ABSTRACT
The concept of de-centring governance emphasises the dispersal of power through the social body; the centrality of constructed meanings as a basis of conduct and necessitates a focus on how such meanings frame situated practice. This chapter examines the problem figuration and constructed webs of meaning within contemporary policy discourses on anti-social behaviour, 'troubled families' and welfare reform in the United Kingdom. Although there are strong historical precedents, there is an increasing use in England, and differentially in the other nations of the United Kingdom, of conditionality, both as an organising concept of government rationality and as a technique and apparatus of governance, particularly within the welfare state. A totality of a hegemonic naming of the world by elites, a hermetically sealed underclass culture divorced from the rest of society or a clinical insulation of arenas of governance from their social worlds are all inaccurate depictions of the orientations of the subjects of intervention.
