51

Much has been made of economising. Yet social scientists have paid little attention to the moment of economic failure, the moments that precede it, and the calculative infrastructure and related processes through which both failing and failure are made operable. This paper examines the shift from the economising of the market economy, which took place across much of the nineteenth century, to the economising and marketising of the social sphere, which is still ongoing. It examines how central the “democratising” of failure – the diffusing of a corporate model of failure defined as insolvency to the public sphere – is to this ongoing process. We consider a specific case of the economising and democratising of failure, namely the repeated attempts over more than a decade to create a failure regime for NHS hospitals. We suggest that these repeated attempts to devise a failure regime for NHS hospitals have lessons that go beyond the domain of healthcare, and that they highlight important issues concerning the role that “exit” models may play in the economising and regulating of public services and the social sphere more broadly.