Creating citizen-consumers?

public service reform and (un)willing selves

John Clarke

Janet Newman

Louise Westmarland

pp. 125-145

in: Sabine Maaßen, Barbara Sutter (eds), On willing selves, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of conceptions of the consumer in the reform of public services in the United Kingdom. In such reforms the consumer has embodied both a specific vision of modernity and a model of the agentic "choice making" individual. We examine the way that the figure of the consumer has been enrolled into political and governmental discourses of reform and its problematic relationship to the figure of the citizen. We then consider responses from people who use public services: exploring their preferred forms of identification and conceptions of the relationships that are at stake in public services.¹ These responses indicate a degree of skeptical distance from governmental address and point to problems about the effectiveness of strategies of subjection. We conclude by considering the analytical and political significance of unwilling selves as dialogic subjects.