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Dialogic Intervention in a Volatile Organisational Takeover by Jane Ball

This is the story of a six-month intervention that enabled the successful handover of a government-run prison in the UK to a private company in 2011. I will be describing the mobilisation phase of privatisation; it is one chapter in a longer story of the transformation of the prison in private hands, and – although I won’t be covering it in detail here – nine years later the collapse of safety and security at the same prison to the point it was returned to government management. This is itself part of the 25-year story of Professional Dialogue work in UK prisons and US corrections. The story is significant in part because the situation was unprecedented – Her Majesty’s Prison Birmingham was the first prison in the UK to be transferred from the public to the private sector. The situation was also high stakes, with a cast of politicians, militant unions, a multinational corporation, prisoners, and the media, and the widespread anticipation of a drama that would become a crisis. Instead, using Professional Dialogue with the benefit of professional partners in this work, the handover was a non-event.

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