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Do Metaphors of Globalization Destroy the Public Service? André Spicer, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom [email protected] Book chapter forthcoming in: Metaphors of Globalization: Mirrors, Magicians and Mutinies. Markus Kornprobst, Vincent Pouliot, Nisha Shah and Ruden Zaiotti (eds.) 1 Introduction One of the reasons why I think there is no hope today for future possibility is precisely because people feel there is no alternative to the capitalist system, and even more to the neo- liberal form of capitalism which is dominant today. And the left is in great part responsible for that, because they seem to have capitulated to this dominance of capitalism and they are not thinking of another alternative . for instance, there is a belief that because of globalisation nothing is possible, and this becomes the dominant discourse (Mouffe, 2002:135). Today, a sense of crisis hectors the public sector. Debates about its’ future inevitably refer to the rising powers of global markets and the declining powers of the nation state (Held, 1995). The values of public service are said to be eroding quickly and being replaced with a commitment to market based competition (Haque, 2001). Employees within the public sector find themselves caught in a bind between being a public servant and an enterprising employee (Thomas and Davies, 2005). Users are not sure whether they are a member of the public, or a consumer ready to gobble up what is on offer. These painful questions have led some to claim that the public sector in most western states is suffering a ‘legitimation crisis’ (Habermas, 1999). By this we mean that people are questioning the relevance, usefulness, importance, and appropriateness of the public sector in contemporary life. The result is that we are increasingly un-sure about what the public sector should do, can do, or whether it even has a right to exist. This has prompted some to speculate that we are witnessing the destruction of the public sector. Mourning the destruction of the public sector inevitably involves asking a profound and troubling question: Why is the public sector in decline? There are a whole range of answers on offer. These include the innate ineptitude of government funded bureaucracies (Osbourne and Grabler, 1992), the will on the part of people to be autonomous from the state (Hardt and Negri, 1994), the rise of a culture of enterprise (Du Gay, 1996), and the crisis of Keynsianism (Jessop, 1992). Perhaps one of the most popular answers to this question today is ‘globalization’. In this chapter I would like to ask how might globalization destroyed public service. To answer this question I shall begin with two tendencies in current debates about globalization. One conceptualizes globalization either as an irresistible force that incessantly pushes 2 public sector organizations into the global market. The other conceptualises globalization as a myth that does not reflect the continued national rootedness of many public services. Rejecting both of these answers, I argue that globalization can also be thought of as a kind of language that is used to speak about the social world in a meaningful fashion. A vital aspect of the language of globalization is how it is used and systematically applied as a metaphor in various social fields. In this chapter I will explore how the propagation of metaphors of globalization are a crucial part of the de- legitimation of the public service. I find that metaphors of globalization did not completely displace other previously dominant metaphors (like nationalism). Rather, globalization seemed to involve multiple contesting metaphors which were used to describe and understand what public service is and should be. This leads me to suggest that the public service is wracked by a legitimation struggle where there are number of different competing metaphors that haunt public sector organizations. Globalization and the Public Sector According to some, globalization represents the most fundamental threat to the public service. This is because it represents a potent mixture of ideological and institutional change that incessantly undermines goals of providing a national public service and replaces them with a global market oriented regime. The central shift in ideology involved with globalization has been the rise of neo-liberalism as a dominant political ideology. Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man is one of the most famous endorsements of global neo-liberalism. Responding to the collapse of communism as an existing political system, Fukuyama argued that the 1990s saw economic and political neo-liberalism become the only viable political system. Fukuyama called for the withdrawal of the nation-state from many aspects of social life. The vacuum left by the nation state and its institution would be filled with market regulated exchange relations (see also: Hayak, 1962; Freidman, 1962). As neo- liberalism became one of the most dominant political ideologies across the globe, the nation state withdrew from many roles in public life. The result has been a market- oriented restructuring of nation states throughout the world (Bourdieu, 1998), wholesale deregulation of previously nationalised markets though dismantling system of trade barriers and state subsidies (Piven, 1995), and an increasing prevalence of technocratic solutions to processes of development (Cox, 1996). 3 Alongside these ideological shifts there has been a wholesale restructuring of state institutions. With the growth of trans-national flows of capital, nation states have become increasingly unwilling and unable to regulate flows of finance, goods and information within and across their borders (Ohmae, 1990, 1995). Similarly, the increasing neo-liberal restructuring has made the nation state increasingly unable to control the flow of capital, images, and technology across and within its borders (Burbach et al, 1997). This poses a significant challenge to the nation state in terms of its sovereignty (Sassen, 1996), its authority in its citizens’ life worlds (Korten, 1995), and its ability to regulate effectively (Held, 1995). Radically different conclusions have been drawn from these apparently similar diagnoses of the contemporary social world. For some, a world of ‘freedom and opportunity’ for individuals and multinational companies emerges from the death of the nation state (Ohmae, 1990). For others, the increasingly global scope of capital unlocks the possibilities for global resistance to capitalism and possibly an international socialist order (Burbach et al, 1997). Others still have pointed out that the decline of the nation state may create insurmountable tension between the demands of the global marketplace and the objectives of the state (Rodrik, 1997). The globalisation process therefore represents an explosive concoction of neo-liberal ideology and market based institutions replacing the nationalism and institution of the nation state. The result is the inevitable decline of nation public service and concomitant rise of new globally oriented offerings. These initial commentaries on globalization painted a rather apocalyptic picture. Public service is fated to wither as the forces of globalization ran rampant. However these apocalyptic conjectures have been called into question by more recent research on the fate of the state and the public sector. These studies have argued that globalisation processes do not necessarily result in a wholesale shift away from national public services towards business like activities oriented towards the global market. Rather, national public service continues to play an influential part in social life. Indeed, the nation states play a vital role in actually facilitating processes of globalization: It is not a question of whether capital’s internationalisation results in a decline of the state, but rather how the state continues to participate in capital’s internationalisation in order to reproduce itself (Yeung, 1998: 298). 4 This means that the nation state is an important conduit though which globalising processes are reproduced. This is very well demonstrated by the world societies research group at Stanford who have sought to show that the standardising and systematising efforts of the public service are a vital driver of globalization processes (Meyer et al, 1997). Others have argued that globalization results in a changing role being ascribed to public service organizations (Yeung, 1998, 1999). The function of the public service organizations shifts from addressing ‘market failures’ through interventionist measures to playing a legislative and policing role that supports the neo-liberal market. This means that the role of the public sector becomes largely focused around attracting capital, regulating to produce favourable conditions for its expansion (Cerney, 1995), addressing problems produced by globalisation that global economic actors like multinational corporations are unwilling to address (Bauman, 1998), and engaging in military and policing operations to protect the interests of multinational capital (Hardt and Negri, 2004). More recent work by political scientists and organizational sociologists has demonstrated that despite the apparently irresistible forces of globalizations, public sector organizations remain resolutely ‘embedded’ within their local institutional framework (eg. Campbell, 2004). For instance, Vivien Schmidt (2002) has shown how despite change prompted by forces of globalization,
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