Clive Barnett and I have a new paper published in Policy and Politics, on their ‘fast track’ page, entitled Marketing practices and the reconfiguration of public action. The paper draws on a project for the NCCPE and ESRC that Clive and I worked on a while back when were both at the OU, on the use of segmentation methods in the public sector, charities, and campaign sectors.
This paper seeks to open up some interpretative space for exploring what is going on when marketing practices get used in non-commercial sectors, without presuming in advance that what is going on is necessarily always something called ‘neoliberalism’.
Here is the abstract of the Policy and Politics piece:
“Market segmentation methodologies are increasingly used in public policy, arts and culture management and third sector campaigning. Rather than presume that this is an index of creeping neoliberalisation, we track the shared and contested understandings of the public benefits of using segmentation methods. Segmentation methods are used to generate stable images of individual and group attitudes and motivations, and these images are used to inform strategies that seek to either change these dispositions or to mobilise them in new directions. Different segments of the population are identified as bearing particular responsibilities for public action on different issues.”
If you can’t access the version published in Policy and Politics, there’s a pre-print version available as a free download here.
Creating Publics 