This article analyses the everyday practices of ‘doing’ socio-spatial relations, drawing upon a series of in-depth interviews with local authority chief officers from across the UK. It argues that for chief officers ‘thinking spatially’ is played out in and through the practice of leadership on the move as they navigate the multiple spaces and temporalities that constitute the landscape of local government. Such leadership on the move resonates in part with predominant explanations of boundary spanning in studies of public governance. But importantly, boundary spanning suffers, our evidence suggests, from a temporal deficit, a ‘thin’ account of time which fails to address the constitutive function of boundaries and the complex politics of fluidity and fixity that follow. Articulating a ‘thicker’ approach to time, we argue that chief officers experience everyday socio-spatial relations less as boundary spanners and more as serial adaptors, who persistently reproduce sedimented boundaries and perform different modes of governance as they move from one arena to another. Serial adaptation, we conclude, challenges the potential managerialist bias of boundary spanning, in which the quest for harmonisation and unity masks over the irreducible complex reality of fragmentation and political conflict within which chief officers move.

中文翻译：

---

串行适配器？地方政府首长与时空航行

本文根据对英国各地地方当局首席官员的一系列深入访谈，分析了“处理”社会空间关系的日常实践。它认为，对于首席官员来说，“空间思考”是在领导实践中体现出来的，因为他们在构成地方政府景观的多个空间和时间性中航行。这种行动中的领导力在一定程度上与公共治理研究中对边界跨越的主要解释产生了共鸣。但重要的是，我们的证据表明，边界跨越受到时间赤字的影响，对时间的“薄弱”解释无法解决边界的构成功能以及随之而来的流动性和固定性的复杂政治。我们阐述了一种“更厚”的时间方法，我们认为，首席官员在日常社会空间关系中所经历的不是边界跨越者，而是串行适应者，他们不断地再现沉积的边界，并在从一个舞台转移到另一个舞台时执行不同的治理模式。我们的结论是，系列改编挑战了跨界的潜在管理主义偏见，在这种偏见中，对协调和统一的追求掩盖了首席官员在其中流动的分裂和政治冲突的不可简化的复杂现实。