Urban Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, 153±165, 1999 Managing the `Underclass’: Interpreting the Moral Discourse of Housing Management Anna Haworth and Tony Manzi [Paper ®rst received, June 1997; in ®nal form, August 1998] Summary. This paper examines contemporary housing management practice by attention to a changing discourse within social policy, emphasising duties over rights. Current policy initiatives are based upon concerns about the collapse of foundational assumptions and a perceived decline in moral responsibility. This concern is most commonly articulated in debates about the existence of an urban underclass, linked to anti-social behaviour on housing estates. The paper argues that a communitarian outlook has exerted a signi®cant impact on contemporary initiatives incorpo- rating a strongly judgmental bias. As a consequence, housing practice discriminates between behaviour in social housing and privately owned property. Drawing upon post-liberal perspec- tives, the conclusion suggests that the predominance of a deontological discourse has resulted in policies of social control of residents. Introduction The central contention of this article is that a distinctive feature of contemporary social policy discourse in Britain is the willingness to introduce an explicitly moral dimension into analyses of problems, with the result that increasingly punitive strategies are adopted. For example, current debates on welfare re- form focus attention upon concepts of `dependency’, `individual responsibility’ and the importance of the work ethic whilst pro- posing reduced state support, in the guise of increased choice, for those failing to conform to approved standards of behaviour. Within housing policy in particular, the emphasis has shifted from a focus on adding to or improving the housing stock to concern about the behaviour of residents and the in- troduction of policies designed to control such behaviour. These interventionist poli- cies have been introduced against the back- ground of reduced funding which we argue, has contributed to a renewed interest in `moral values’. However, this moral dimen- sion is rarely explicitly interrogated in policy analysis. In Part 1 of the article, we examine some of the moral foundations underpinning British social policy and housing practice. We underline the importance of examining the social context within which normative frameworks are embedded. In Part 2, we analyse some theoretical questions in moral philosophy and social policy, using a `social constructionist’ perspective. Policy is argued to be implicitly in¯uenced by basic `founda- tional’ concerns about morality. The result is Anna Haworth and Tony Manzi are in the School of the Built Environment, Department of Housing, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS, UK. Fax:: O171 911 5171. Email: haworta@westminster.ac.uk and manzit@westminster.ac.uk. The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees and Judith Allen and Keith Jacobs of the University of Westminster for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. 0042-0980/99/010153-13 $7.00 Ó 1999 The Editors of Urban Studies