Consumerism and Social Policy: Creating citizen-consumers

This paper explores the emergence of consumerism as a basis for the reconstruction of relationships between the state and citizens around conceptions of service users as consumers. We are interested in service variations in the development of ‘consumerist’ orientations comparing the provision of health care, policing and social care in different places by different organisations. A primary concern is with how service providing organisations have interpreted citizen-consumerism and put it into practice in their relationships with the public. The paper reflects on different aspects of service-user relationship that play across the drive towards consumerism (about voluntary-involuntary dimensions of service use; about chosen-coercive encounters with services; about different locations in the public-private distinction and about the relationship between use/consumption and co-production of services.