Descrizione

This book hosts a journey. The journey of a researcher in the nitty-gritty processes of planning in a public setting, through the eyes of the people engaging with it, and through the words constructing its meaning and its practice. This journey has a focus, an angle, and a lens, like a picture, or a moving one.

The focus is planning practices in the changing public sector.

The angle is professional work, i.e. how planning is lived among professionals in their daily work.

The lens is discourse analysis, as a way to capture and make sense of the multiple rationalities that may be interacting when a change in practices is in place. In this journey we are thus brought close to the people who engage with planning discourses in their everyday work and we get to gain a new, deeper and more nuanced understanding of the meaning of planning in the changing public sector.

We suggest reading this book to whoever is interested in exploring planning in practice in the micro details of its day to day work.

We suggest reading this book to the people interested in capturing public management reforms from the point of view of professionals, and not of the dominant managerial discourse.

We suggest reading this book to the people sharing a curiosity for how to study practices through the analysis of discourses.

We dissuade impatient readers expecting easy managerial implications from engaging with this book. This is a journey that demands to be followed patiently, step by step.