Abstract:

In the UK, New Labour has identified citizens as consumers of public services as central to their reform. This extension of the figure of the consumer to public services has been seen by some commentators as emblematic of New Labour’s neo-liberal character, embodying (or prefiguring) tendencies towards the marketization and privatization of the public realm. Drawing on a current research study, this paper argues for a different view of the citizen-consumer which

  1. examines the hyphenation of the citizen-consumer as indicating an unfinished and unstable process of articulation;
  2. foregrounds the political-cultural conditions of the public realm that have made possible – or plausible – such a transformist articulation of the citizen and consumer; and
  3. is attentive the ways in which the transnational logics of neo-liberalism become ‘nationalized’ in a specific social formation.
The paper concludes by reflecting on some of the limits and limitations of neo-liberalism, as suggested by the problems that the Labour government has had in institutionalizing and embodying their conception of the citizen-consumer.

 

Suggested Background Reading:

Kingfisher, Catherine. Western Welfare In Decline. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. (chapters 2-4)

Clarke, John. "Dissolving the Public Realm?" Journal of Social Policy. 33.1 (2004): 27-48.