‘Publicity’: policy push in the age of privatisation

This article contributes to the debate on the causes and effects of the public services reform. Even if the results reflect empirical findings and experiences, the conclusions deal more with the principles debated in the public domain on the appropriate division of labour between public and private sectors in service provision and the balance set between the domains of free market and normative regulation. The latter approach has largely marked the development of Nordic welfare societies with service provision as its key element, having faced large-scale public management reforms initiated in the 1990s. A key question asked here is, how and why enterprises get involved in a new kind of regulatory environment that reflects a particular policy push having emerged from the presumed globalisation/privatisation nexus.