Interests in the Field of Public Private Partnership: Insights from Bourdieu’s Social Praxeology

Abstract

Although public private partnership (PPP) contract has been the subject of numerous debates and controversies, governments across the globe have increasingly used PPP to modernise public services. This study attempts to examine the attractiveness of the PPP policy, by analysing the interests of the government, private sector, and users in the field of UK school PPP contracts. Bourdieu’s analytical concepts of habitus, capitals and field are used to analyse interests in PPP and shed light on the insidious power relations in PPP processes. Interviews were conducted with public and private sector respondents familiar with UK school PPP contracts, to understand their interests. The field of PPP is animated with players and interests. Players use their positions and predispositions (or habitus) and their economic, social and symbolic capitals to generate strategies consistent with their interests in the success of PPP. PPP is particularly attractive to governments that are faced with increasing demands to keep public debt under control, whilst at the same time improve public services. It is argued that the value for money and efficiency arguments (doxa) used to justify PPP mask a number of interests and the governments’ neoliberal ideology, which are not readily apparent in policy documents. The PPP policy, through conferring symbolic power to the private sector, has reconfigured power relationships in the field. This study provides a scholarly analysis of the interests at stake in the field of the UK government’s school PPP programme by using Bourdieu’s theory of practice. At the practical level, this study explains the popularity of the PPP policy by unmasking interests which are not easily captured in the government’s value for money discourse.