Reconfiguring agency and responsibility in the governance of social housing in Scotland

The construction of identities for subjects as self-regulating agents characterises processes of governance in advanced liberal democracies. Such identities implicate subjects within moral bonds of responsibility and agency to prescribed ethics of normalised consumption and duties to community. Within this 'ethopolitics' of social housing in the UK, the conduct of tenants and practitioners is framed within a conceptual triangle of consumerism, communitarianism and managerialism. This paper examines specific technologies used by Scottish social housing agencies to construct identities of agency, self-regulation and responsibility amongst their tenants. It identifies the rationales, processes and implications of these techniques for tenants and practitioners and suggests that emergent ambiguities in the reconfiguration of governing identities reflect conflicting conceptualisations about the role for social housing.