Market Concepts, Coordination Mechanisms and New Actors in Social Housing

This introduction to the special issue on ‘market concepts, coordination mechanisms and new actors in social housing’ makes the case for multi-disciplinary and multi-level studies of the impacts of market-oriented policies aimed at social housing. The authors suggest that privatisation, tenant purchase programmes, market oriented policy shifts, increased regulation, changing household needs and lingering problems with stigmatisation have combined to create a challenging operating environment for social housing providers and that the phenomenon of ‘marketisation’ of social housing has four distinct strands. These are: 1) problematising, 2) bypassing, 3) replacing and 4) transforming social housing, and the focus of the articles in the special issue is on the fourth strand. Transforming social housing encompasses policies aimed at increasing the interaction between social and private housing providers, encouraging managerialist approaches to housing provision and introducing regulations and/or incentives to increase competition among social housing providers as well as between social and private landlords. The editorial concludes with suggested directions for research into the marketisation of social housing and recommends that researchers continue to pursue the connections that can be made among different disciplines in the study of organisational change in this sector.