ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on a research project on the relationship between images of citizens as consumers and the reform of public services in the UK.1 We explore how ‘the public’ represents a problematic subject for public services and their reform (Newman 2005a). It is shape shifting, unstable and unpredictable. It embodies conflicting or ambivalent desires and doubts. This view of the public challenges accounts of public service reform that explain it as an adaptation to a more individualized or consumerist public (Office for Public Service Reform 2002) or as the creation of a more marketized set of relationships between state and citizens (Marquand 2004). In such accounts – whether enthusiastic or critical – changes towards marketized, privatized or consumerist orientations in public services are largely seen to be driven by forces beyond the national level: globalization or neo-liberalism, for example (Clarke 2004). However, our study suggested that national political projects and forces play a decisive role in shaping public service reform, not least in translating international policy and political discourses into national settings. This suggests the need for some care in ‘trend spotting’ in public service reform, in particular not assuming that processes of reform sharing similar orientations produce the same outcomes in different places.
