ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the powerful challenges that the shift poses both to the bureaucratic position of the professions within the public sector and ideologically to traditional professional values and practices. Recent public choice theorists have made the same point, although they have drawn rather different policy conclusions. The professions became autonomous sources of influence on public policy, autonomous in the sense of separate from yet using the routine channels linking central and local government and central government and other decentralised agencies. The conditions under which the professions flourished have changed. The professions both in the private and the public sectors have lost prestige and influence. The most radical changes in the public services followed the 1987 Conservative electoral win. The post-bureaucratic agenda has to be understood in historical context as the most significant change in the structure of the public services since at least 1945.
