Purpose – The social marketing literature tends to focus on upstream marketing (policy) and downstream (individual behaviour change) and has a limited view on midstream (working with partners and community groups) social marketing. The paper proposes midstream social marketing should also include an understanding of how services and service employees influence and support individual behaviour change goals. The paper presents four key services marketing principles – derived from services theory and thinking – which the paper believes to be essential for implementing effective midstream social marketing. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper that uses service theory and case-examples to show how service thinking can be used as a midstream social marketing approach. Findings – For effective uptake and impact of social marketing services amongst people and populations, social marketers need to design programs that consider the service experience, the service employee, service quality/customer value and the active role of the customer in value creation. Research limitations/implications – Services marketing is a well-established sub-discipline of marketing which, until recently, has not interacted with social marketing. The extension and application of services theory for social marketing can enrich and propel the social marketing discipline forward. Further research is recommended to evaluate how service principles can be applied in practice. Social implications – Given that social marketing services tend not to be accessed in sufficient numbers by the people who most need them, social marketers need to think beyond the technical, cognitive, and organisational-focused goals when designing social services. Originality/value – This paper identifies key service theories that social marketers should understand and use and is thus a source of fresh ideas for theory and practice.

Co-production is a risky method of social inquiry. It is time-consuming, ethically complex, emotionally demanding, inherently unstable, vulnerable to external shocks, subject to competing demands and it challenges many disciplinary norms. This is what makes it so fresh and innovative. And yet these research-related risks are rarely discussed and, as a result, risk-reduction strategies remain under-developed within training and research processes. It is for exactly this reason that this article draws upon Mary Douglas’s notion of ‘social pollution’ in order to understand the tensions and challenges of co-production. It seeks to expose the generally hidden politics of co-production.

In a supposedly 'anti-political' age, the scholarly literature on celebrity politicians argues that politicians gain popularity by adopting strategies from within the world of entertainment. This article offers the findings of a research project that has detected a marked shift in the interplay between celebrity culture and the presentational strategies adopted by politicians. At the heart of this shift is an increased focus on the concept of 'normality' as politicians increasingly attempt to shake-off the negative connotations associated with 'professional politicians' and instead attempt to appear 'just like us'. As such, this article offers an original approach by distinguishing between 'superstar' celebrity politicians and 'everyday' celebrity politicians before identifying three aspects of each strategy (i.e. media platform, marketing technique and performative role). It offers numerous empirical examples that serve to underpin this distinction before using the example of Boris Johnson as a case study in the attempted shift from 'superstar' to 'everyday' celebrity. This focus on normality offers a fresh entry-point into the analysis of contemporary political statecraft while also posing distinctive questions about the tension between political popularity and credibility in an anti-political age. As such, the approach also has significant implications for normative ideas about how celebrity can be 'democratised' to remedy anti-politics.

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi‐level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi‐level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multi‐level governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria—accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness—and points towards substantive institutional reforms.

This chapter introduces the volume, sets out its key themes, and explains how the chapters interrogate the nexus between governance and anti-politics via the concept of depoliticization. It argues that the literature on governance has drawn attention to a ‘capacity gap’ between elected politicians and those who actually take decisions about essential public services, while the literature on anti-politics has highlighted a growing ‘democratic gap’ between politicians and citizens. These issues arise in a dynamic context that is captured by concepts such as meta-governance and multilevel governance but also a wider disillusionment with neo-liberal ideology. This book addresses the ‘research gap’ that arises from the relative absence of studies that have drilled down into the relationship between the ‘capacity gap’ and ‘democratic gap’, by focusing on depoliticization. Overall, we argue that studies of depoliticization are well placed to examine these questions and especially the ‘nexus’ between governance and anti-politics.