Conceptualising Customers in the Public Sector: An Activity-theoretical Analysis

In the public sector, an emphasis on a customer approach, as well as approaches related to citizens, patients, students, and parents, has grown over the past few decades. This in turn has spread to a number of fields of work in Finland. This thesis investigates the conveyance and development of the concept of customer in four Finnish public organisations. The point of departure for the study is the marketisation of the public sector and the New Public Management (NPM) ideology, which emphasise the benefits of business models in public sector practices. The introduction of the concept of customer is an example of such benefits, and the development of the concept is examined in this particular cultural and historical context. Previous international studies have raised challenges related to customer thinking in the public sector and concerns over official discourses that seem to simplify the fundamental societal implications produced by the customer approach.
The theoretical framework of my study is cultural-historical activity theory. The activity-theoretical concept of an object enables the analysis of customers as the core of work. Work-related tensions which have been initiated by the marketisation of the public sector are analysed through the concept of contradiction. The data comprises interviews (53) and documents (42) from each organisation. The studied organisations represent fields of elderly care, children’s day care, road management, and academic library work.
The findings in the document analysis suggest that in all the studied organisations, the use of the concept of customer has increased along with the introduction of the NPM doctrine. In the interviews, interpretations of customers as the object of work are expressed, first, by using the following discourses: dynamic, possibility, stabilisation, active, and passive discourses. Second, customers are conceptualised by expressions of the social and temporal expansion of customers. One interesting finding is the variety of conflicting situations which the interviewees experienced regularly in their service encounters. These conflicting situations are related to dominating ‘old’ organisational structures and practices, which have not developed sufficiently with regard to customer thinking. In addition to these conflicting situations, another interesting finding was shared discourses which were related to the customer approach. Shared discourses are a sign of the abstraction of the concept of customer as well as the NPM approach. Abstraction means here a generally accepted dominant status quo that is not widely questioned.
My interpretation in this study is that at the core of the concept of the public sector customer are the opposing forces of the private sector’s understanding of human beings as responsible individuals with free choice and the public sector’s emphasis on collective citizenship and the public good. The opposing forces produce not only a variety of conflicting situations, but also possibilities for the development of the concept.
This thesis theoretically opens up the background ideology behind the concept of customer in the public sector and thus increases the understanding of larger ongoing societal changes. The study provides new openings in regard to empirical studies on customer thinking from the perspective of employees. Such research objectives have been limited in number in the Finnish context. One important contribution of this study in regard to studies of working life is its explanation of the origin of conflicting situations from systemic tensions instead of trying to trace their origins to the behaviour of individuals.
My study provides new perspectives regarding customer thinking and the NPM in Finland. It also reveals and creates new learning challenges not only for employees and management, but also for customers and citizens. This thesis challenges all of us to reflect on the findings of this study with regard to our own experiences in service encounters and public sector practices in general.