The Will as the Subject of Welfare—The Consumer Model of Service Delivery

Abstract

Whether it is the North American idea of ‘consumer-directed care’ (Keigher 1999; Kapp 1997; Feinberg and Ellano 2000) or the British idea of ‘user involvement’ (Cowden and Singh 2007; Carr 2007; Scourfield 2005), there has been a remarkable shift in policy for the delivery of welfare services over the last decade. Instead of a professionalized relationship of service delivery embedded within the structure of public administration of publicly-funded welfare services, the model that prevailed up until the last quarter of the twentieth century, now the model is rhetorically shaped by the idea of consumer or service user ‘choice’, and, ideally anyway, such choice is to be assured through the natural development of a welfare service market.