Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

Abstract

The drive to instil 'customer focus' in government services has always been controversial. However, it is particularly controversial when adopted in services that have compliance functions, such as regulatory bodies, the police and some welfare agencies. The reason for this is that, whereas customer focus discourse prescribes that public services tailor their offerings to the preferences of individual service users, compliance-oriented services produce public goods (order, safety, etc.) by compelling individuals to do/stop doing certain things regardless of their preferences. There is, therefore, a prima facie tension between customer focus discourse and the objectives and practices of compliance, and this raises important questions about why and how customer focus is adopted in compliance-oriented services, and what the consequences of this are.This thesis addresses these questions by investigating the adoption of customer focus policies in the compliance branch of an Australian city council. It is informed by a conceptual framework derived from the governmentality studies literature, where numerous theoretical resources exist for examining how styles of thinking, such as customer focus, shape, and are shaped by, practices for governing the conduct of political subjects. In particular, I draw on the theoretical and methodological insights of a number of recent governmentality studies that examine governing at the level of situated practices as well as, or instead of, at the level of widespread discourses or political rationalities. The rationale for attending to situated practices is to grasp how discourses like customer focus are mobilised by situated actors to address problems emerging in particular governmental contexts, such as urban governance.It is also to facilitate analysis of how heterogeneous discourses and practices, such as customer focus and compliance, are assembled together and how tensions between them are managed on the ground.The thesis presents data collected through ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted with the compliance branch of the city council mentioned above. An ethnographic approach was adopted because it best aligned with my theoretical orientation to study governing at the level of situated practices. Adopting an ethnographic approach allowed me to observe firsthand how customer focus discourse is integrated with compliance practices in the day-to-day operations of urban governance.It also allowed me to overcome some of the limitations associated with the reliance on textual analysis of archival materials in governmentality studies, such as the tendency to infer the operation and effects of governing practices from how they are represented in programmatic texts.Previous research has foregrounded the tensions that arise when customer focus is adopted in compliance-oriented public services and has warned that these tensions risk undermining the public interest outcomes that compliance services produce. The findings presented in this thesis contributes to this literature by...