Redescribing public services as diverse economies: a pragmatic critique of economistic reasoning

Conventional economics and cognate disciplines, such as business and management studies, furnish capitalism with its distinct vocabulary. Yet, the abstractions they peddle to describe the world cannot contain it. This dissertation uses public services in peripheral places as a lens with which to look past mainstream economic discourses. It shows that even in the late capitalist condition there are socio-economic activities implicit in public services which escape the economizing reason and are at odds with the imperatives of efficiency, control, or growth. To that end, three instances of civil servants’ resistance to capitalist encroachment are analyzed: self-governance, care, and place-attachment. The first chapter discusses the revival and recent struggles of local self-government in Poland. It traces its emergence as an emancipatory strategy against the oppression of the Soviet regime. This strategy was aimed to liberate the Polish society from the state and the market and culminated in 1990 when first democratic municipal elections since World War II were held. Then the discussion moves 30 years forward and focuses on the resistance of the revived local governments to central government’s debilitation of democratic institutions. This resistance is explicated by a study of the conflict over the municipal right to self-govern water and sewerage infrastructure. The state, under a technocratic and economistic guise, attempted to centralize these hitherto municipal services. The key axis of the disagreement was the state’s failed attempt to subdue the political dimension of water provision with the notions of efficiency and control. The second chapter turns to villages located in the Apennines which have been suffering from depopulation, amenity desertification, and earthquakes. There, postal offices are often the last pieces of social infrastructure and the only institutions subsidized by the state. By using the community economies approach and the method of reading for economic difference, this chapter draws attention to the emotional and caring work of the postmasters and explicates how they help abate isolation, improve wellbeing and provide a sense of citizenship to the rural communities. In doing so, it attends to the absences in the conventional regulatory economics discourse of postal offices and redescribes them as a universal, even if lingering, redistributive social infrastructure. It also discusses the unacknowledged costs of the emotional and caring labor of postal employees which evade the traditional economic purview and suggests possible policy interventions. 4 Finally, the third chapter interrogates the idea of schools as social infrastructures. On the basis of a review of literature pertaining to the school-community interface and a participatory action research project conducted with a high school in Poland it identifies a range of tendencies which undermine the potential of schools to serve as social infrastructures: placelessness, equating citizenship with global competitiveness of workers and education with a commodity for status attainment, exhaustion of teachers and students, spatial isolation, idealization and demonization of community. It also discusses how they can be resisted and overcome and provides a selection of ways to do so. Epistemologically, the dissertation draws inspiration from the feminist critique of political economy, especially the method of reading for economic difference, and the pragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty, particularly the concepts of vocabularies and redescription. It uses a wide range of methods: desk research, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, participant observation, participatory action research, photo voice, and surveys.