ABSTRACT

What is going on? What on earth has happened to the services in and around the public domain? We all know the stories about hospitals that keep you on a waiting list for ages and then, just as your surgery is due, they postpone it. And about call centres that pretend to all be there for you, but confront you with their automated replies or with their standard apologies for the inconvenience whenever you try to contact them. It could be easily argued that the so-called client-centeredness which was introduced to many of these services about a decade ago, under such labels as ‘Service Management’ (Grönroos 1990; Normann 1991) and ‘New Public Management’ (McLaughlin et al. 2002) has, to say the least, been quite counter-productive.