Citizenship, Choice and Social Equality in Welfare Services

Abstract

The provision of welfare services has been re-organized in many countries in the last two decades. Inspired by ideas best known under the label New Public Management (NPM), policy-makers have introduced organizational features like privatization, contracting and consumer choice into the welfare service sector. Prominent goals behind such reforms were to make the provision of public welfare services more cost-efficient and to raise their quality. Another important goal was to empower users by offering them more choice between different service alternatives. The introduction of NPM into the welfare sector has given rise to new questions regarding the relationship between organizational market dynamics and the preservation of political control over resource distribution in such policy areas. Is it, as suggested by the proponents of NPM, possible to vitalize welfare service provision with the help of organizational features like choice and competition while at the same time preserving the universalistic character of such services? This question has been much discussed by researchers and policy makers alike in the last twenty years (see, for instance, Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993; Le Grand, 2007; Greve, 2009), but few conclusive answers have been given. In relation to this, there have also been questions asked regarding the relationship between the marketization of social service provision and the changing nature of social citizenship.