The marketisation of public employment and public services and its impact on civil servants and citizens

Abstract

The chapter analyses the undergoing transformations of public employment and public services, with a view to identifying how they contribute to the deconstruction of employment as a political question. It shows how most of the boundaries that were characteristic of public employment and public services in the Fordist period (States vs. firms, civil servants vs. private economy workers, public services vs. private goods or services, citizens vs. consumers) are becoming blurred and being challenged by (a) the rise of the managerial state and the increasing use of market mechanisms to govern the work of civil servants, and (b) the emergence of the citizen-consumer as the figure around which the quality of public services is organised.