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Reconstituting the Public Service Ethos: Services for Consumers or for Citizens?

This article explores the crisis of welfare and the shift to a new public managerialism. It discusses agency and motivation in public services and examines popular and welfare provider discourses. The conclusion highlights the challenges in translating awareness of interdependency into support for universal rights. The text language is English.

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Reconstituting the Public Service Ethos: Services for Consumers or for Citizens?

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  1. Reconstituting the Public Service Ethos:Services for consumers or for citizens ?Hartley DeanLondon School of Economics • The crisis of welfare and the new public managerialism • Rethinking agency and motivation • Popular and welfare provider discourses: some evidence • Conclusions

  2. 1(a) The crisis of welfare …. • Crises of capitalism in the 1970s • Economic: the ascendancy of monetarism • Political: the New Right response • Social: fears of (i) a demographic ‘time-bomb’ and (ii) trends in household formation • The risk society thesis • The end of history and ‘post-everything’ • A crisis of trust in science, politics and administration • Self-provisioning and risk management

  3. 1(b) … and the new public managerialism • The ‘marketisation’ of public services • Making public services ‘business like’ • Choice and competition: creating ‘quasi-markets’ • Changing the culture of bureau-professionalism • Reconstituting citizenship • Charters for public service consumers • The Third Way: a new orthodoxy? • No rights without responsibilities • Pragmatic/evidence-based/performance-measured policy implementation

  4. 2(a) Agency and motivation • The Le Grand thesis regarding the assumptions/desires of Third Way policy makers • Motivation: welfare providers are ‘knaves’, not ‘knights’ • Agency: welfare receivers ought to be ‘queens’, not ‘pawns’ • Adapting to a society in which calculating knaves provide for ruthless queens

  5. 2(b) Agency and Motivation:ideological-discursive repertoires Queen (autonomous) neo- social liberal democratic Knave Knight (instrumental) (altruistic) neo- social conservative conservative Pawn (passive)

  6. 2(c) Agency and Motivation:welfare recipients Queen (autonomous) heroic responsible consumers citizens risk risk embracing averse artful passive dodgers clients Pawn (passive)

  7. 2(d) Agency and Motivation:welfare providers reflexive welfare bureau entrepreneurs professionals Knave Knight (instrumental) (altruistic) hypocritical principled autocrats do-gooders conventional

  8. 3(a) Popular and welfare provider discourses: …. • A UK based study of popular and welfare provider perceptions of the rights that result from interdependency and the responsibilities that go with rights • In-depth interviews with ‘core’ sample of working age adults (49) and a sample of welfare providers (9 benefits administrators and 14 social workers)

  9. 3(b) … Some evidence • Core sample (neither pawns nor queens): • Prejudices about ‘dependency’ but inclined (reluctantly) to accept interdependency as feature of lifecourse • Responsibility = self-reliance: individualistic • Some rights are inalienable, but welfare rights are conditional • Welfare provider sample (more knights than knaves): • More likely to acknowledge human interdependency • Committed to public service ethos • BUT more guarded about rights (want clients to be pawns, not queens)

  10. 4(a) Conclusion I: Service users • The inability to translate awareness of interdependency into support for universal rights relates to individualistic (Third Way compliant) notion of responsibility • An ethical deficit and the erosion of mutual responsibility? OR A post-material ethic of self-responsibility and an ‘advanced’ form of liberalism? • BUT there is also evidence (i) that popular discourse draws on diverse and conflicting moral repertoires and (ii) that the extent to which people value security generally exceeds their willingness to embrace risk

  11. 4 (b) Conclusion II: Welfare providers • Reluctance to embrace a rights-based approach may undermine capacity to sustain a public service ethic in the face of NPM • Defensive risk management by service providers may serve to turn citizens into customers by default • Though they are not ready to become welfare entrepreneurs, service providers may yet abandon the public service ethic for fear that their pupils/ patients/ clients are being turned into heroic consumers • But, more evidence is needed

  12. Select bibliography Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society, Sage Publications. Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997) The Managerial State, Sage Publications. Dean, H. (2003) ‘The Third Way and social welfare’, Social Policy and Administration, 37(7) Dean, H. (2004) The Ethics of Welfare, The Policy Press. Giddens, A. (1998) The Third Way, Polity. Hood, C. et al. (2000) The Government of Risk, Oxford University Press. Le Grand, J. (2003) Motivation, Agency and Public Policy, Oxford University Press. Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom, Cambridge University Press.

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