Two Economic Discourses in the New Management of Local Governance: Public Trading and Public Business

Abstract

we are more limited I think by our imagination than by our resources at the present time. (Social Services Director talking about community care)

Are quasi-markets and the force-feeding of business and market concepts to public services staff generating in response new concepts of public economic behaviour? Sweeping shifts within local governance to decentralisation, externalisation and contractual working relationships (see the chapters by Lowndes, Pollitt et al. and Doogan in this volume) have challenged the economic imaginations of service managers and staff. Can the new organisational forms be bent to public interest ends?