In the UK, public policy and services are being contracted to private and voluntary sector providers as part of public sector reform, leading to what has been called the ‘competition state’ (Jessop, 2002). The shift involves the public sector contracting and, or ‘partnering’ with, external organisations to provide services. This process creates opportunities for new participants (forms of organisation) to become involved in public policy creation and implementation and raises questions about how such networks of actors and activity are governed as well as about accountability and quality. In the compulsory education sector, schools and local education authorities are commissioning consultancy firms to help them meet government performance targets (Ball, 2009; 2007). Little is known, however, about the new inter-connected landscapes of provision that are emerging in relation to training, welfare-to-work, and employment policy. This paper will present findings from a project being undertaken in a city-region in England. The project is located within a new research centre (LLAKES) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, which explores the role of education and training in mediating between competitiveness and social cohesion agendas. The concept of the ‘city-region’ (see, inter alia, Dias and Giordano, 2003; Scott, 2002) provides both a spatial and theoretical framework for the project which is investigating what Considine (2001) refers to as a new configuration of ‘independent sub-systems’ constructed to provide and control public services. The research seeks to expose the actors involved in those sub-systems, the locus of control and power (vis-à-vis democratically elected local government institutions, national government, private and ‘third’ sector provider organisations, and business), and their relationship to the different agendas driving the regeneration of city-regions. These phenomena occur in different guises across Europe and, hence, raise questions of international importance (see, inter alia, Esping-Anderson, 1996). The paper focuses on the innovative use by a city council of government planning regulations to bind a non-UK, European retail company, that wished to build a new facility in the city, into a series of social inclusion measures for the unemployed. This involved co-designing a pre-employment training course and recruitment process linked to the ring-fencing of places at the company’s ‘assessment centre’ for individuals attending the course. Using this empirical lens, the research team was able to study the extent to which existing theories of the ‘privatised State’ can fully explain the dynamic and shifting interplay between the State and local actors.

A mixed method approach was used to develop a case study of the initiative. From a qualitative perspective, interviews were conducted with personnel from all the organisations involved, including: the City Council; the retail company; the providers responsible for delivering the pre-employment training course; and with the individual course participants. The research team also attended the course as semi-participant observers. A quantitative picture of the characteristics and progress of applicants into and through the training and recruitment process was created. The profiles of the course participants and providers were used to build social and economic maps of the city focusing on the distances between areas of deprivation, and employment and training opportunites.

Findings revealed contradictions in relation to the initiative’s social and economic aims and the outcomes for the unemployed participants. The paper builds on the constructs of the ‘privatised’ and ‘competition’ State to address research questions underpinning the study. It argues there is a parallel between earlier developments in the private sector to adjust economic models to engage with the opportunities that globalisation offered nationally and locally to compete in hitherto ‘closed’ markets, and government’s attempt to use contracts to engender competition in the public sector. It also draws on the concept of the ‘shared object’ from cultural-historical-activity-theory (Engeström 2008) to show how the actions of the actors create the conditions for the contradictions and,hence, affect the ability of citizens to improve their life chances . The paper also considers the contradiction between the centralising tendencies of social policy and uneven labour market conditions at local level (Peck and Theodore, 2001).