Summary
Contents
Subject index
Political, popular and academic debates have swirled around the notion of citizen as a consumer of public services, with public service reform increasingly geared towards a consumer society. This innovative book draws on original research with those people in the front-line of the reforms -staff, managers and users of public services - to explore their responses to this turn to consumerism. Focusing on health, policing and social care, it vividly brings to life the contentious and troubled relationships between government, services and users. Creating Citizen Consumers explores a range of theoretical, political, policy and practice issues that arise in the shift towards consumerism.It draws on recent controversies about choice in public services to bring them in line with the experiences and expectations of a consumer society. It offers a fresh and challenging use of popular understandings of the relationships between people and services to argue for a model of publicness based on interdependence, respect and partnership rather than choice.
Unstable Encounters: Users, Staff and Services
Unstable Encounters: Users, Staff and Services
We now explore the emergence of a consumerist orientation from the perspectives of both staff and service users in health, policing and social care. In this chapter:
- we begin by locating some of the wider pressures that were at work on the encounters between publics and public services;
- we then explore staff and user views of consumerism in relation to our four key themes of challenge, choice, inequality and responsibility;
- finally, we link these themes back to political and policy discourses about choice and consumers.
This moves our focus of attention from the policy domain to the points of intersection between publics and public services, focusing on the lower half of the diamond that we introduced as a ...
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