Publics, Politics and Power explores the emergence of new forms, sites, and practices of publicness and the implications for public services. It examines the remaking of the public in the context of new formations of the nation, where issues of migration, diversity, and faith challenge traditional forms of solidarity and citizenship. It traces the emergence of hybrid organizational forms and new strategies for governing publics and public services. It suggests some of the ways in which the public domain is being recast around notions of civil society, community, and populist participatory politics.

Making (up) Markets: Discourses, Devices and Agents

Making (up) markets: Discourses, devices and agents

As we saw in Chapter 3, new forms of governing involve the creation of new kinds of agent: communities, non-governmental organisations, voluntary associations, all constituted as ‘ordinary people’. These are being enrolled into new articulations with nations and states as ‘subjects of value’: the bearers of economic value in the struggle for individual and national success in the global marketplace. In this chapter, we highlight the marketising strategies, discourses and devices that produce this proliferation of economic agents. But we also attempt to challenge the idea of the market as a singular entity:

The notion of the market is so familiar that we tend to take it for granted. But like so many ...

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