Read any useful research lately, unanswered research questions
From:
Simon Smith
Date:
Jul 22 16:42 UTC
Short link
Michael wrote (in response to Mick):
> You contrast the roles of:
* passive consumer of government services
* active citizen
> But maybe the active citizen needs as much mistrust and opposition to
> government, as trust and participation? Historically anyway, the
> public sphere of active, private people was critical of government and
> often in opposition to it. It was not a willing and cooperative
> partnership. Though maybe it will be different, this time around -
> there are reasons to think so.
Without having read it, I think that's probably a misinterpretation of Mick's
work. Customer versus citizen is not passive versus active. On the contrary,
customer-based relationships can be extremely active, both in commerce and in
public services. The growing use of personal budgets in health and social care,
for example, is an example of a customer-based relationship which
invites/demands service users to become proactive, even creative, in how they
spend their benefits. It's essentially an individualised relationship with the
state, but it could be argued that this type of consumerist democracy still
constitutes what Eriksen calls a general public sphere of consumers,
'co-deciding' (in the current jargon) about public policy outcomes through
their spending decisions.
Citizenship in the type of deliberative democracy you are proposing actually
often tends to manifest itself in smaller, 'strong publics' - in different
segments of the public sphere, which act as policy networks, project teams,
communities of critical reflection (like this one!) or oppositional/subaltern
enclaves.
But why set up an opposition between the roles of customer and citizen? Can't
we do/be both?
You might be interested in the following references:
Bovaird, T. (2005) ‘Public governance: balancing stakeholder power in a network
society’, International Review of Administrative Sciences 71(2): 217-28.
Eriksen, E. (2007) ‘Conceptualising European public spheres. General, segmented
and strong publics’ in Fossum, J. & Schlesinger, P. (eds.) The European Union
and the public sphere: a communicative space in the making? London: Routledge:
23-43.
Simon Smith