Creating Citizen-Consumers

Changing Publics and Changing Public Services

John Clarke, Janet Newman, Nick Smith, Elizabeth Vidler, Louise Westmarland

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412921343, 9781412921336
• eBook ISBN: 9781446225479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

`This is an illuminating and topical study, which skilfully blends together theoretical and empirical analysis in search of the "citizen-consumer". It should become a key text for all with an interest in public service reform and the "choice" agenda, as well as consumerism and citizenship? - Ruth Lister, Professor of Social Policy, University of Loughborough

Political, popular and academic debates have swirled around the notion of the 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.

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 to examine the tensions of modernising public services to meet the demands of a consumer society. The book offers a fresh and challenging understanding of the relationships between people and services, and argues for a model based on interdependence, respect and partnership rather than choice.

This original book makes a distinctive contribution to debates about the future of public services. It will be of interest to those studying social policy, cultural studies, public administration and management across the social sciences, as well as for those working in public services.

John Clarke is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University. Janet Newman is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University. Nick Smith is a Research Officer in the Personal Social Services Research Unit at the University of Kent. Elizabeth Vidler is a Project Officer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. Louise Westmarland is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Open University.

1

Changing Times: Perspectives on the Citizen-Consumer

From some perspectives the rise of the citizen-consumer is viewed as ‘empowering’, a means of challenging the paternalistic power of the professions and of ensuring that citizens might benefit from more flexible and responsive public service provision. For other commentators, it marks a shift towards a more marketised and privatised form of service delivery, driven by commercial rather than public service values. In this chapter:

• we explore three different perspectives on the citizen-consumer: the sociology of modernity, the political economy of neo-liberalism and Foucauldian conceptions of governmentality;
• we highlight how each understands the place of consumerism in modern times, and draw out some of the analytical and political implications of each.

We begin by noting the slipperiness of the boundary between academic analysis and the perspectives that inform policy and politics. The policy documents or political speeches we make use of during this book all reveal how their authors draw on implicit – and sometimes explicit – theories about how the world has changed, how citizenship is being remade, how economic and social forces imply the need for yet another cycle of reform or modernisation. Similarly those analysing – and often critiquing – the consequences of reform do so from a particular theoretical standpoint, with implicit political implications and evaluations.

‘The world has changed’: the sociology of modernity

One important area of sociological theorising – work that treats contemporary society as modernity, or as a particular phase or development of modernity – has immediate and compelling relevance for thinking about the citizen-consumer. As Edwards (2000) has argued, consumer culture seems to be intimately bound up with the character of late, reflexive or even post-modernity. Although these different versions of modernity vary in their accounts and assessments of consumer culture, all of them identify it as a core component of modern societies.

Despite such variations, we will refer primarily to the work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck in this context, partly because they have constructed analyses of modernity in which dynamics of individualisation and reflexivity provide the conditions for ‘life politics’ as projects in which individuals come to define themselves, both individually and collectively. The rise of a consumer culture provides one site through which individuals can define and project their identities. The underlying dynamics that produce this phase of ‘reflexive modernity’ are, in Giddens’ account, a combination of globalisation, de-traditionalisation and social reflexivity. For Giddens, reflexive modernity is a ‘post-traditional social order’ (1994: 5) in which ‘tradition changes its status. Traditions have to explain themselves, to become open to interrogation or discourse’ (1994: 5; see also Giddens et al., 1994). The rise of reflexivity dislocates varieties of ‘taken for granted’ or institutionalised social arrangements:

The development of social reflexivity is the key influence on a diversity of changes that otherwise seem to have little in common. Thus the emergence of ‘post-Fordism’ in industrial enterprises is usually analysed in terms of technological change – particularly the influence of information technology. But the underlying reason for the growth of ‘flexible production’ and ‘bottom-up decision-making’ is that a universe of high reflexivity leads to greater autonomy of action, which the enterprise must recognise and draw on.

The same applies to bureaucracy and to the sphere of politics. Bureaucratic authority, as Max Weber made clear, used to be a condition for organizational effectiveness. In a more reflexively ordered society, operating in the context of manufactured uncertainty, this is no longer the case. The old bureaucratic systems start to disappear, the dinosaurs of the post-traditional age. In the domain of politics, states can no longer so readily treat their citizens as ‘subjects’. (1994: 7)

De-traditionalisation also implies that societies have moved away from cultural formations of deference that supported forms of hierarchical authority and social order. This view of traditional authority in decline links Giddens’ concern with the democratising impact of reflexivity to conceptions of post-modernity (e.g., Lyotard’s view of the loss of belief in ‘grand narratives’, 1984), and the dissolution of class/status formations (Bauman, 1998). We might also see connections between the rise of consumer culture and the decline of deference and ‘respect’ for traditional order or traditional authority. Consumer culture features a populist and quasi-egalitarian impulse, asserting that everyone is entitled to consume and to consume what they want. It disrupts conventions and hierarchies of taste and access. Alternatively, it might be that the decline of deference has made possible the populist sensibility of mass consumerism. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and its aftermath suggests that the dislocation of established authority and the rise of a consumerist (as well as political) conception of individualised freedom are closely associated.

Public services were intimately bound up with established or ‘traditional’ models of authority as governing the relationships between state, services and public. The Policeman (and the implied connection between masculinity and authority is significant) and the Doctor have served as particular embodiments of professional and social authority. It is not just ‘bureaucratic’ forms of organising authority that have been affected by the decline of deference. Forms of embodied occupational or professional authority have also become vulnerable.

Giddens argues that reflexive modernisation involves a shift towards democratisation – linking more democratic forms of personal relationship, the rise of social movements, the dynamics of organisational decentralisation and the dialogic potentials of an emergent global order (1994: 117–24). Our own view would be somewhat different, suggesting that the decline of deference involves a populist shift in politics and culture that does not necessarily translate into democratic or progressive political forms. On the contrary, one effect is the rise of a ‘demotic populism’ that celebrates the people/the popular. Such developments are not intrinsically democratic, even though they may appropriate some of the mechanisms and trappings of institutional democracy (opinion polling, voting by phone/e-mail, etc.). But they are demotic because they claim to speak in the voice of the people. Demotic populism rests on claims that the voice of the people is typically excluded or repressed by the dominant institutional forms of politics and social life. Forms of demotic populism are often framed in an anti-elitist discourse that challenges concentrations of privilege and power in the name of people. As we shall see, this model of populism has strong connections to New Labour’s conception of citizen-consumers.

In several ways, consumer culture embodies this late or reflexive modernity. It is associated with both economic and cultural dynamics of globalisation that create the conditions for the proliferation of commodities and their increasingly aestheticised – or signifying – character (Edwards, 2000). It promotes de-traditionalisation, unlocking taken-for-granted associations of taste, style and social position (developments that are discussed in Featherstone, 1991; Lury, 1996 and Tomlinson, 1990, for example). Finally, consumer culture is associated with reflexivity and some versions of life politics, in which identities are constructed through the signifying practices of consumption choices. As Giddens argued: ‘Life politics is a politics of identity as well as of choice’ (1994: 91). There are, of course, substantial arguments about whether consumer culture is a site of politics (even individuated ‘life politics’) or is a displacement or subordination of politics (e.g., Bauman, 1998).

But we need to step back a little from this general view of the emergence of consumer culture as a core element of late or reflexive modernity to discuss some of the problems with this as an analytic framing for the rise of the citizen-consumer. Almost all aspects of this sociology of modernity have proved controversial, from the view of globalisation to the conception of individuated and reflexive subjects – and some of these are taken up in the following two sections of this chapter. Here, though we concentrate on questions of the time and space of reflexive modernity. A foregrounding of globalisation is often linked to a diminution of spatial differentiation (Massey, 1999). Although Giddens (and Beck) do not treat globalisation solely as a homogenising force, they do see its mix of economic, cultural and political dynamics as generalising a ‘cosmopolitan’ reflexivity across national boundaries – weakening traditional institutions and authorities wherever they are encountered. The spread of such cosmopolitanism looks more spatially uneven than this, with forms of corporate, religious, military and authoritarian political power being reconvened alongside pressures for democratisation.

This view of modernity and its different phases (early/late; simple/reflexive) tends to collapse spatial difference into time, producing one modernity to which societies approximate in terms of being more or less advanced. Geographers have critiqued this displacement of space by time (Massey, 2005). Others – especially those deriving from post-colonial studies – have challenged the conception of a singular modernity, arguing that the Euro-American model of modernity co-exists uncomfortably with others (even if its economic, political and cultural dominance often obscures their presence, see, for example, Chakrabarty, 2000). There are also questions about the timing of the rise of the consumer culture and the figure of the consumer (see, inter alia, Brewer, 2003; Maclachlan and Trentmann, 2004; Trentmann, 2006a). The threads of consumer culture – commodified consumption, conspicuous consumption and consumption as a site of collective mobilisation and social regulation – have long histories predating the rise of Fordist industrial production and the associated growth of mass consumption usually taken to be the economic and social preconditions for consumer culture (see Edwards, 2000). But more significantly for our work here, Trentmann has argued that both historical studies and contemporary sociology have neglected the ‘subjectivities of the consumer’ (2006a: 2). He suggests that:

The expanding literature on consumption has enriched our understanding of the central role of material culture in the reproduction of social relationships and status, everyday routines and selfhood, but has offered surprisingly little in the way of explaining the evolution of the consumer as a master category of collective and individual identity. Put simply, all societies have been engaged in consumption and have purchased, exchanged, gifted or used objects and services, but it has only been in specific contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that some (not all) practices of consumption have been connected to a sense of being a ‘consumer’ as an identity, audience or category of analysis. (2006a: 2)

Our study contributes in some ways to redressing this lack of attention to the consumer as a social category, identity and identification. Rather than assuming that ‘consumers’ exist, our inquiry explores how they are summoned in one field of social practice (the use of public services) and how people experience themselves – and what identifications they deploy – in relation to those practices.

Before leaving the sociology of modernity to explore other perspectives, it is worth noting the ways in which sociological analysis has connected with the more situated politics of New Labour’s citizen-consumer. There are strong links between this sociology of modernity and the politics of public service reform in the UK. As we will see in more detail in the following chapter, New Labour’s approach to public service reform has been constructed around the imperatives of modernity and modernisation – drawing on sociological accounts of social changes, including globalisation and more reflexively demanding, less deferential individuals. More particularly, there was the critical role of Tony Giddens in theorising the relationships between late or reflexive modernity and the rise of (and need for) ‘Third Way’ politics (1994, 1998). We can trace ways in which New Labour’s version of the Third Way incorporated and adapted – selectively, and in very specific ways – the Giddensian view of modernity. The familiar narrative – ‘the world has changed, people have changed’ – was used as a device to underpin a third element: the imperative that ‘public services have to change’ (see, for example, Blair, 1998). The idea of reflexive individuals has been used to legitimate the need for the public – as consumers – to have access to new sources of information in order for them to make more informed choices. And the individuation thesis is linked to calls for more personalised services tailored to the needs of individuals. Themes from the sociology of modernity are selectively appropriated in order to create a new normative framework of policy development.

Not all sociologists of modernity share the relatively optimistic reading of social and political developments offered by Giddens and others. For example, Zygmunt Bauman’s writings on the rise of consumption associated with what he terms ‘liquid modernity’ and its implications for welfare states (and their subjects) presents a much bleaker set of analyses. In Bauman’s work, consumption has displaced production as the site of moral worth and value – and (individualised) choice has become a master value. Those excluded from the realm of consumption – primarily because they lack the economic capacity to make and realise choice in the marketplace – are now multiply excluded: from the activities of consumption, from the exercise of choice and from the moral realm of the worthy. ‘It is the fault of the excluded that they did nothing, or not enough, to escape exclusion; perhaps they even invited their fate, making the exclusion into a foregone conclusion’ (1998: 85).

Bauman explores the ways in which social divisions and inequalities are reconstituted and recoded through the rise of (commodified) consumption. He is also concerned by the de-politicising effects of the transition from a ‘work ethic’ to an ‘aesthetic of consumption’ as the dominant principle of social organisation:

Contemporary society engages its members primarily as consumers; only secondarily, and partly, does it engage them as producers. To meet the social norm, to be a fully fledged member of society, one needs to respond promptly and efficiently to the temptations of the consumer market; one needs to contribute to the ‘supply-clearing demand’ and in case of economic trouble be part of the ‘consumer-led recovery’. All this the poor, lacking decent income, credit cards and the prospect of a better time, are not fit to do. Accordingly, the norm which is broken by the poor of today, the norm the breaking of which makes them ‘abnormal’, is the norm of consumer competence or aptitude, not that of employment. First and foremost, the poor of today are ‘non-consumers’, not ‘unemployed’: they are defined in the first place through being flawed consumers… In the book-balancing of a consumer society, the poor are unequivocally a liability, and by no stretch of imagination can they be recorded on the side of present or future assets. (1998: 90–1)

Accordingly, the complex social and political ties that had connected the poor-as-unemployed to the politics of a society governed by the work ethic have been undone. The mixture of fear, concern and solidarity that underpinned welfarist politics has no place in the consumer society:

And so, for the first time in recorded history the poor are now purely and simply a worry and a nuisance. They have no merits which could relieve, let alone counterbalance, their vices. They have nothing to offer in exchange for the taxpayer’s outlays. They are a bad investment, unlikely ever to be repaid, let alone bring profit; a black hole sucking in whatever comes near and spitting back nothing, except, perhaps, trouble. Decent and normal members of society – the consumers – want nothing from them and expect nothing. (1998: 91)

These are concerns that are shared in some ways by writers from our second main theoretical perspective: the political economy of neo-liberalism, albeit from rather different intellectual starting points.

States versus markets: the view from political economy

Many of the criticisms of Giddensian conceptions of modernity have been raised by authors writing from the standpoint of critical political economy or varieties of Marxism (e.g., Benton, 2000; Ferguson et al., 2002). In some cases, critics point to the underestimation of continuities in capitalist social formations – particularly the persistence of class as relations of production, as a form of (deepening) inequalities and as a mode of political organising and conflict. For others, it is the persistence of a capitalist mode of production on an international and global scale that is missing from the model of modernity. As Edwards (2000) has suggested, in relation to conceptions of consumer culture and consumer society, there are also significant distinctions to be drawn between analysts who focus primarily on the symbolic domain (stressing the sign value of commodities or treating consumption itself as a privileged site of signifying practice) and those who emphasise the more ‘materialist’ analysis of production and consumption practices. In this later view, consumer culture is marked primarily by the extension or deepening of commodification: ‘in contemporary society, almost no human need or activity avoids commodification, and consumer society, despite its internal contradictions, is increasingly all-encompassing’ (Edwards, 2000: 5). From the standpoint of critical political economy, such changes mark the extension of the power and reach of capital into new sites – both spatially through its globalising ambition and socially through the subjection of new areas of human activity to the logics of commodification and market exchange.

In this view, the shift from citizen to consumer marks a new phase in western capitalism, predominantly theorised as the moment of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005). This has something in common with earlier political-economic discussions of globalisation because of the centrality of the spatial universalisation of the rule of neo-liberalism. But it differs in identifying a particular political and ideological formation that represents itself as a new ‘logic of capital’ and seeks to liberate capital from the shackles of earlier political compromises – not least the impositions of national governments (in the form of taxation and regulation).

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom and skills within a framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade… There has everywhere been an emphatic turn towards neoliberalism in political-economic practices and thinking since the 1970s. Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common… Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world.

The process of neoliberalization has, however, entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional forms of state sovereignty) but also of divisions of labour, social relations, we...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Changing Times: Perspectives on the Citizen-Consumer
• 2 Public Service Reform: the Rise of the Citizen-Consumer
• 3 Delivery Problems? Consumerism and Institutional Variation
• 4 Unstable Encounters: Users, Staff and Services
• 5 Managing Consumerism: from Policy to Practice
• 6 Sites of Strain: Consumerism and Public Services
• 7 What’s in a Name? In Search of the Citizen-Consumer
• 8 Beyond the Citizen-Consumer
• Appendix: The Project
• References
• Index