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PUBLIC services are increasingly obliged to prove their commitment to the individual by seeing them as customers – yet almost no-one who uses the services wants to be described in that way.

OU researchers found that when asked, people were far more likely to describe themselves as specific users of a particular service – such as “patients” – or, more intriguingly, as “members” of a group who are coming to a service not just because they want to, but because they need it.

And how the users of such a service – whether it’s, say, a hospital or a library – describe themselves reveals not only how they perceive their relationship with it, but what they expect from it.

“It’s not like shopping – that’s the response that constantly comes across,” said Professor John Clarke, who undertook the research with four colleagues from the University’s Department of Social Policy. “Using public services is not about a set of anonymous transactions as you would have in, say, Tesco’s. We found two themes kept cropping up. One was partnership – for example, if you have a problem with your health, you work with health professionals to recover – and the other was respect. That is, people respect the system enough not to assume that there are necessarily solutions – for instance, we can’t make old age go away – but they do hope to get respect themselves, by being taken seriously.”

Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Relationships and Identifications was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Cultures of Consumption research programme. The researchers asked staff and users of three public services – health, policing and social care – a series of questions examining how the services were responding to the so-called consumerist imperative, how users experienced the move towards consumerist relationships, and who service users thought they were when they used services.

“Hardly anyone identified themselves as a customer or a consumer,” said Professor Clarke. “Not many called themselves citizens, either. They preferred to see themselves as ‘members of the public or local communities’, being part of a collective or communal relationship.”

The work is part of ongoing research in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance into the changing nature of citizenship, how we see our own status within it – and how much it has changed in the last decade. And understanding how people fit in and define themselves is vital to the success of the public services, conclude the researchers.

“The current policy agenda conceals the tensions between needs, choice, rights and rationing and devolves them to service organisations,” says their report. “Choice appears to be making those decisions more difficult. More transparency about such tensions and how they are being managed would create more productive public dialogue.”

For further information visit the creating citizen consumers website.