The central question addressed by this book is how front-line staff in public services and the citizens who use those services act in ways that modify, disrupt or negate the intended processes and outcomes of public policy. This is not a new issue. In 1980 Michael Lipsky coined the term ‘street-level bureaucrats’ to describe the way in which frontline workers could effectively determine policy through their actions, and to explore the way in which workers developed strategies to resist management control of their work. However, the world of public services and public policy has changed substantially since then and some of the most significant changes that have taken place – for example, the introduction of managerialist practices across the public sector – can be considered as responses to the resistance of workers and the need to very precisely counteract aspects of worker agency that undermined the achievement of policy objectives. A second set of changes, and one of the key developments in public policy during the closing years of the twentieth century, stems from the expectation that citizens as well as workers have responsibilities for delivering policy outcomes defined by government. Citizens have themselves become key actors in the delivery of policy at street level. Thus Lipsky's analysis, which locates workers and their clients within different spheres of interest and which views clients solely from the perspective of the workers’ strategies for manipulating them, is clearly inadequate to an understanding of the way in which public policy objectives may be subverted within the current context.

The subversive citizens we are interested in here include both workers and citizens – or clients, consumers, users, customers. In this book we focus on workers and citizens and on the relationships between them as they interpret and reinterpret policy; negotiate their own values, identities and commitments in relation to the way in which they are encouraged and exhorted to act; determine what they consider is the right thing to do in particular circumstances; and challenge or resist the identities that are offered to or imposed on them by government. In the chapters that follow the contributors draw on research in a number of policy areas to reflect on questions such as:

• • How do policies seek to fulfil the objective of creating ‘responsible citizens’ – what does this form of citizenship entail and why does it remain elusive?