Patrice Dutil, Cosmo Howard, John Langford and Jeffrey Roy (2010) The Service State: Rhetoric, Reality and Promise
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852312437324 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
78(1) 183–185
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852312437324
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International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Book review
Book review
Patrice Dutil, Cosmo Howard, John Langford and Jeffrey Roy (2010) The Service State: Rhetoric ,
Reality and Promise, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 224pp., ISBN: 1487-3052
Canada has been regarded as an international leader in new modes of service
delivery, a message strongly communicated by its academics and practitioners.
This leadership was apparent in integrated service delivery, citizen focus and the
application of new technology to governance, and was registered by innovations
such as Citizen First surveys and Government On-line. A reality check occurred in
recent years as progress plateaued and high expectations were not met by organi-
zations such as Service Canada. Once the ‘low hanging fruit’ was plucked, the
movement stalled at the point where more ambitious forms of integration were
required.
This book is a reaction to these experiments: part lamentation for lost oppor-
tunities, part stock-take of progress and part exhortation to address the potential
by confronting the challenges, with much stimulating analysis between. Four aca-
demics combine their individual research into a narrative about service transfor-
mation with a citizen-centric basis. They ask whether given the experience and
progress over the past decade, and the interruption to the trajectory of service
enhancement, the service transformation movement can rise to the new challenges.
The authors report that service delivery was once regarded ‘as something done
by trolls’ (p.1), but as new types of service organisation emerged and public ser-
vants became interested in delivering services, such an activity became ‘cool’. The
focus here goes beyond service improvement to the more ambitious objective of
service transformation, the partial convergence of and interplay between several
elements, and the overall question of whether a potentially successfully pathway
can be fashioned.
Service transformation is presented in one sense as a collection of agenda: a
‘multifaceted vision of citizen and business engagement; joined up services; multi-
channel delivery; innovative partnering; collaborative networks; information shar-
ing; and focus on outcomes and performance measurement’ (p.3) This set of ideas
operating in unison is meant inter alia to invert the normal approach to service
delivery and to lead to re-conceiving services to citizens, integrating complementary
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