the local will not just
increase responsibility, it will lead to innovation, as people have the freedom to
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try new approaches to solving social problems, and the freedom to copy what
works elsewhere. (Cameron, 2009)
Although some of the elements differ, the enrollment of ordinary people remains
the central device for imagining new ways of governing the social. Although I have
drawn my examples here from the UK, similar trends involving the valorization
of ordinary people (as individuals, families, and communities) recur elsewhere.
Wherever welfare states are being reformed, ordinary people are being activated;
where the political process lacks reach and legitimacy, popular participation is
solicited; and where challenges of poverty, inequality, or social dislocation exist,
ordinary people are to be empowered to solve them. For instance, social development
through microcredit or womens empowerment aims at similar enrollments (e.g.,
Elyachar, 2005; Sharma, 2008). Although each site involves a specific assemblage
of politics, policies, and practices (and I do not mean to underestimate their
distinctiveness), there does seem to be something compelling about the ordinariness
of ordinary people in the current period. What is it that makes them such an object
of governmental desire?
Valorizing the ordinary: Governing without politics?

It is clear that ordinary people are desired: They are imagined as having something
distinctive and different to offer the processes of governing the social. Here, I want
to draw out two other aspects hinted at earlier. The first concerns the relationship
between ordinary people and politics; the second concerns the relationship between
ordinary people and technocratic administration. Both aspects involve a view of
ordinary people as adding value to the processes of governing.
I have argued elsewhere (Clarke, 2010; Newman & Clarke, 2009) that a powerful
feature of the figure of ordinary people involves a view of them as not political.
Rather they are seen as standing simultaneously above and below politics. They appear
above politics because they are not tarnished by the sordid, self-seeking obsessions
with power and interest that are seen to motivate politics. In this representation,
politics is grasped first and foremost as a dirty business (see Helms, 2006).
Politicians are venal, self-interested, and concerned to gain and keep power. In
contrast, ordinary people are motivated by their quotidian concerns: the everyday
preoccupations of everyday lives. At the same time, they are also below politics:
Those same everyday preoccupations are local and particular, operating beneath
the radar of political organization, mobilization, and institutional structures. Being
grounded in the everyday ensures that ordinary people are not distracted by big
ideas or ideologies. But their ordinariness equips them to face the challenges of
governing:
We believe that citizens and communities are capable of taking difficult
decisions, balancing competing demands and solving complex problems
themselves, given the right support and resources. We do not think that only an
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enlightened and altruistic class of political leaders and administrators can deliver
what is good for people. We trust people to have the common sense and
ingenuity to run their own affairs and to be the authors of their own destiny.
(Department of Communities and Local Government, 2008, p. 13)
This double movementidentifying ordinary people as both above and below
politicscarries with it some problems. It is articulated by governments and
politicians and thus evokes popular skepticism, even as it tries to summon popular
participation. It also runs into problems when ordinary people act politically,
because there is then a need to redesignate them: as activists (rather than active)
or as special interests rather than the embodiment of an unarticulated general
interest. Graham Martin has talked about this enrollment of ordinary people as
involving a conception of them as a strange mix of representativeness, diversity,
ordinariness, knowledge and expertise (2007, p. 46). This might be unpacked a little
further: They are representative (by virtue of being ordinary); and they can serve
as representatives (as long as they represent the generality of ordinary people, not
any particularity). They should, however, embody the diversity of ordinary people:
Representativeness has, thanks to the challenges of social movements, taken on a
social and political complexity thatat times and unevenlydemands a sort of
physical analog of the currently visible elements of diversity (gender, ethnicity, age,
disability, etc.). But embodying (an element of) diversity does not excuse acting only
as the representative of a narrow, sectional, or specific interest. Ordinary people
bring lay knowledge to governing processes, different from the knowledge held by
those who run governing systems. Ordinary people can speak of the effects of those
systems (as users, consumers, beneficiaries, etc.); they can testify to the workings (or
nonworkings) of the processes; and they can speak of their own experiences, needs,
and desires. They arein the phrase of the disability movementexperts of their
own condition.
In this guise, they are the antidote to the failings of technocratic social administration. Whether in the form of professionals or bureaucrats, multiple and overlapping
critiques have challenged the authority of institutionalized welfare service provision in
the name of users, consumers, and citizens (Clarke & Newman, 1997). So, grounded
expertisethe self-knowledge of ordinary peoplestands as an alternative pole
of authority and legitimacy for service planning and delivery. Of course, this is
not a simple liberation of ordinary people from the dead hand of monopolistic
welfare bureaucracies, staffed by power hungry professionals and depersonalized rule
following bureaucrats. Instead, the governance of public services forms a contested
space in which ordinary people are simultaneously consulted, listened to, spoken for,
and tutored into better and more appropriate forms of knowledge. For ordinary
people (or those representing ordinary people), the problem is that their knowledge has only limited currency (the lay perspective); is particularized (rather than
the abstract/general categories of being business-like); and risks being dismissed as
merely anecdotal. In their study of public service governance, McDermont and
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her colleagues explored the relationship between elected (political) representatives,

tenant representatives, and the professional staff in the boards of social housing
organizations. They noted the problematic status of tenant representatives (not least
around questions of what it meant to represent), and pointed to the managerialized
context in which governing took place:
On the RSL board, New Public Management values were reiterated time and
again, from the regulator, the officers, and even the tenant board member who
had inspected other landlords and knew what the regulator wanted.
Managerialized politics had taken hold. The concept of the well managed
organisation was taken for granted (Clarke & Newman, 1997, p. 143) and
political decisions become de-politicized in the skilled and expert board.
(McDermont, Cowan, & Prendergast, 2009, p. 697)
In a variety of contexts, the empowered ordinary person taking up a role in
processes of governing the social enters fields of practice that are framed by other
forms of authority. As Thumim argues about the processes of self-representation,
ordinary people and their views do not enter an empty field:
When institutions invite members of the public to represent themselves,
processes of mediation may ensure that the participants stay in their place by
producing representations that are recognisably amateur and ordinary, and
therefore located at the bottom end of a well-established hierarchy of legitimacy.
It might be that representations of ordinary people are only legitimate if they
do not challenge this positioning. Moreover, ordinary citizens must produce
representations of experience; the legitimacy of ordinary self-representations in
established systems of expression depends on having and representing
experience. (2010, p. 301)
Nevertheless, the symbolic valorization of ordinary people continues to play
a powerful role in contemporary political and governmental discourses. In what
follows, however, I want to distinguish more carefully between governmental and
political, as these two terms lead to rather different views of the enrollment of ordinary
people. The first points to a Foucauldian concern with governmentality and, more
particularly, the governmentalization of responsible subjects. The second leads to an
engagement with the political project of neoliberalism. In the final section, I explore
the celebration of ordinary people as the (contradictory) focus of authoritarian
populist politics.
Becoming ordinary: Governing through responsibility

There has been a fecund field of Foucauldian scholarship that has explored the
varieties of liberal governmentality, with a particular interest in the constitution
of responsibilized subjects. In this view, a variety of advanced or neoliberal discourses and practices have (re-)constituted citizens as actuarial subjects (OMalley,
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2004); as communal and consuming subjects (Rose, 1999); as enterprising

or self-sustaining selves (McDonald & Marston, 2006); as empowered citizens
(Cruikshank, 1999); and as mediatized responsible selves freed from government
(Ouellette & Hay, 2008). The movement from expansive or welfarist liberalism
to advanced liberalism is characterized by this shift toward the production of
self-governing subjects (Dean, 1999; Petersen, Barns, Dudley, & Harris, 1999).
This orientation has been particularly productive in drawing attention to the
changing sites and modes of governing the social, pointing to both the changing
forms of state intervention and the emerging forms of governing that take place
beyond the state as other agencies and agents are drawn into the business of
constructing responsible subjects capable of conducting themselves and their lives in
the desired new ways. The diversity of sites and practices through which responsibility
is induced continues to growas does the centrality of the figure of the responsible
subject to governmental imaginaries. The responsible subject is the medium through
which the reward of autonomy is distributed (what New Labour in the UK used to
call earned autonomy); it is the benchmark against which subjects are judged (and
the failure to behave responsibly may carry severe penalties); and it establishes the
norm against which irresponsibility can be defined (see, e.g., Brown & Baker, 2012).
The ordinaryhere in the form of the responsible/responsibilized individualis
always normative, always imagined as a particular sort of valorized subject. But the
failure to be ordinary in this normative sense can bring hard consequencesas
Bauman (1998) has pointed out in relation to the new norm of consumption; as
Brown and Baker (2012) show in the field of mental health; and as Wacquant
(2009) and others have shown in relation to the criminalization of the poor and
marginalized.
This attention to the governmental enrollment of ordinary peopleand the
efforts to constitute them as self-governing responsible subjectshighlights the
work involved in being and becoming ordinary. It also makes visible the potential
problems and pitfalls of producing ordinary people in the work of governing
(Clarke, 2012b). I suggest that it is important to take the Foucauldian interest in the
governmental beyond programmatic concerns with designs and strategies into the
rather messier practices through which subjects are summoned and enrolled (Clarke,
2009). For example, in a study of citizenconsumers, we found that one recurrent
device through which the empowered user of public services was to be disciplined
through the norm of the reasonable consumer:
All the organizations we dealt with saw the processes of involvement and
engagement with the public as a means of constructing reasonable consumers.
At an individual level, provider organizations saw encounters with users as a site
for remaking at least some of them into self-directing or self-managing
subjects . . .
In more collective forms, organisations treated forms of
public involvement as a site in which both organisations and the public could be
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educated. Service providers could learn about user/public perceptions, wants

and expectations while the public could become knowledgeable in service
termslearning to appreciate the constraints, conditions and calculations of
professional or organisational knowledge. (Clarke et al., 2007, pp. 119120)
The valorization of ordinary people in processes of governing the social can thus
be seen as a contradictory and unfinished process. Ordinary people are valorized
for their difference from existing forms of authority (political or technocratic), yet
their enactment in specific sites is troubled by questions of authorityin relation
to both politics and professional expertise (see also Needham, 2011; Thumim, 2010;
and see also the important discussion in Carpentier & Hannot, 2009). A second
implication centers on the performance of ordinariness: When summoned to take
their part in politics and governance processes, ordinary people are expected to look
and behave like ordinary people. This has implications for both their recruitment and
their conduct. There is an emerging body of work that addresses these two critical
aspects of the enrollment of ordinary people. First, there is the problem of their
recruitmentpeople do not necessarily appear when they are summoned. So, in a
recent Ph.D. study, Ellen Stewart (2012) explored the puzzle of nonparticipation by
young people in health care who simply did not hear, or did not understand the call
to be active participants. In other fields, too, agents and agencies trying to recruit
members of the public complain about always encountering the usual suspects
rather than the genuinely ordinary (Needham, 2011). But, even if they do turn
up, ordinary people may not act like the people they are supposed to bethey may
be difficult, intractable, recalcitrant, or insistent. They may turn out to be activist
rather than merely active, subversive rather than reasonable (Barnes & Prior, 2009;
Newman & Clarke, 2009). In these different ways, ordinary people may turn out
to be both less and more than their image in governmental fantasies.
In this section, I have tried to indicate how the Foucauldian attention to the
governmental work of producing responsible subjects provides one point of entry to
thinking about the centrality of ordinary people to contemporary politics and policy.
As advanced liberal governmentality seeks to produce empowered, autonomous, and
self-governing subjects, it is precisely ordinary people who will be the object and
subject of governmental strategies. However, I have also tried to suggest that the
enrollment of ordinary people may require considerable governing work, and may
not work according to plan. In the following section, I turn to an alternative way of
viewingand critiquingthe contemporary salience of ordinary people.
The veneer of participation: Neoliberalism as de-politicization

A rather different view of popular participation and its enrollment of ordinary people
has been advanced by commentators who identify it as one of the characteristic
modes of contemporary neoliberalism (especially in Anglo-American settings). In
this view, participation displaces politics by the promise of involvement, consultation,
and participation in a field of activities that have little or no purchase on significant
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decisions. In this way, participation furthers the larger processes of privatization,

marketization, and the global dominance of capital. Abram (2007) has written of
participatory de-politicization, suggesting that is precisely the weakening of the
public sphere under neoliberal rule that enables the proliferation of participation. It is
the absence of effective political power that enables such forms of public involvement,
and provides a marker of how neo-liberalism has truly taken hold (p. 133).
In a related vein, Couldry has argued that neoliberalism has produced a crisis of
voice . . . in economic, political and cultural domains (2009, p. 581; see also Couldry,
2010) in which gestural offerings of choice and consultation are systematically
disconnected from any larger collective politics. Instead, they are treated as localized,
particularized, and individualized matters. He suggests that: neoliberal Britain
provides some clear examples of the conflict between the claim to offer voice in,
say, public servicesinteractive consumer choiceand a complete failure to grasp
what listening, and the broader value of voice, might entail beyond pure formalism
(Couldry, 2009, p. 581). This systematic de-politicization of voice, he claims, generates
a paradox that voice can apparently be offered, without any attention to whether it
is matched by processes for listening to, and registering voice which is part of the
banal oxymoron of neoliberal democracy (Couldry, 2009, p. 581). Graeme Turner
(2010) has drawn an important distinction between demotic and democratic
forms of voice in the increasing visibility of ordinary people in contemporary media.
Critical accounts of the development of models of choice, consultation, and
participation during the last 20 years provide a compelling connection to a larger
political projectneoliberalismthat has reworked the relationships between the
economic, political, and social domains in profound ways. In particular, they point
to the de-politicizing quality of the neoliberal project or, perhaps more accurately, to
its antidemocratic character. Others authors such as Wendy Brown (2005) and Colin
Crouch (2004) have highlighted this tendency: not just the desire to subordinate the
social and political domains to economic logics of calculation, but the quest to dismantle the institutions, practices, and relationships that might (however imperfectly)
represent alternative logics of calculation (and social imaginaries). Nevertheless, the
approach through neoliberalism occludes some important questionsboth about
neoliberalism as a political project and about the ambiguous politics of participation.
I think it is important to ask what problems the neoliberal project imagines might
be overcome by enrolling ordinary people into processes of consultation, choice,
and participation. Personalizing social care, participatory local events, or empowering active citizens should not be read as dropping fully formed from the pages
of the neoliberal playbook. They might better be understood as accommodations
withand appropriations ofother political projects and social imaginaries. Movements of disabled people launched demands for independent living that provided
a key foundation for personalization (Needham, 2011). Insurgent democratic
movements in Latin America provided modelsand discoursesof local participation (Dagnino, 2007). Empowerment emerges from different political tendencies
(see, e.g., Sharma, 2008, on the assemblage of neoliberal, Gandhian, and feminist
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conceptions in India). I think it is useful to draw out three issues for thinking about
the ambiguous politics of enrolling ordinary people.
The first is simply that neoliberalism is itself a mobile assemblage (Ong, 2006). It
borrows, adapts, ventriloquizes, and translates elements of other political discourses
in the quest to make itself meaningful, acceptable, and desirable in the many contexts
that it seeks to dominate. Perhaps, it is more accurate to say that neoliberalism
mutates across time and space such that although there is a preliminary grammar
of neoliberalism (Kingfisher, 2002), it is always in the process of being revised and
reinvented to take account of its changing circumstances. The second point is that
those circumstances always include the recurring failure of the neoliberal projectthe
failure to make the world it imagines come true in practice. Peck argues that
Neoliberalism . . . has only ever existed in impure form, indeed can only exist
in messy hybrids. Its utopian vision of a free society and a free economy is
ultimately unrealizable. Yet the pristine clarity of its ideological apparition, the
free market, coupled with the inevitable failure to arrive at this elusive
destination, confer a significant degree of forward momentum on the neoliberal
project. Ironically, neoliberalism possesses a progressive, forward-leaning
dynamic by virtue of the very unattainability of its idealized destination . . . .
Beneath the mythology of market progress lies a turgid reality of neoliberalism
variously failing and flailing forward. (2010, p. 7)
This sense of the contradictory dynamics of neoliberalism is a powerful one but
it needs to be complemented by an attention to the uncomfortable cohabitations
between the neoliberal project and other politics (as indeed Peck recognizes). In a
recent article, Jeremy Gilbert has argued that neoliberalismand its antidemocratic
tendency in particularmight be seen as not just a response to the economic
problems of Atlantic Fordism but also as a response to the political problems
generated by insurgent social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This delivers my
third issue: the importance of grasping the political fields in which neoliberalism is
formed (and reformed) as posing problems to be overcome, including the challenges
that both residual and emergent political formations pose to the dominant (in
Raymond Williams terms: 1977). Gilbert argues that the present conjunctureat
least in Euro-Atlantic societiesis marked by a profound mixture of heightened
personal freedoms and systematic de-politicization: a mixture that is not merely the
effect of neoliberalisms economizing logic:
The point I want to reiterate and to emphasise here, however, is that this
situation has not arisen by accident, but because it serves a very powerful set of
interests and protects them from real threats; post-democracy is the outcome of
neoliberalisms attempts to neutralise the threat posed by the democratic surge
(Huntingtons phrase, but I like it, and will keep using it). If we look now at the
demands of that moment, at the critique of limited representative democracy
which informed the programmes of the New Left, at the pioneering of
decentralised and nonhierarchical forms of collective action and
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decision-making in the womens movement, at the rise of demands for industrial

democracy in the labour movement at this time, at the histories of autogestion
and autonomia, its clear that not only on a symbolic level, but at the level of
institutions and government, the hope for a substantial extension,
transformation and reinvention of democratic institutions was a central element
of that surge, and one which posed a tangible threat to the sovereignty of capital.
(Gilbert, 2012)
This is a very suggestive analysis, not just about the origins of neoliberalism as
a political project but also about its continuing difficulties in relation to insurgent
movements and mobilizations. It locates the politics of popular participation differently, then and nowrecognizing mobilizations that ask not just for more, but
for better and different ways of making decisions about ways of living together. This
looks like more than a founding moment (even if it was a significant one) and perhaps
identifies a recurring set of tensions and antagonisms which neoliberal strategies try
to reconcile and contain in the individuated, particularized, and localized forms that
Couldry identifies. Here, we might locate the contradictory foundations of personalization, choice, and participation in and around public services and their governance.
Insurgent movementsof service users, local activists, and morewere part of the
challenge to statist social democracy, even if their challenges have been contained
in limited and imperfect settlements. Nevertheless, such attempts at containment
have often proved imperfect as activist citizens, users, and workers seek to work the
spaces of power (Newman, 2012) and, in the process, challenge the limits of the
social and political settlements.
My aim in this section has been to develop a reading of forms of popular participation through the focus on neoliberalism as a political project. By emphasizing the
mobile, imperfect, and contradictory forms that neoliberalism has taken, it becomes
possible to trace some of the ambiguous politics that underpin the valorization
and enrollment of ordinary people into the business of governing. In the following
section, I return to some of the ways in which ordinary people have been summoned in contemporary UK politicsparticularly in the populist address of the
2010 Conservative-led Coalition government and its commitment to austerity.
All in this together: Ordinary people and austerity politics

Ordinary people have been celebrated and valorized in a series of populist dramas
that rely on a series of distinctions and identifications: most crudely the distinction
between the people and the power bloc, variously articulated as Them, the ruling
elite, the political classes, or similar categorizations that express the social and political
distance between ordinary people and those who rule. Populism also legitimates a
challenge to the distinction between the people and the power blocby politicians
who are not part of the power bloc; who are not members of the ruling classes,
dominant elite, etc. Recent British politics has seen a number of variations on
this themethe Thatcherite challenge to the old consensus; New Labours rich
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enthusiasm for the people (indeed, real people, understood as a series of hard
working, responsible families); and the current Coalition that attempts to represent
itself as the champion of ordinary (British) people in a number of ways. However,
even more than its predecessors, the current Conservative leadership (and its Liberal
Democrat allies) have struggled to find a stably populist voice through which to
articulate the program of fiscal austerity and state reform to which they have
committed themselves. In one characteristic rhetorical move, the prime minister
attempted to weave togetherness, fairness, freedom, and responsibility into one
(austere) national purpose:
We are all in this together, and we will get through this together.
We will carry out Britains unavoidable deficit reduction plan in a way that
strengthens and unites the country.
We are not doing this because we want to, driven by theory or ideology. We are
doing this because we have to, driven by the urgent truth that unless we do,
people will suffer and our national interest will suffer . . .
Freedom, fairness, responsibility: those are the values that drive this government,
and they are the values that will drive our efforts to deal with our debts and turn
this economy around. (Cameron, 2010b, p. 5)
This conception of a national we (despite the increasingly distinct political
cultures of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) is located in typically populist
pieces of myth-making about the national character. Freedom (to be enterprising),
responsibility (the alter ego of freedom), and fairness are preferred as the current
elements of a national character. Fairness is a trope inherited from New Labour
who were consistent enthusiasts for constructing a future fair for all (Labour
Party, 2010). This was more grudgingly, but more accurately, articulated by Gordon
Brown in New Labours consistently conditional formulation as: fairness not just
for some but all who earn it (Gordon Brown leadership announcement, May 2007:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6646349.stm). Fairness has been taken up by
the Coalition as the nominal guiding principle for both social policy and distributing
the pain of austerity. The Coalition has sustained the delicately adjusted commitment
to what might beas with New Labourbest described as fairness but:
Yes, fairness means giving money to help the poorest in society . . . Thats the
sign of a civilised society, and its what I believe.
But you cant measure fairness just by how much money we spend on welfare, as
though the poor are products with a price tag and the more we spend on them
the more we value them. Fairness means supporting people out of poverty, not
trapping them in dependency . . . Fairness means giving people what they
deserveand what people deserve depends on how they behave. (Cameron,
2010a)
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The insistence on conditional fairness is also echoed in recurrent claims that we

are all in this together: this being both economic crisis and the austerity strategies
proposed as a virtuous necessity to overcome the crisis (Clarke & Newman,
2012). Nevertheless, these populist devices have not been altogether successful in
political/electoral termseither in obtaining a decisive victory for the Conservatives
in the 2010 election or in political polling since then. This combinationausterity
as a virtuous necessity, a populist inscription of austerity as shared misery, a project
of structural reform, underpinned by a social authoritarianismforms an unstable,
if not contradictory, assemblage.
To some extent, this distinctive mixture reflects specific conjunctural conditions
that are peculiar to the British case. We might, for example, note the leading role
played by the financial sector in British capitalism and in the global financial crisis,
such that the dislocations, collapses, and government rescues between 2008 and
2010 both placed the UK in a critical location in the global financial crisis and
placed the financial sector (more popularly, the bankers) in a central material
and symbolic place in the British crisis and in strategies for its resolution. Second,
we might note the troubling political and constitutional landscape established by
devolution in relation to Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. This dis-United
Kingdom provides a difficult terrain for Coalition politics, not least because of the
almost complete absence of Conservative politicians from the Scottish Assembly
(now controlled by Scottish Nationalists). If populism works on the terrain of what
Gramsci called the national-popular, then identifying the national that is at stake
has become increasingly problematic.
It is important to note some of the paradoxes of trying to articulate a populist
discourse alongside a program of cuts and constraints. One recurring paradox
has been the challenge of accomplishing a populist identification of the people
with the current political leadership. A cabinet that is predominantly White, male,
public school- and Oxbridge-educated, and independently wealthy has faced some
representational challenges in trying to align themselves with ordinary people.
Indeed, one such attempt by Prime Minister Cameron unleashed a fulsome public
debate about ordinariness and social class. In a question and answer session, David
Cameron likened himself and his wife (Samantha) to those sharp elbowed middle
class people who were able to take advantage of public service provision. In these
terms, it seemed he was attempting to mark his ordinariness. The attempt not only
failed to persuade but also elicited some remarkably detailed observations of British
class formation and mores. For example, a Daily Mail commentator observed that:
David Cameron claimed on Tuesday that he and his wife Samantha are members
of the sharp-elbowed middle classes. This statement was at the same time an
attempt to proclaim his ordinariness and a dig at middle-class values. . . . My
point is only that describing the Camerons as middle class is pretty meaningless.
They do not share the experience of the great mass of middle-class people, the
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vast majority of whom are not privately educated and not at all rich. (Glover,
2010)
The Daily Mail has been one of the core voices articulating a traditional middleclass English populism over the last 3 decades, so it is presumably particularly
sensitive to such questions of class position. But Camerons claims provoked a
much wider debate about ordinariness, class, and political representation that both
addressed the class composition of the Coalition cabinet (and its implications for
the claim that we are all in this together) and the wider question of political
representatives perceived detachment or distance from the lives of ordinary people
(see, e.g., the comments by Martin, 2010; Osler, 2010; Young, 2010). This problem
exemplifies the paradox of the Coalitions unpopular populism (Clarke, 2012a).
The attempt at mobilizing a populist politics appears to have foundered in the face
of the contradictions and antagonisms that constitute the present conjuncture, and
has encountered deep popular skepticism about politics in general, the Coalition
in particular, and the economic and political strategies on offer. Such skepticism,
however, is not the same as political oppositionit may be mobilized in counterpolitics or it might be absorbed into a de-mobilizing politics of resignation (Benson
& Kirsch, 2010).
Conclusion: The problem of ordinary people

In this article, I have explored some of the settings in which ordinary people are
being imagined and summoned to participate. In populist politics, in participatory
processes, and in the constitution of active, self-governing subjects, ordinary people
are the focus of political and governmental strategies that seek to summon and
enroll them. The proliferation of such strategies marks ordinary people as objects of
a profound desire. I have also tried to reflect on some of the ways in which these
strategies and desires are being theorized. My aim is not to present an overarching
theoretical conclusion, but to insist on two rather more mundane things. First, the
desire for ordinary people is itself significant: It is precisely the intersection of so many
different apparatuses, agencies, strategies, and summonings that marks the salience of
ordinary people as objects of desire. Second, the process of discovering, summoning,
and enrolling ordinary people is a difficult process. It demands considerable political
and governmental labor and its results are unpredictable. These subjects do not
necessarily come when summoned, nor do they necessarily behave according to the
plan if they do arrive. Their capacity for behaving badly remains one of their other
great attractions.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jayson Harsin and Mark Haywood for inviting me to the conference
on Cultural Studies and the Popular in June 2011, and for encouraging me to write up
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this paper for publication. I am also grateful to the two reviewers whose comments
helped to reshape it in important ways.
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