ABSTRACT
The energy user seems to have no choice but to accept, pay for, and grumble about the life-sustaining forces that issue from household sockets, gas pipes, oil trucks, and gasoline hoses. Thus emerge the institutional images of energy politics: greedy oil companies raising prices at the expense of hopeless and impotent consumers. When political scientists sought to develop explanations of how public services are delivered in cities and towns, the concept of "coproduction" was developed. Thus "public order" in a city is produced not only by the actions of municipal employees-police, courts, and correction officials-but also by their interaction with an alert and watchful citizenry. The points of energy refinement and generation are usually huge industrial installations protected from citizen intrusion by sophisticated systems of security and defense. The social implications of coproduction have excited the greatest attention in the energy literature.
