Subversive Citizens: Power, Agency and Resistance in Public Services.
| Author | Needham, Catherine |
Marian Barnes and David Prior (eds.)
POLICY PRESS, 2009
The front-line of public services - the place where staff interact with the people who use services - retains a somewhat mythic status. In ministerial speeches and policy pronouncements it is often celebrated as the site where the real work of public services goes on: 'let's get resources to the front-line and free up professionals to do their jobs'. Its value is celebrated through contrasts with the 'back office', where resources are seen as being wasted on pen-pushers and managers. Several reports in recent years have highlighted the front-line as the crucial site of effective practice (see, for example, Olliff-Cooper et al., 2009; Localis/KPMG, 2009; Haldenby et al., 2009; HM Government, 2009). The coalition government has committed itself to removing targets and easing the audit load so that professionals are free to get on with their job on the front-line.
However, the very name front-line draws attention to an alternative interpretation, suggestive of a place in which staff and citizens meet not to collaborate but to fight for power and resources. The Panaroma expose of the abuse at the Winterbourne View care home in Bristol reveals the scope for the front-line to be a site where vulnerable people are abused and neglected by staff. Rather than staff and users working co-productively to deliver better services, front-line staff can be gatekeepers pitted against service users in relationships of indifference or abuse.
Such contrasts reveal the extent to which the front-line is an intimate and emotive setting. The alchemy through which formal policies are translated into better health, education, care (as well as neglect and malpractice) is often obscured from public view. It takes place in the doctor's consulting room, the private interview room, the home visit, on the telephone, etc. The scope for staff and service users to pursue their own agenda, as distinct from formal guidelines, is large.
In Subversive Citizens, Marian Barnes and David Prior have gathered together an excellent set of chapters to reflect on ways in which front-line workers and citizens 'act in ways that modify, disrupt or negate the intended processes and outcomes of public policy' (p. 3). They draw on Michael Lipsky as a starting point. His 1980 book Street-Level Bureaucracy is a classic account of how and why front-line staff resisted management control of their work, determining policy through their...
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