Governing by Inspection

This paper explores the role of inspection processes as a mode of governing and offers of a comparison of the formation and trajectories of inspection processes in England and Scotland. We start from a consideration of the rising importance of inspection processes in the transformation of forms of governing in recent decades, associated with such tendencies as the New Public Management, governing at a distance and the rise of ‘audit culture’. The paper draws on current research to both explore and problematize such generalizations. The ESRC funded research explores both comparative and transnational dimensions of national inspection models (England, Scotland and Sweden) and the role of European level networks and agencies in promoting inspection. We draw on some of the early work in this project to explore how England and Scotland have developed (in both the long and short terms) different modalities of inspection and we consider some of the political, cultural and institutional conditions of these differences. Such comparison suggests that analyses of inspection (and related terms such as audit, evaluation and so on) need to be tempered by attention to particular formations in which institutional relationships, political orientations and professional practices differ substantially. The paper concludes by considering how to articulate the general and the particular in relation to inspection (while being attentive to the transnational processes that link and influence inspection in specific national settings). We examine the shared elements that mark inspection as a mode of governing (with particular attention to the growing significance of data generation and management). We also ask what the political, analytical and practical implications of different modalities of ‘doing inspection’ might be.