Customers and active citizens

[Mark Woodhead]

I recently attended an event at which someone from a public sector organisation was talking about some future developments. In the course of this talk, she kept referring to local residents as 'customers' , and talking about 'customer service'. It occurred to me that, if we are to make progress with co-production, we need to move beyond this 'customer' mentality, this perception of local residents as 'customers' of services provided by public sector agencies, and we need to move instead to perceiving local residents as active citizens with whom we can - and perhaps should - be working to co-produce projects and, through that, more importantly, to co-produce wellbeing outcomes. I'd be interested to hear of anyone else's thoughts/ideas on this.

[Lucie Stephens]

Edgar Cahn, who has informed a lot of nef's thinking on co-production once said, if you call people customers of public services you only give them two roles, to consume more or to complain. Customer in the money economy is seen as a strong position, assuming you have status related to how you chose to spend your cash, with people competing for your 'business'. But this does not translate well into a public service economy. Here we don't want people to be consumers, we want them to be contributors, with a stake in the final results. Whilst talking about people as 'customers' is better than ignoring them completely, or expecting them to be grateful recipients of services, it will be a dead end in relation to creating opportunities for co-production.    

[james oflynn]

I completely agree Mark, I think that one of the problems is that those who work in the public sector continually get different messages about what people should be called and this causes people not to interact naturally but to constantly search and worry about the correct term.Service Users, Customers, Clients......... the list goes on to the point where people become confused about where to start. Your quite right though if Co Production is to be used in the public sector we need to start at the beginning, by getting the terminology right.