Thought this was interesting

Graham P Martin

"strengthened accountability to local communities; a health service that responds to

patients and carers; and a sense
of ownership and trust’

...

What emerges is
a conception of the involved member of
the public as filling a mediating

role of the kind identified in certain other
areas of
contemporary social policy in economically

developed countries (Petersen
1997, Schofield 2002, Green 2005): lay
individuals whose

disposition and social location provide particularly
acute insights to government.
Such

insights make knowable the vagaries of the
wider population which involved individuals

articulate through typicality,
commonality or communicative skill, and help to ensure the

appropriateness
and efficacy of
public services to that
population. They are almost, perhaps,

‘experts
in laity’. ...

Particular
members of the public
– archetypically ‘active’ citizens,

with productive subjective
qualities varying from
willingness to rationality to knowledge of

their peers – seem to be cast in new interpretations
of these crucial mediating roles
of

governmentality. They bring together
experience, representativeness and knowledge
in new

configurations
as considered above, which
help to make knowable
the wills and whims of

the governed
to governmental
power:
the crucial input upon which
a modernised welfare

state, fashioned around
the idea of a fundamentally
changed, reflexive
society, rests for
its

success. What we see,
moreover, in
the British policy context,
is the way in which
it is not

just the background
and features
of these individuals, but
their labour, too, which
is crucial

in this process
of illumination."

--

Annette McKinnon

Thought this was interesting 1 1 8