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This book focuses on how personalisation - the idea that public services should be tailored to the individual, with budgets devolved to the service user or frontline staff - evolved as a policy narrative and has mobilised wide-ranging political support

This book focuses on how personalisation - the idea that public services should be tailored to the individual, with budgets devolved to the service user or frontline staff - evolved as a policy narrative and has mobilised wide-ranging political support.

Drawing on interviews conducted by the author with politicians, bureaucrats and citizens, alongside content analysis of government documents, the book explains how New Labour has consumerized public services and contributed to the anti-politics that it previously decried

The cluster of reforms to English social care associated with personalisation mark a break with recent thinking about what spaces are considered relevant and appropriate for people with an assessed social care need. The promise of personalisation from a spatial perspective appears to be twofold: expanding the physical spaces that are available to people, while at the same time contracting interpersonal spaces between people and those who support them to emphasise attentiveness and particularism. However, there is a danger that personalisation is much more variable in its impacts. The physical spaces for some are expanding while for others they contract, and these opportunities are likely to be unequally distributed in ways that overlay other forms of inequality. The attentiveness and particularism promised by personalisation is again patchily distributed, with wide variation in the quality of support planning and person-centred care. For the formal care workforce, the two concepts of space (physical environment and interpersonal closeness) intersect as physical spaces shape the capacity to deliver attentive, responsive care. The article brings these concepts together through a discussion of 'caring labour' at the intersection of the physical and emotional aspects of space.

The article explores the relationship between personalization reforms of social care services in England and the redevelopment of day centres for older people and people with a disability. Recognizing the ways in which personalization reforms have been driven by a rejection of institutionalization, it considers how intersecting story-lines delegitimize the day centre model and promote alternative shared spaces such as 'community hubs'. Using responses drawn from a small survey of day centre workers and case study interviews with social care managers, the article argues that the personalization narrative has been much more effective in legitimizing the closure of day centres than in stimulating the emergence of new collective spaces. There are a range of possible explanations for this apparent disconnect between the narrative and the practice context, including a neo-liberal agenda which uses the community hub story-line simply as cover for retrenchment of the welfare state, or an assumption that the financial context has knocked the story off track. However, a broader explanation was considered to be more plausible, acknowledging the difficulty that ambiguous narratives have in marshalling resources and 'freezing' change.

AbstractPersonalization has become a unifying theme and a dominant narrative across public services in England. Key to understanding the dominance of personalization is the recognition that it is a story that is told about public services, their history and the roles and experiences of the people who use them and work in them. Like other stories it is compelling, emotionally resonant, but also multi‐interpretable. This article identifies five key themes which are central to the personalization story‐line, noting their reliance on a combination of formal evidence, personal narratives and common sense. These are: (1) personalization works, transforming people's lives for the better; (2) person‐centred approaches reflect the way people live their lives, rather than artificial departmental boundaries; (3) personalization is applicable to everyone, not just to people with social care needs; (4) people are experts on their own lives; (5) personalization will save money. The article goes on to examine some of the complexities that audiences face in translating a story‐line into policy programmes and frontline practice. Three aspects in particular are considered: the ambiguity of personalization as a guide to action; the tensions between user empowerment and user responsibility; and the extent to which personalization is used to legitimize other reforms, in particular budget cuts.