Re-Defining The Public

The development of “the public” in Western European societies has been closely affiliated with the emergence of modern statehood, democratic government and citizenship rights. From the very beginning the public has been related to both serving the needs of people best (“public sector”, “public goods” and “public utilities”) and giving people a voice (“public opinion”). Doubtlessly during classical modernity, the public translated into being at the frontiers of societal and political innovation. But in the golden years of the welfare state, the service-provision dimension of the public shifted toward bureaucracy, while its voice-dimension was increasingly professionalized through mass media. Since the 1970s, political opinion leadership started to favor the private in terms of both service provision and in-put with respect to political decision-making. Since then, the public sector has been heavily deregulated. Public governance has developed into a synonym for public-private partnerships with commercial and third sector /civil society organizations included. Private policy experts, consultants and advisory committees have become ubiquitous in western democracies. Simultaneously, the “voice” dimension of the public has changed remarkably. There is a significant decline of citizens’ engagement in classical arenas of political and social activities (parties, trade unions, churches, voluntary associations). The media as a central venue of the public has passed through an amazing process of concentration. But concurrently, there is a shift towards new forms of political and social activities, such as social networks, virtual communities, as well as a decisive increase in civic engagement, particularly at the local level and on behalf of national, international and community issues. Against this background, the purpose of the workshop is to investigate the current re-defining of the public with special attention to three particular topic and themes: 1) the output-dimension and hence the provision of public services, specifically the increasing hybridity which characterizes the field of public service delivery; 2) the discourse and therefore the legitimacy-dimension of the public, in particularly with respect to changes of the welfare mix of service provision; 3) the actor-dimension and thus the changed role and scope of public constituencies in the age of globalization and post-democracy.