‘Modernizing’ government – the case of the cooperatives of the Civil Service

Abstract

This article considers the recent history of efforts to ‘modernize’ the British Civil Service, focusing on the development of interest in the cooperative organizational form among Conservatives in the first decade of the new millennium. We explore shifts and changes in Conservative understanding of the concept of modernization and certain consequences of their modernizing ambitions – the emergence of the notion of the public service cooperative – reflecting historically and critically on these developments. In the early years of the new millennium, a discourse with a distinctive, liberal conservative and sceptical accent began to take shape, allowing a certain way of framing the problems of the Civil Service under their political opponents. Conservatives’ initial enthusiasm for the cooperative organizational form, customarily associated with their political opponents, can be connected to the revival of liberal conservative discourse. Later, however, in the years after 2008, Conservatives rationalized the case for the cooperatives in another way. The notion of an impending economic catastrophe, linked to the ‘burden of the deficit’, gave the case for change an apparently compelling quality. Notions of future and past now penetrated conservative thinking. But the cooperatives, as the detail of their design became clearer, acquired a distinctively neo-liberal inflection. We consider the work of diverse ‘governmental’ forces, directly and indirectly connected with the Conservatives, in these developments.