The market doesn’t care

Mary Corcoran and Kevin Albertson

Public Money & Management, 2024, vol. 44, issue 4, 289-297

Abstract: This article theorizes some consequences of skewing relational (care) labour into more transactional forms of marketized public service areas; with particular reference to contracted criminal justice services in England and Wales. The authors attribute this to an interplay of the incentives of the corporate sector and those of governments which form a collective ‘artificial intelligence’ promoting marketization. This creates unintended consequences. Whereas corporate incentive structures minimize transaction costs and optimize profit, recent UK governments have incentivized economic productivity over socially beneficial indicators in public services. The article finds that narrowly transactional calculations of value in the commissioning of care services may produce short-term fiscal incentives for commissioners (usually the state) and corporate suppliers and ‘care resellers’, but generate longer-term supply-side problems. The article concludes by signposting how more pluralistic forms of collaboration among government, commerce and third sectors can be differently—and more socially—conceived. There are lessons to be learned in the article for all capitalist economies.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09540962.2023.2244851 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:pubmmg:v:44:y:2024:i:4:p:289-297

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPMM20

DOI: 10.1080/09540962.2023.2244851

Access Statistics for this article

Public Money & Management is currently edited by Michaela Lavender

More articles in Public Money & Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().