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Chapter 6 moves from the global to the EU level to analyse the way in which the ideational shift of the global farm trade regime has influenced the development of EU agricultural policy institutions and the CAP. It demonstrates that the changed global context, emerging in the early 1990s, increasingly influenced CAP decision-making institutions that, in turn, affected the design of agricultural support measures. The MacSharry reform of 1992 changed the architecture of the CAP, switching from market price support to direct payments; and the Fischler reforms of 2003/04 resulted in a further decoupling of farm support.

This chapter examines the radical changes currently seeking to transform social services for adults – from service provision to self-directed support. In the United Kingdom, direct payments and individual budgets have been major forces for change in adult social care, and there is considerable policy support for building on current progress and extending these concepts further in the future. The chapter presents an overview of the transitions and changes in the British social-care system. After providing an overview of policy and an introduction to a system in transition, it discusses the changing role of service users and user organisations in the development of the self-directed-support agenda, the changing role of social workers, support planning and brokerage for people using self-directed support, and risk and risk management.

This chapter examines fundamental changes that have developed in the delivery of some parts of social care to individuals, aimed at both increasing their choice over service providers, but more recently their control over that choice. It argues that for such policies to succeed requires four elements: a range of services that offers meaningful diversity; accessible and understandable information for service users to make choices between options; empowerment of users and carers to select between services; and control — in some cases with support and monitoring — over those selections. It traces the development of first ‘direct payments’ to people entitled to support for personal care of different kinds since 1996, and more recently the pilot experiments with ‘individual budgets’, where service users are using combined resources from a variety of funding streams within what becomes a real, rather than a ‘quasi’-market.

Chapter 3 looks at dilemmas in commissioning. Now that the ‘purchaser-provider split’ is entrenched, what judgement can we make of how well commissioning has lived up to expectations? How is the concept being understood and interpreted? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

This chapter examines specific areas of conflict and constraint in achieving a ‘modernising’ vision of services that promote independence, well being, and choice, focusing mainly on older people's experiences of social-care services. After summarising what quality of life means from older people's perspectives, it discusses areas of practice in which various facets of the modernisation agenda's managerialism appear to be obstructing the delivery of user-centred services. One is the tension between the need for timely intervention that supports older people's coping strategies and the managerial policies and practices which seek to ration, restrict, and delay service provision. Another is the significance of disjunctions between policy discourses, managerial concerns, and service-user understandings and prioritisations of need. The chapter also assesses the potential of current policy directions, in particular the extension of direct payments and the introduction of individual budgets, to deliver support that is more closely attuned to the needs and preferences of service users.

This chapter discusses an approach to the sources of demand and supply for institutional change. It explores the use of social science knowledge and role of social scientists in the design and evolution of institutional innovations and examines the contribution of agricultural economics research to the design and evolution of the “direct payment” approach to farm price and income policy. The chapter concludes with the definition of institution, which includes behavioral rules that govern patterns of relationships and actions, and decision-making units that consists of government bureaus, firms, and families.

This chapter considers how unitary, pluralist, and critical traditions have responded to the emergence of the customer as a category within social analysis. The primary focus of all three traditions in the past has been on the worker–employer dyad but increasingly they have had to consider the trilateral relationship between workers, customers, and employers. The chapter examines unitary, pluralist, and critical conceptions of the trilateral relationship and the prescriptions each tradition makes for accommodating the customer. The chapter also focuses on a central issue, the marketization of public services, and reviews hard unitary, pluralist, and CLS writing on this topic. It is noted that unitarists favour marketization and believe that incentives can align worker and consumer interests; pluralists believe that public service quasi-markets must be appropriately regulated in order to balance interests; and that critical writers are opposed to marketization, advocating worker–consumer coalitions as a means of resistance.

This chapter describes the impact of giant multimedia conglomerates on internet services and applications. It first considers the media conglomerates that had dominated the political economy of communications and that now continued to help structure its capital logic. In particular, it looks at the competition presented not only by broadband and mobile internet operators but also by well-financed outsiders and upstarts such as Google and Facebook. It then examines three possible forms of revenue generation for communications and media beyond financing by venture capital and the sale of stock: direct payments, advertising, and noncommercial support, either through governmental or philanthropic finance or voluntary donations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of changes in specific media industries such as the book publishing industry, e-book industry, television industry, music industry, and film industry.