Transformations and Predicaments

Abstract

Although public sector organisations are a significant feature of everyday experience, understanding of their distinctiveness has all but atrophied, a situation which has been accelerated since the late 1970s by what Estrin and Le Grand (1989) call ‘an unprecedented barrage of criticism’. Hospitals and surgeries, schools and welfare agencies, local authorities and departments of government provide an array of services, benefits, subsidies and regulations that have formed the context of most people’s lives. Nevertheless, for over a decade the public sector has looked beleaguered: its rationale doubted, its effectiveness and efficiency derided and its resources depleted (see Buchanan, 1975; Niskanen, 1971, 1973, 1975). Public organisations have, purportedly, been self-interested and unresponsive to the public and have failed to fulfil the expectations of the postwar years of leading the creation of a fairer, more equal society.