Includes index. Currie, G., Ford, J., Harding, N., & Learmonth, M. (2010). Making public services management critical. London : Routledge.

Part I: Rethinking the Background -- From Collective Struggle to Customer Service: The Story of How Self-Help and Mutual Aid Led to the Welfare Sate and Became Co-Opted in Market Managerialism -- Toward Unprincipled Public Service: Critical Ideology, the Fetish of Capitalism, and Some Thoughts on the Future of Governance -- Sheep in Worlf's Clothing Schools, Managerialism, and Altering Ideologies -- Public Sector Management? But We're Academics, We Don't Do That Sort of Thing! -- Part II: Critique of Mainstream Orthodoxy -- The Inevitability of Professions? -- Critical Risk Management: Moral Entrepreneurship in the Management of Patient Safety -- Public Participation in State Governance from a Social-Theoretical Perspective -- Marketing the Unmarketable: The Vlaams Belang, a "Party unlike Any Other" -- A Critical Realist Analysis of Institutional Change in the Field of US Nursing Homes -- Part III: Radical Alternatives -- Critical Leadership Theorizing and Local Government Practice -- Individual Patient Choice in the English National Health Service: The Case for Social Fantasy Seen from Psychoanalytic Perspective -- From Metaphor to Reality: A Critical View of Prisons -- Queer(y)ing Voluntary Sector Services: An Example from Health Promotion -- The Contribution of Existentialist Thinking to Public Services Management -- Adding Value to Critical Public Services Management -- Conclusion: What is to Be Done? On the Merits of Micro-Revolutions

This book brings together public services policy and public services management in a novel way that is likely to resonate with academics, policy makers and practitioners engaged in the organization of public services delivery as it is from a perspective that challenges many received ideas in this field. Starting from the perspective of critical management studies, the contributors to this volume embed a critical perspective on policy orthodoxy around critical public services policy and management studies (CPPMS). In so doing the authors bring together previous disparate fields of public services policy and public services management, but more importantly, debate and present what 'critical' constitutes when applied to public services policy and management. This edited collection presents chapters from a broad range of public services domains including health, education, prisons, local and central government and deals with a range of contemporary issues facing public services managers are examined, including regulation of professions, risk management, user involvement, marketing and leadership.