Janet Newman

Clive Barnett

Nick Mahony

Rethinking the public, public communication and public action in a globalising and mediated world, this book examines web-based interaction, community empowerment, participation experiments, transnational struggles and new ways of understanding public space.

Innovations in Research, Theory and Politics

Rethinking the Public

Tim Cole

Angela Piccini

Morag McDermont

Responding to the urgent need to rethink the relationships between systems of government and those who are governed, this book examines ways that we can design regulatory systems that better support the knowledge and creativity of citizens.

Co-Creating Regulation for Engagement

Imagining Regulation Differently

Evelina Hendrika Tonkens

Faced with budget problems and an aging population, European governments in recent years have begun reconsidering the structure and extent of the welfare state. Guarantees and directives have given way to responsibilities and choice. This volume analyzes the effect of this change on the citizens of Germany, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. It traces the emergence of new discourses around social movements for greater independence, power, and control, and the way these discourses serve to reframe the struggle at hand. Making use of ethnographic research and policy analysis, the authors analyze the cultural transition, tensions, and trajectory of this call toward active citizenship.

Summoning the Active Citizen in Western European Welfare States

Participation, Responsibility and Choice

John Clarke

This original analysis of the creation of new state forms critically examines the political forces that enabled `more and better management' to be presented as a solution to the problems of the welfare state in Britain. Examining the micro-politics within public service, the authors draw links between politics, policies and organizational power to present an incisive and dynamic account of the restructuring of social welfare. Clarke and Newman expose the tensions and contradictions in the managerial state and trace the emergence of new dilemmas in the provision of public services. They show that these problems are connected to the recurring difficulties in defining `the public' that receives these services. In particular they question whether the reinvention of the public as either a nation of consumers or a nation of communities can effectively address the implications of social diversity.

Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare

The Managerial State

Publics, Politics and Power explores the emergence of new forms, sites, and practices of publicness and the implications for public services. It examines the remaking of the public in the context of new formations of the nation, where issues of migration, diversity, and faith challenge traditional forms of solidarity and citizenship. It traces the emergence of hybrid organizational forms and new strategies for governing publics and public services. It suggests some of the ways in which the public domain is being recast around notions of civil society, community, and populist participatory politics.

Remaking the Public in Public Services

Publics, Politics and Power

Davina Cooper

Nikita Dhawan

This book examines what value, if any, the state has for the pursuit of progressive politics; and how it might need to be reimagined and remade to deliver transformative change. Is it possible to reimagine the state in ways that open up projects of political transformation? This interdisciplinary collection provides alternative perspectives to the ‘antistatism’ of much critical writing and contemporary political movement activism. Contributors explore ways of reimagining the state that attend critically to the capitalist, neoliberal, gendered and racist conditions of contemporary polities, yet seek to hold onto the state in the process. Drawing on postcolonial, poststructuralist, feminist, queer, Marxist and anarchist thinking, they consider how states might be reread and reclaimed for radical politics. At the heart of this book is state plasticity – the capacity of the state conceptually and materially to take different forms. This plasticity is central to transformational thinking and practice, and to the conditions and labour that allow it to take place. But what can reimagining do; and what difficulties does it confront? This book will appeal to academics and research students concerned with critical and transformative approaches to state theory, particularly in governance studies, politics and political theory, socio-legal studies, international relations, geography, gender/sexuality, cultural studies and anthropology.

Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities

Reimagining the State

Electronic Inspection Copy available for instructors here "Very stimulating and intellectually exciting. In fact, I think it is one of the best books I have read for a long time." - Professor Carsten Greve, International centre for Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School Publicness appears to be in decline or retreat in the face of markets, consumerism and individualism. Yet questions of public participation, public governance and the reform of public services are at the top of the political agenda in many countries. Publics, Politics and Power offers an innovative analysis of the changing fortunes of publicness. The book " Explores the emergence of new forms, sites and practices of publicness and the implications for public services. " Examines the remaking of the public in the context of new formations of the nation, where issues of migration, diversity and faith challenge traditional forms of solidarity and citizenship. " Traces the emergence of hybrid organizational forms and new strategies for governing publics and public services. " Assesses some of the ways in which the public domain is being recast around notions of civil society, community, and populist participatory politics. Chapters include vignettes illustrating the book's core concepts, making this a useful teaching resource and valuable reading for students of public management, public and social policy, sociology and cultural studies, and for those working in public services. Janet Newman is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University, and Director of the Publics Research Programme within the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance. John Clarke is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University. His research has centred on conflicts over the future of welfare states, public services and citizenship in the UK and elsewhere.

Janet Newman

Books

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