Introduction

In one of his tantalisingly undeveloped remarks, Michel Foucault suggested that

My aim in this chapter is to try to explore how the relationship between power and resistance might be understood in the specific context of the delivery of public services and, more particularly, to examine the conditions in which resistance to public service policies and practices can take the form of an oppositional or counter-agency on the part of both public officials and citizens.

The conceptual starting point for the chapter is ‘governmentality’, the analysis of the rationales and techniques of governing that, inspired by Foucault's historical investigations (Foucault, 1991), has been developed in the work of Nikolas Rose and others (for example, Rose, 1996, 1999; Dean, 1999; Miller and Rose, 2008). The crucial insight of governmentality is that contemporary processes of governing operate through a myriad of mundane, everyday techniques and routines of discipline and control that are exercised by individual citizens and which enable them to function as self-regulating members of the polity. In this approach, public policies and services are to be understood as principally concerned with the creation and maintenance of citizens who possess both the will and the capacity to conduct themselves in accordance with governmental objectives. However, it is a central theme of this chapter that this account is in itself insufficient in seeking to understand what happens in the delivery of public services, particularly ‘at the point where relations of power are exercised’ in encounters between officials and citizens. More specifically, it does not enable us to explain how and why public policies and services can be disrupted or subverted in their pursuit of defined objectives, and what the active role of both public officials and public service users might be in those processes of disruption and subversion.