Professional Public Performance. Capacities of Professionals to Produce Publicness in and around 'Public' Service Delivery

AbstractIn many ways, public action depends upon public professionals. Medical doctors, judges, policemen, teachers, and the like, generate public services on a day-to-day basis. The rendering of public service, however, is... [ view full abstract ]

Abstract

In many ways, public action depends upon public professionals. Medical doctors, judges, policemen, teachers, and the like, generate public services on a day-to-day basis. The rendering of public service, however, is not automatically the rendering of ‘public’ services. Even though professional workers might work in or for ‘public’ organizations, they do not automatically act in a ‘public’ way, especially in times that force service providers to perform and solve problems in rather strict, businesslike ways. Professional workers, however, might act as counterweight. Not so much in a reactive and ‘negative’ sense, protecting professional spaces and autonomies and resisting managerial ‘intrusions’. But in the sense of professional behavior, aimed generating acts of publicness, i.e. acts that combine conflicting logics or rationalities when complex cases are treated and choices have to be made. In this paper we take a performative perspective on the generation of publicness. We argue that choice situations might be a matter of public action when professional workers anticipate difficult choices, when they acknowledge multiple rationalities or logics, and when they make trade-offs. Based upon insights in multiple logics, we stress the importance of procedural, performance, professional and political logics. We also stress the importance of capacities of professionals to cope with such complexities. When professional workers have the capacity to make productive use of contrasting logics, publicness can be generated. Publicness, in other words is not so much a separate logic – it is the process of connecting and interweaving multiple logics.

Key words

Public/private, professional workers, acts of publicness, logics, coping