A Service to the Public: The Containment of Ethical and Moral Conflicts by Public Bureaucracies

Abstract

Abstract The rhetoric of pragmatism has become a defining characteristic of public service reform under Britain’s (New) Labour government. Exemplified in policies such as the Private Finance Initiative and Best Value, it construes choice between public and private as essentially a matter of efficacy-what works is what’s best, or so the rhetoric goes (on’Best Value’ see Miller, Chapter 10, this volume). This rhetoric has been subject to sustained critique from several directions. Some (Pollock, Shaoul, and Rowland 2001) have argued that it is simply a camouflage for the further penetration of global market forces into public life, a continuation of Thatcherism but in a more publicly acceptable clothing. Others have focused more upon pragmatism as the cloak beneath which a bland and homogenizing managerialism has spread its tentacles across public life (Clarke and Newman 1997).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.