choose life, choose a job, choose a....
by Charlie Tims
Smacking children, smoking in public places, car lanes for multiple passengers and binge drinking have all fluttered around the headlines for the last week. Efforts to influence public behaviour range from efforts to illegalise the wrong choice (smoking and smacking) to coercing individuals into making the right choice (car usage, rampant boozing). With the spectre of manifestos casting a shadow over the political theatre, is it only me who sees a vague contradiction between the promotion of choice in public services with an almost religious fervour, and a preoccupation with trying to regulate it in a wider societal context. Why in one instance is excursing free choice assumed to have negative implications for other choosers, while in another it’s pursued with wild abandon?
I guess it's a just an odd inversion which treats consumers as citizens (don’t smoke as it will have negative implications for others) but citizens as consumers (pick whichever school you like, its your chance to shape your own life).
James Page
Having recently attended a small seminar with the authors of the new must-read book The Support Economy, I agree whole heartedly that the publicisation of the private realm will be crucial in years to come.
Maxmin and Zuboff argue that we are undergoing a revolutionary shift - from a service to a support economy; mirrored by a shift from the concentrated model of managerial capitalism to a new "distributed capitalism". Private companies will soon be turned inside out ("a Copernican inversion")- no longer starting with the firm but with the individual consumer as the source of value. They will, then, start to work to understand and respond directly to the complete picture of each individual's needs and desires.
If so, there are two important points - first, this will entail an intimate relationship between consumer and provider which will further (or completely?) erode the public/private split; and second, this will require enormous levels of trust (the lack of which is the hallmark of contemporary capitalism) which are only achievable through previously unimaginable levels of transparency.
Bobby Bobby
I'd agree with Charlie's last paragraph, though I don't think there's any inversion going on: treating people as consumers AND citizens isn't really so strange. Particularly since Gordon Gecko and the 1980s gave us the idea that to be a good citizen you had also to be an active consumer...
It also seems perfectly reasonable (in theory, at least) to seek to maximise personal freedom to the point where it starts to affect the freedoms of others, in a bit of a John Stuart Mill-stylee. Cars = pollution, smoking = passive smoking, drinking = anti-social behaviour, smacking = bodily harm (the most convincing argument I've heard is that the same laws should apply to children as to adults).
Schooling seems to contradict this (again, you're affecting another person's life), but in this case choice is in fact extraordinarily limited: parents can at most decide where their kids are taught, but wherever they go they'll still be studying the same national curriculum.
Duncan O'Leary
I agree with Charlie that there is a degree of contradiction here ? as the government positions itself to allow citizens to take at least joint authorship their engagement with public services and institutions, it also promises to peer more closely into people?s private lives to ensure that their lifestyle choices aren?t producing undesirable outcomes.
What does seem to connect the conversation about choice and the discussions around emotionally intelligent government/the politics of public behaviour is the growing impression that government needs to recast itself in order to regain its relevance in a society which is no longer deferential to its traditional institutions. Through allowing people to make more of their own choices this can be partly satisfied, but through engaging with issues that are grounded in people?s every day lives (shopping, parenting, better public spaces, quality of life) then government can play its own part.
This for me though, though is where the congruence ends and the contradiction begins, as most of the measures that the government is actually floating seem to be more recognisable as the state continuing in its traditional role as the protector - through defending children, preventing passive smoking, protecting the environment - rather than offering a positive story of governance which connects with people?s aspirations. In each of the cases that Charlie mentions the trade-offs seem remarkably similar to the traditional arguments in this sphere, which largely boil down to the need for protection vs. the freedom of the individual.
I think its hard to refute the suggestion that the private realm is becoming increasingly public-ised, but I do think there?s a danger of confusing the reinvigoration of democratic citizenship through a more modern conception of governance and the fairly basic extension of state boundaries along their conventional lines.
Bobby Bobby
Again, I don't really see this as a contradiction. It's fairly straightforward to argue that this is just an example of a government doing its job by maximinsing its citizens' freedoms: the complex freedoms rather than just the simple ones.
Allowing people the freedom to smoke is denying people the freedom to enjoy public spaces with clean air; taking away a parent's right to assault their child gives that child the freedom to live without fear of physical harm.
It's a fallacy, peddled hard by the American right, to think that freedom and choice can only be the result of government inaction.
Charlie Tims
...mmm i wonder who might take issue with that.
just before the onslaught i might point out that it was a nothing entry. there's no contradiction at all; our "public behaviour" choices have to be moulded because we haven't reached utopia yet, but choices are fine in the public services because they're good enough to take it. the issue of whether there is any contradiciton purely depends on your disposition on whether public services have got any better, and if so, by how much? the choice argument is boils down one side saying that public services are good (so good we can have choice) the other saying they're bad (so poor they need choice to improve).
a big yawn all round?
Bobby Bobby
Now now, Charlie: you can't post on a topic and then pretend that it's too boring for the attentions of a cool kid like yourself...
Paul Skidmore
One of the defining governance stories of the last 25 years has been the dissolution of the boundaries between the public and the private. By and large we have been used to the traffic primarily flowing from the public to the private, most notably through the privatisation of the public utilities which turned public institutions into private ones, and which helped to realise Mrs T's vision of citizens-as-shareholders.
To some extent the "choice" agenda is a continuation of that policy by other means.
What we are now seeing in a number of areas is more traffic flowing in the other direction. This includes many of the areas of personal or consumer responsibility Charlie mentions which form what Demos is calling "the new politics of public behaviour".
But this process is also operating at an institutional level, as Mike Power documents in his recent pamphlet The Risk Management of Everything. Organisations are being turned "inside-out", with unprecedented focus on the effectiveness of their private control systems because of the public consequences if they are defective (e.g. Barings Bank, Bhopal, Equitable Life, Challenger shuttle disaster).
All this suggests that the big policy questions of the next decade and beyond will not be about how you privatise the public realm but how you public-ise the private realm (both individual and institutional) in ways which are legitimate and effective.