On self-service democracy

A brief history of the self-service concept

The concept of self-service has a relatively long history, dating back to the first half of the twentieth century. The first commercial store operating on a self-service basis was opened by grocer Clarence Saunders in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee. The following year he acquired a patent for this concept (United States Patent Office (1917) ‘Clarence Saunders: Self-Serving Store (No. 1242872, Patented Oct. 9, 1917); see also Oi, 2004). In the patent application, Saunders stated that the purpose of a ‘self-serving store’ was ‘to provide an arrangement for distributing the merchandise of a store in such a manner that the goods may be selected and taken by the customers themselves while making a circuitous path through the store’ (US Patent Office 1917). This model became the standard for the modern grocery store in the following decades: by utilizing all of the available floor space, reducing the number of shop assistants needed, and rearranging the store so as to make it possible for the customers to see the entire merchandise, it profoundly changed the retail business and set a new norm for it (see newspaper reporting on the subject, e.g. The Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 1, 1920; The Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 14, 1924; New York Times, Feb. 8, 1925; The Hartford Courant, Mar. 2, 1933; New York Times, Dec. 5, 1942). For example, the number of stores in the US that sold fresh meat on a self-service basis increased to 5400 in 1952, compared to just 178 in 1947 (Wall Street Journal, May 12, 1952). In Britain, there were about 2500 self-service shops in 1955, while only three years later the number had risen to 4500 (The Manchester Guardian, Sep. 29, 1958).

Over the next decades, the self-service logic spread from grocery stores to other fields of life in the Western world. Such phenomena as the do-it-yourself ideology, the externalization of labour costs to the consumer (separate charges for services previously included in the price of the product), and the growth of household production (developing skills in such areas as gardening, home repair and bartering to fill the service gap) became common by the latter part of the 1970s. ² It became evident by the end of the 1980s that many customers in the urban, developed world believed that the only way to get things done quickly and correctly was to do them themselves. Services and products thus became unbundled: café customers were increasingly willing to serve themselves in order to get their cup of coffee. It is certainly not surprising that this self-service trend has become ever stronger since the 1980s; a few years ago it was estimated that one-third of all service interactions are in fact self-service (see Cavanagh, 2008: 462).

In social analyses, the notion of self-service also gradually gained visibility. For instance, Jiří Skolka (1976) used the concept in relation to labour productivity growth; Jonathan Gershuny (1978) developed the idea of households producing services for themselves in what he called ‘the self-service economy’; and Jonathan Gershuny and Ian Miles (1983) discussed ‘social innovations’ in which services are designed so that they can be almost completely produced by the consumers themselves. Alvin Toffler (1980: 271) speculated, in his classic volume The Third Wave, about a future in which people themselves take care of many tasks that were previously done for them by others (if done at all), and thereby produce for their own consumption. Nathan Glazer (1983) used the notion of a self-service society in an article on social policy in which he studied the individualization of tastes, the proliferation of self-help groups and organizations, and the common labour services that people must provide for themselves. Phil Blackburn et al. (1985) discussed the way in which information technology can be used in the service sector to provide services for people.

Since the 1980s, the discourse of self-service has often been linked to the idea of ‘co-production’. The term co-production, referring to a new way to see users of social services as co-producers of these very services, was developed by American political scientists in the late 1970s and the 1980s as a critical response to the inherent centralization tendencies of government. The logic appears relevant both in the private and public spheres. In the former, when individual consumers assume responsibility for and participate actively in the production of goods and services, they can also be seen as ‘co-producers’ (Bendapudi and Leone, 2003). In the latter, citizens are expected to be increasingly active, making the demarcation between the citizen and the civil servant actually obscure (e.g. Löffner, 2010). In the debates of the 1970s and 1980s, exemplary forms of co-production ranged from citizens’ participation in neighbourhood watch schemes to such prosaic routines as filing tax forms or writing postcodes in particular spots on envelopes (e.g. Brudney, 1985; Brudney and England, 1983; Parks et al., 1981; Sharp, 1980; Whitaker, 1980).

Over the past two decades, new information technologies have enlarged the scope of potential self-service practices and enabled new forms of customer involvement; a logic reminiscent of that of co-production has been clearly visible. Bringing customers closer to business operations – and outsourcing the expenses of control to the customers – have been seen as one of the most important changes in the history of business management (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999; see also Barney, 2004: 88–9, 100). In 1999, Dell Computers pioneered the outsourcing of product development by moving the services of assemblage, ordering, and technical support for the clients to the Internet (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 2000: 29–30). More recently, the notion of ‘putting customers in charge’ has found new articulations through notions such as the creative consumer, the democratization of design and open innovation (e.g. Thomke and von Hippel, 2002; Barney, 2004; Chesbrough, 2006; Benkler, 2006). Collective projects based on peer production or social production include, for instance, such well-known examples as the free-content encyclopaedia Wikipedia and the open-source code operating system Linux. ³ In the new millennium, through networks of online communities, collaborative consumption initiatives and peer-to-peer renting schemes, individual actors can not only buy and sell, but also increasingly share, trade or rent pre-owned goods to each other.

Developments have been more or less analogous in the public sector. The proponents of self-service policy models have been emphasizing, at least since the early 1990s, that they offer citizens a way to save time and money in their transactions with the government and in the use of public services. The British Labour governments (1997–2010), for instance, gave self-service a central role in their agendas for public services reform. It was important for them to invest in systems that deliver the right services but also ‘systems that encourage self-service’, as a former junior minister at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister once put it (The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2003). As a consequence, in the health service vision of then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the patients of the National Health Service would be enabled to engage and take control over their own health and their healthcare (Brown, 2008). Concrete examples of such practices have ranged from the telephone information systems of the 1990s, making services available 24 hours a day and freeing the staff for tasks requiring personal attention, to personal ‘citizen accounts’, currently being developed in the Scandinavian countries, through which people can safely communicate with public sector agencies. Ideas of this kind should not necessarily be interpreted negatively: electronic governance in particular – allowing people to obtain services online and thus reducing visits to government offices – has made it feasible to take into account citizens’ diverse needs in a pluralistic society.

Three parameters of self-service

In the brief narrative above, three closely interlinked issues – or general parameters or prerequisites – emerge, which essentially seem to define the principle of self-service, namely, consumerism, active citizenship and information technology. Each of these has assumed ever greater prominent societal presence in recent years, and each contains elements that are fundamentally important for the current conduct of democratic politics. Let us look at each of these three issues in more detail.

Although it first appeared in 1915 (Colman’s Rural World, March 25) and continued to occur in the press from time to time, the word consumerism became popular in the 1950s as a means of contrasting the American economy to that of the Soviet Union (see The Washington Post, Sep. 28, 1956; Times Herald, Sep. 28, 1956; The Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 27, 1956). This new interpretation of the word was possibly introduced by John S. Bugas, a former vice president of the Ford Motor Company, who proposed that ‘capitalism’ be substituted with ‘consumerism’ as an appropriate depiction of the American economy (The Sun, Jan. 23, 1955; The Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 24, 1955).

Over the past three decades, consumerism has increasingly gained ground, both in political and social thought and in concrete administrative and political practices: the citizen has become a consumer who makes free choices in the marketplace. ⁴ Robert Adams, among others, has discussed what he calls the new welfare consumerism as being associated with a consumerist view of user involvement that emphasizes choice, quality and participation. In the 1990s, with the disintegration of the universalistic welfare state and the rise of contractual service provision, public service clients increasingly became customers, but because of the strengthened personal involvement of these clients, this transformation also represented a potential source of empowerment (Adams, 1996: 5, 11, 18, 21; Wirsching, 2011).

It is thus possible to divide the models through which people are believed to participate in public services provision into democracy-oriented or consumer-driven models; participation is legitimate either in terms of democracy or the market (Croft and Beresford, 1993; Tritter et al., 2009). There is, in other words, an intimate connection between participation and consumerism, but pinning down the consequences of this connection appears far from simple. A critical, politically conscious attitude can potentially inform the acts of consumption; however, it is also possible to interpret the marketization of public services in terms of performing ‘mimic consumerism’ – the public sector consumer only mimics the act of truly choosing between real alternatives (Klein, 2001). Be that as it may, while it is withdrawing from its previous concrete responsibilities in the public sector services, the representatives of political/administrative power (e.g. states and municipalities) have increased the use of indirect governance methods linked to the desires of a free-to-choose, consuming citizen (see Passavant, 2005: 25, 28, 32).

The second parameter, active citizenship, materializes both in terms of public participation and personal responsibility – making individual citizens and organizations responsible for their own well-being. Further, active citizenship is closely related to distinct forms of accountability. The demands for citizen participation generally emerge from what are believed to be problems of representative democracy (the myth of representative democracy having exhausted much of its legitimacy and energy among the citizenry), and the consequent need for government reform. Indeed, raising the levels of citizen participation, and thereby enhancing the sense of community within the polity, have become important elements in general government and regional policy agendas in many countries and also, for example, in the European Union (e.g. the EU’s rural community initiatives, see Kull, 2008: Ch. V). The initiatives have, however, often had limited and ambiguous effects (Marinetto, 2003: 111; Brannan et al., 2006: 993, 1001, 1003).

The closely related theme of personal responsibility has become an equally ubiquitous issue of public policy in the past few decades in many industrialized countries. For instance, the US Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (Pub. L. 104-93) in 1996, which made the conditions of welfare provision for the poor significantly stricter. Personal responsibility has also been a key theme in several of Barack Obama’s political campaigns and speeches, including the address to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 in which he stressed individual responsibility and mutual responsibility as being the essence of ‘America’s promise’ (Obama, 2008). This move to emphasize personal responsibility is also familiar from the other side of the Atlantic: The Third Way Programme of New Labour was based on the key principle of ‘no rights without responsibilities’ (Giddens, 1998: 66–8). Ten years later, in 2008, the then opposition leader David Cameron (2008) continually stressed that the most important word in politics is ‘responsibility’ rather than ‘freedom’. The ideal of personal responsibility thus often merges with the goal of civic renewal. Taking responsibility for one’s own livelihood is coupled with the aim to be an active, responsible and participating citizen in general (Brown, 2009: 102). In terms of governance, it becomes vital to advance methods that make social actors capable of governing themselves, that make them more autonomous, while they simultaneously assume responsibility for vicissitudes that used to be dealt with by the state (Rose, 1999: 139, 142; Harvey, 2005: 65).

The third parameter is the central role of information technology and the new models and practices of e-governance. Information technology has indeed become indispensable for the new forms of democratic governance and a vital tool in the drive to deliver more individualized and cost-effective public services. Although it would be misleading to locate the beginning of e-government in the 1990s and thus ignore the long history of the use of electronic information and communication technology in and by the state, it seems undeniable that this technology, especially the Internet, has provided the means by which the public sector reforms of the past two decades have become possible (Henman, 2010: 39–43).

The e-governance ‘movement’ has not only managed to transform public administration but also some crucial aspects of our political self-understanding. The new electronic channels seem to constitute a promising environment for a novel kind of interaction between the government and the citizen. The new, digitalized forms of policy and administration include web-based windows or gateways to organize all the information and services across the government agencies according to the needs and interests of defined segments of the population. This single-window approach builds on the concept of self-service, by requiring the users to become more active and self-directed. Additionally, there is also an element of empowerment: through self-service, citizens can gain greater access to, and control over, the personal information that the government holds about them (Brown, 2007: 58).

The three parameters discussed above go a long way towards defining the preconditions or even modes of the self-service principle. Let us now turn to the other main storyline – the more structural one – in order to acquire a more complete picture of the phenomenon of self-service democracy in its historical context.

The emergence of service welfare

We believe that the specific societal constellation constructed in Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War could well be called service democracy. It was, first of all, designed in the belief that the new social and societal system had to be able to prevent the emergence of new radicalisms, both on the right and on the left. It had to tone down the potential problems of laissez-faire capitalism and to be social enough to block the strengthening of the communist parties – as happened simultaneously in Eastern Europe with the support of the Soviet Union. In these circumstances it was also important to make the system more or less universally valid by bringing all citizens under the social and protective umbrella. The ideal of a strong government producing all-encompassing welfare (institutions and solutions) for the citizens thus prevailed, with significant local variations, of course. The provision of welfare services was the central organizing idea of post-war democracy.

The main principles of the new policies had already been introduced before the war, however. Sweden is usually mentioned as the forerunner in this respect thanks to such scholars and politicians as, to name but two, Rudolf Kjellén and Gunnar Myrdal (e.g. Tunander, 2001). A specific welfare model, the folkhemmet, emerged in that country from the late 1920s onwards, with the Social Democrats firmly at the helm. The distinction between the state and the individual citizen became virtually meaningless, the citizens formed the state as they formed a home (hem), a distinct sense of social responsibility prevailed, and the role of the all-powerful state was to carry out the tasks that this responsibility required; this made generous welfare distribution and a large service-sector possible. By the 1970s, the Swedish or Nordic model had reached its peak, with a universalized idea of social responsibility, which is still visible in these countries’ generous development aid policies.

Perhaps the most remarkable developments in terms of post-war social reconstruction took place in Germany, with the resulting Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and 1960s. ⁵ The ideas of a soziale Marktwirtschaft, or ordo-liberalism, began to take shape soon after the catastrophe of the Third Reich, through the work of Ludwig Erhard and Alfred Müller-Armack in particular. In his famous pamphlet of 1946, Wirtschaftslenkung und Marktwirtschaft, Müller-Armack (1990) drew a clear linkage between freedom and the social sphere, but nevertheless gave the state a significant role as an instance of order. The question was, as it were, of government-liberalism with a strong state-based social service dimension. Even the country’s Social Democrats came to accept the basic logic of that new system, even though they emphasized the social dimension more (e.g. in the Godesberg programme of 1961).

In France, and in many other Central European countries, developments in many respects resembled those of Germany; they followed the corporatist-statist model à la capitalisme rhénane as Michel Albert (1991) has put it. In Great Britain, by contrast, the post-war Labour governments, primarily inspired by the ideas of William Beveridge, began establishing various welfare systems, the National Health Service (created in 1948) foremost among them. Until the late 1970s, various welfare provisions increased, the dominant (Labour) ideology affirming that the state or the community had to have the ‘power over the commanding heights of the economy’ (Pettersson, 2004: 215). ⁶

All in all, the mode of government established during the post-war decades in Western (or continental) Europe aimed – and there was a remarkable consensus across the political spectrum – to create institutional and legal mechanisms that would give people a strong sense of security and provide them with what they needed, and it was the task of the public sector, primarily the state bureaucracy, to do this. It was a hierarchical, top-down system, with clear responsibilities and duties on both the citizens’ and the government’s side. There was also a strong tendency towards centralization, towards centralized government structures, which also meant that the mechanisms and idea of representation remained strong in politics. Moreover, it was also a system primarily created in and for the conditions of a single nation-state, not regionally, although many institutional solutions naturally spread from country to country. ⁷

From service to self-service

In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, the model of state-led service democracy (or, as is has often been called, the Keynesian Social State) gradually started to evaporate under the banners of neo-liberalism. Welfare (state) systems were redefined and reconstructed, economic policies transformed in the name of freedom, and mechanisms of social individualization grew stronger. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s has sometimes been indicated as the turning point. It was followed by such political events as Deng Xiaoping’s new economic policy in China launched in 1978, Margaret Thatcher’s assumption of power in Britain in 1979, and the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in the USA a year later (Harvey, 2005).

We need to remember, however, that the strong individualism inherent in the ideology of the New Left, the 1968 ideology of societal anti-hierarchization, paradoxically may have led to similar consequences. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (1999) in their magnum opus, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme make a distinction between the social – the security of working conditions – and artistic – the fulfilment of one’s individual creative capacity – critique of capitalism that the new (post-1968) left introduced. The latter mode and its inherent individualism gradually assumed the upper hand in Western societies.

There is no need to provide a substantial depiction of the basic principles of neo-liberal (economic) policies here. Suffice it to note that neo-liberalism primarily refers to an economic policy that relies on economic deregulation and privatization, market liberalization and the pruning of the welfare state (see Hayek, [1944] 2001; Friedman, 2002). It also emphasizes individual liberty, personal responsibility and the ‘rationality of social actors’, together with an inclination to understand individual sovereignty in terms of consumer choices rather than the language of citizenship (Amadae, 2003). Thatcher and Reagan, above all, attacked the welfare state for creating a ‘dependency culture’, which eroded the principles of hard work, individual initiative and self-reliance (Murray, 1984: 180). ⁸ The mechanisms of welfare provision remained intact in many countries, but there was a change of attitude in the 1980s: it seems that, at least with the benefit of hindsight, the imperative of social responsibility began to weaken and the individual exploitation of the market society became more widely accepted.

An inherent element of the neoliberal policies was the New Public Management ideology that came to dominate the administrative systems of much of the ‘developed world’. It was not, and has never been, a clearly defined ideology. It is usually seen to include such elements as cutting down centralism, management by result, increased significance of local government, customer orientation, marketization, and economic efficiency rather than the promotion of equality and social protection (Lane, 2000: 6); to this ideology, the state as a benevolent server of its people obviously represents an utterly alien ideal. In the new millennium, because of the evident problems of the original credo, New Public Management ideas have been increasingly replaced or modified with principles of participative politics, such as reintegration projects, client-based or needs-based reorganization, and new types of digitalization processes (Dunleavy et al., 2006: 224–42).

Hence, since the 1980s, the individual has gradually become an important source of information and the new focus of policy concerns: public services are being managed and delivered increasingly with, rather than simply for, people. For instance, in Britain, in the area of health services, the voices of service users have been heard through official sanctioning by the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 (Adams, 1996: 18, 23). The citizen is thus no longer being regarded solely as a recipient of diverse public services but as an active participator in the service system and what is therefore deemed to represent the democratic process of today. In the words of Paul Henman (2010: 217): ‘Self-service provision involves active welfare subjects taking their own initiative to engage the welfare state without bureaucratic assistance and to ensure that they obtain the benefits and services they need and to which they are entitled.’ From this perspective, the individual, the citizen, could metaphorically go to the supermarket of services, and choose the products that please him or her.

These developments could be also understood in the framework of social individualization, a key element of the theory of modernity. The individualizing tendencies that established the individual person as the ‘master identity’ of modern society (made possible by the formulation of individual rights, the globalization of market capitalism, the growth of income and leisure time, the expansion of the service sector, the rise of consumerism, and the decline of the nation-state), gave rise, on the one hand, to the expansion and pluralization of individual roles in society, and, on the other, to the heightened authority of individual ‘personhood’ (Frank and Meyer, 2002; Honneth, 2004). With time, and with the ever-strengthening differentiation of life patterns, this individualization possibly leads to the disappearance of commonality and the privatization of what used to be the common space (e.g. Putnam, 2000). It is also part and parcel of those new models of ‘advanced’ liberal societies, which aim at rendering individuals more responsible for their own choices and for the consequences of these choices.

It is noteworthy, however, that even though liberalism sees free individuals as inalienable basic units of society, the consolidation of the individual-oriented perspective can also be seen as a result of the specific rationalities and techniques through which subjects are governed and constructed – of what Michel Foucault (1991; see also 1982) has called governmentality. The free liberal individuals ‘are not merely “free to choose”, they are obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice’ (Rose, 1999: 87). The free individual is not a ‘natural’ concept; rather, specific societal processes, social ideas and political practices, such as educational institutions, have laid the foundations for the emergence of the image of a free individual.

Self-service and individualized governance

In the above, we have followed two fairly general storylines as we have tried to frame the historical context, or the historical logic, within which it has become justified to talk of a self-service form of democracy. We now seek to bring these storylines together. For this, we assume that from the perspective of lay men and women ‘democracy’ happens (or has traditionally ‘happened’), evolves, develops, and dissipates within a three-dimensional space or triangle; it is composed of bureaucracy – or today we usually talk about governance – civil society (or participation of and by the citizenry), and mechanisms of representation through which decision-makers have been chosen and are accountable (elections, above all). Within each of these dimensions the self-service ideal has led to significant changes. The general point is that, increasingly, there are mechanisms or social practices that, on the one hand, allow one to serve oneself (in a space of freedom), while, on the other, one is often forced to serve oneself (which obviously curtails the faculty of freedom). This tension between the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aspects of the ideal essentially constitutes the self-serving subject of today. Let us begin with issues related to the governance dimension.

From the governance point of view, two intertwined points seem particularly noteworthy (Henman, 2007). First, the mechanisms of governance ‘produce’ the individuals. Individuals must be formed and continuously reformed as independent and self-directed subjects who actively conduct their behaviour according to individual calculations and social norms. Second, individualizing governance is targeted at a given individual separately, and it is capable, at least in principle, of taking into account that individual’s personal desires, needs and problems (e.g. the whole-person approach in service delivery). The mass production of universal services and policies is gradually being supplemented, and sometimes perhaps even replaced, by individualized and individualizing services and policies. The linkage is clear: individualizing power promotes and shapes the individual subjectivity, which, in turn, demands more personalized services (see Bauman, 2001; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). From a slightly different angle, responsible and spontaneous citizenship in the context of individualized forms of governance demands a shared idea of individuality and the individualized society.

What, then, are the individualized, concrete forms of governance that take into account citizens’ individual needs, desires and aims, and simultaneously help or force them to engage in political and administrative processes in new ways, thus sustaining self-service democracy? At least four key mechanisms of individualized governance can be discerned in contemporary societies:

First of all, it has become possible, primarily because of information and communication technologies, to provide ever more personalized services. This can encompass two dimensions: integrating services across traditional service boundaries to make them easier to use (e.g. the single window approach), and tailoring services and channels of access so that the users’ specific needs can be met (Cabinet Office, 2000; 2009); the private sector has offered models for both dimensions. The latter requires, in practice, the availability of more detailed personal information about the users and their individual circumstances, but it can, arguably, also give service users control over the services they receive (van Berkel and Valkenburg, 2007; Borghi and van Berkel, 2007). ⁹ A good example here is the citizen account – a secure communication channel between a citizen and the government. Yet, in spite of the allegedly increased control over the services that they provide, the individualized and personalized forms of governance seem to make it difficult to detect those structural problems (e.g. poverty within one segment of population) that the system may include or even cause (Henman, 2010: 228–33). There are also the risks to privacy: when the patterns of consumption are mapped with precision, this can compromise the privacy of individuals (Cavanagh, 2008: 464).

The second, closely related method is what is known as targeted governance: customer-citizens are increasingly grouped for the targeting of public services and for the group-specific individualization of these services; administrative events are informed by an active consideration of differences between citizens. Grouping citizens into different segments thus erodes the principles of universal service provision, according to which political bureaucracies have traditionally viewed their functions and aims (Passavant, 2005: 25; Henman, 2010). There is thus the obvious risk of building hierarchies between different citizen groups but, on a more positive note, specific groups can have access to more relevant, or simply better, services (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998: 79–81, 89; Bellamy, 2002: 219; Ciborra, 2005).

There is also a trend called ‘new conditionality’, primarily in the field of social policy, which tends to emphasize differences between different groups of service users. The idea is that access to benefits and services in one policy domain is made conditional on the citizen’s behaviour in another policy domain. As early as 1998, Christine Bellamy and John Taylor (1998: 81) posed the question of whether social security administration in Britain has been moving towards ‘lifestyle targeting’, which emphasizes the behaviour and motives of claimants.

The individualization of risks also indicates more targeted governance. In most developed countries, citizens are segmented and classed, not only in terms of personalized services, but with a view to the security risks that they pose. This makes it possible to apply different systems of treatment to different risk categories and risk-based security models (Passavant, 2005: 30–2). With the sophisticated statistical methods and especially the large-scale computerization of government practices, it is possible for the state agencies (and the commercial sector, e.g. life insurance firms) to keep ever better track of individual subjects as parts of the whole population (Cole, 2000; Agar, 2003; Yates, 2005). In this ‘profiled risk governance’, individual characteristics are linked to specified risks such as poverty, obesity, fraud, or terrorism. In Britain and elsewhere, for instance, the government routinely utilizes risk assessment procedures, data matching, and social sorting techniques that some have seen as an indication of the strengthening of the capacity for surveillance (6 et al., 2005, 113; see also Lyon, 2003). Because profiled risk governance is based on the personalization of risks and risk scenarios, it tends, however, to eschew social explanations for those risks.

Third, the role of an active and enterprising citizen has been accompanied by a new focus on accountability, broadly understood. Various practices of self-assessment, auditing and accounting have become central management techniques of the current governance culture. Increasingly, citizens are expected to actively enter information about themselves into administrative datasets that form a cumulative and, in principle, interactive information base for bureaucratic purposes. This has been closely related to the prevailing performance-oriented management practices, which contain a promise of efficiency and reduced administrative burden. The shift to self-assessment practices, for instance, in taxation systems of various countries, conveys the rationale of placing responsibility on taxpayers to assess their own tax liability (Power, 1997; Henman, 2010: 77–9). The policy of making citizens more accountable for their decisions could also be seen as a means to strengthen active citizenship and regenerate political community, but defining responsibility as an individual and not a collective matter undermines most of this potential.

We already discussed the fourth key element at the outset: there is a new way to see users of public services as co-producers of their own services. This citizen involvement can take place either collectively (as a community) or individually (for the distinction, see Brudney and England, 1983; Alford, 1998), and at various points in the service chain in the forms of co-designing, co-delivery and co-managing. Co-production also tends to emphasize close interaction between staff and service users, and the focus is on (mutually shared) outcomes rather than merely ‘services’ (e.g. Sharp, 1980; Brudney, 1985; Bovaird, 2007; Needham, 2007). Co-production can thus indicate a shift away from defining public services solely in terms of professional state administration, which can, from an optimistic perspective, bring forth broader civic struggles for self-determination and democratic choice.

In this sense, co-production can have significant implications for democratic practices beyond representative government, because, as Tony Bovaird (2007: 846) notes, it locates users and communities more centrally in decision-making processes. Co-production potentially reduces the tendency towards individualized forms of responsibility by promoting joint citizen–agency provision of services and strengthening civil society by mobilizing community resources. It can also raise the level of civic knowledge and education. In individualized co-production activities, on the other hand, the self-service model tends to lead to an added emphasis on individual responsibility: in submitting tax returns, for example, an individual is liable with regard to sufficiency of thoroughness and must withhold no vital information (see Bovaird, 2007: 847; Shamir, 2008).

Self-service, participation and representation

Governance is not only a matter of various, more-or-less mechanistic innovations and practices based on them. There is always a general rationale, or even an ontology, that determines the nature of these practices and thus the encounters between the polity and the citizen as well. As we have seen above, governance issues also expose the very intricate balance between top-down control (by the state) and bottom-up freedom of the individuals (potentially enhanced by the ideal of self-service). But a fuller picture of self-service democracy requires an understanding of the other two political dimensions: participation and representation. In some sense, they can even be seen as more fundamental than the dimension of governance: the promise of freedom that we should always nurture in democracy can only materialize in and through these dimensions.

The focus of the new, innovative self-service governance mechanisms is on individuality, consumerist personal choice and responsibility. There is no indication, however, that the individualized forms of governance are completely devoid of the capability to increase comprehension about our common world and to produce new types of collective forms of agency. Indeed, it is possible to argue that, as a replacement for the post-war model of collective solidarity, based on social insurance aiming at redistribution within a given risk class, the individualized forms of responsibility (and governance) can increase social inclusion and decrease estrangement. There is, in other words, the possibility of a new positive politicization based on individual responsibility and the ethos of self-service, and on the ability and need to expose one’s individuality within the community (Rosanvallon, 2000: 92, 104; Luhtakallio, 2010). Self-service, as we noted in the first section of this article, is thus closely tied to the ideals of active citizenship, and this can also manifest itself through more or less traditional civic, organizational activities. To put it simply, self-serving, self-responsible individuals can help each other to participate. ¹⁰

However, self-service individualism also entails significant problems from the point of view of democratic participation. The strongest, and rather obvious, concern is the constant danger of collective political processes (e.g. acts of resistance and opposition) not emerging, or becoming weaker than expected, in the face of the individualized forms and patterns of action, organized on a one-to-one basis. Politics has become profoundly fragmented: citizens deal with the government as individuals rather than as members of an organized public (Crenson and Ginsberg, 2002). The strength of the self-service rationale also seems to narrow the area of political debate as it transfers many genuinely political questions to the sphere of personal transactions, a sphere which tends to assume its significance through a discussion concerned with technicalities (see note 10 on deliberation). Moreover, civic education, often mentioned as a major challenge for late capitalist societies (e.g. Dahl, 1998: 185) may also encounter problems in the self-service context. It is difficult to develop a shared sense of civicness, if people increasingly opt for very specific and specialized educational services. There is also a danger that the shift to a self-service culture will exclude those groups who are not capable of participating actively, for example, the elderly and the poor; online participation in particular can turn out to be problematic (Cavanagh, 2008: 465).

Furthermore, as a potential consequence of the ideals of self-service, civil society is sometimes expected to assume the role of service providers from the state (which can indeed activate civil society), but this can easily lead to significant problems in terms of accountability and transparency. Civil society is always ‘blind’ in itself, its constitutive components tend to promote their own particular interests; there are no formal(ized) checks and balances. This also applies to co-production and citizen participation programmes more generally (Bovaird, 2007: 856; Needham, 2007: 222). Closely related to this, while encouraging co-production in various public services potentially increases people’s involvement in politics, when this is linked to the spread of the practices of self-assessment, auditing and accounting, co-production can turn into a tool of control in the hands of the government. These last points are also closely related to patterns of democratic representation.

It is commonplace to assume that the represented (the citizenry) is a clearly defined category. Yet political representation partly determines what it represents: without representation we do not have a conception of what the represented is like (Ankersmit, 2002: 114–15). While this is true, the question of representation has undergone a profound transformation, because self-service, and the ethos of individualism it entails, coupled with the ever more complex nature of modern life, unavoidably reduce the need of representation. People are expected to be able to orient themselves – and they increasingly demand the right to do so – instead of being in need of the cultivation of a detailed political tutelage. In other words, both the state and the citizens seem to embrace, with varying motives, the idea of involved citizens representing themselves. Analogously to Stefan Schwarzkopf, who talks in ontological, politico-theological terms about the sovereign ‘Consumer King’, we can even refer to a sovereign Self-Service King, a sovereign who has become a sacred category and can therefore no longer be represented by others (Schwarzkopf, 2011).

Moreover, if citizens’ opportunities to affect the development of the public sphere, including the services provided there, increasingly depend on their rights as consumers, on their rights to independently make choices of consumption, any ideal of representation can be deemed to become virtually useless. There is still an unresolved tension between capitalism and democracy; representation can step into the realm of consumption only to a limited degree. Under these circumstances, it also tends to be increasingly difficult to construct a recognizable picture of the common, shared world – a picture that is in fact the precondition for a well-functioning democracy. Moreover, the borders of responsibility and accountability between the public and the private also become blurred in the age of Self-Service Kings. Then, because democratic representation is essentially based on responsibility towards the represented, mechanisms of representation hardly appear meaningful.

Hence, in order to increase the politicizing tendencies inherent in the individualizing models described above, one needs to enlarge the gap between the voters and the representatives instead of narrowing it – otherwise what we get is not democracy but bureaucracy (Ankersmit, 2002: 117). Representation should, in other words, be a sphere of its own, a sphere where shared structural problems of society can be addressed, where common pictures of the world can be drawn, and where the mirror of the citizenry is clear.

Given the above, the ultimate question seems to be to what extent the individualized forms of governance and participation reconstruct what the political realm is all about. In other words, if politics has traditionally been defined in terms of what is collectively shared – what is common to all – then the new personalized forms and processes of governing and participating tend to be excluded from the picture. Yet these forms and processes reshape the traditional outlook of the political realm in an essential manner. They compel us to redefine what is political by questioning the conventional demarcation between the spheres of the collective and the individual. But the question remains: How can what is individual address what is common?

Conclusion

Self-service, as elaborated above, is not just about public administration reforms or new policy ideas. It is, above all, an attitude or ethos of governance that promotes self-directed citizenship and individualized governing processes through a number of different policy initiatives concerning consumerism, marketization, active citizenship, and personal responsibility, emphasizing information technology as a mediator between these. Self-service is thus not restricted to distinct public service models alone – although these are important – but it has become an integral part of the larger political culture through diverse participative and productive processes and with various implications for the mechanisms of representation. Self-service ideals bring forth a new mode of democracy.

The question of politics, the question of our common concerns, remains crucial in this context. We ought to understand how the individual’s participation in the self-service logic affects the way we understand politics, under which conditions we (as a community) can make and implement decisions that we can all accept and share. We have seen that the self-service ethos includes both politicizing and depoliticizing elements, but we have not been able to decide which of these elements prevail at the end of the day. There are dimensions in self-service democracy that fit well into the traditional, participatory ideals of a democracy of free citizens, but there are also issues that are, we believe, highly problematic, such as commonly shared political involvement descending into individualized activities that are unable to address structural matters. The ultimate objective is, perhaps, to make sense of a societal constellation, where we have all the freedom in the world to make choices, but where we also perceive the acts of choosing as an obligation.