Corporatizing Canada Making Business Out of Public Service - PDF
نویسندگان: JAMIE BROWNLEE, CHRIS HURL, AND KEVIN WALBY
خلاصه: Jamie Brownlee, Chris Hurl, and Kevin Walby Social activists and critical scholars have often used the concept of “corporatization” to describe the changing nature of the Canadian state over the past thirty years. The concept evokes the image of economic elites controlling public institutions and using business metrics to evaluate their performance. Corporatization is also used to describe the expanding discretion of senior managers to set priorities in health and social services, the creation of market-friendly public sector cultures, the development of new contractual arrangements between the public and private sector, and the “capture” of regulatory agencies by industry. In the popular press, the term corporatization is invoked to explain changes in areas as diverse as mental health, foreign aid, LGBTQ pride events, and the funeral industry. (1) Clearly, corporatization means different things to different people, with it becoming a sort of catch-all concept to describe a multifaceted set of political and economic processes associated with neoliberalism and growing corporate power. However, little attention has been devoted to exploring what corporatization means, to assessing its process and impacts, or to investigating how it is taken up across different types of public agencies and institutions. A small body of research has examined the effects of corporatization around the world, initially looking at North America and Western Europe, and, more recently, the Global South. (2) Much of this literature focuses on public utilities, such as electricity and water, as well as health care and higher education, although research has increasingly focused on other areas of service delivery. Some researchers have also examined the growing impact of corporatization on civil society. For instance, recent scholarship has exposed how social activist organizations increasingly look and act like multinational corporations, and how non-governmental and non-profit organizations are pursuing partnerships with the same corporations they ostensibly oppose. (3