Flexible framing: Analysing innovative austerity talk from a cultural perspective

This article examines how local policy elites conceptualize and
communicate potential innovations to overcome the fiscal crisis.
Four austerity frames based on cultural theory are developed: an
individualist, hierarchist, egalitarian and fatalist frame. Two expectations
are tested by tracing frame usage in austerity speeches by
the leadership in Birmingham, Cologne and Rotterdam. First, the
modest contribution of the individualist frame in NPM-sceptic
Cologne is confirmed, but no evidence is found of individualist dominance
in NPM-minded Birmingham. Second, it is shown that
leaders in Birmingham and Rotterdam combine elements of multiple
frames so as to create a new promising narrative which opens
up routes towards innovation. The importance of “frame flexibility”
is stressed to deal with the complexities of coping with the fiscal
crisis in ways that are logical (given available views) and innovative
(exploring alternative views), and highlight the importance of further
developing understandings of such (municipal) coping.