Social policy outcomes are sometimes made to appear as the final result of a pre-determined set of ideological priorities. In puppet-like versions of Foucault, governance and governmentality ensure that micro-regulation and disciplinary knowledges work to fully inscribe institutionally docile subjectivities. In more fevered accounts, preferred discourses, technologies and strategies thoroughly determine all the possibilities for public services. Any resistance to the model of public services coming off the policy line seems rather futile, ineffective or, worse, counter-productive, since it only invites ‘power’ to return to the scene of the crime better equipped. Dissent is thereby contained, absorbed or marginalised.

Doom-laden tales like this will be familiar to students of social policy over the past few decades. Recently, however, more grounded, and more rounded, approaches have begun to surface that forefront resistance and dissent in the shaping of public services. At the moment, this concern with the contentious shaping of policy outcomes appears to be a relatively minor sideshow to the real stuff of grand theorising or the affirmative empiricism of evaluation studies.

Subversive Citizens will undoubtedly help reinforce this emerging focus on contentious policy interactions. It marks a significant contribution to widening out more familiar ideas of policy contention by organised social movements or organised labour. Its contributors singularly avoid a romantic or nostalgic view of ‘resistance’. They theorise what they call ‘subversion’ in a variety of ways, broadly informed by ‘post-empiricist’ social constructionism, through studies of ‘subversion’ in the relationship between public service officials and public service users. In so doing, its focus on the mutual shaping of policy at the front-line returns us to the more active subjectivity of Michael Lipsky's ‘street-level bureaucrats’.

A particular strength is that most chapters pay close attention to the intersection of policy discourses and material practices. David Prior argues that wherever there is regulatory power seeking to constrain and contain, there is also the ‘counter-agency’ of workers and citizens. Governing strategies, technologies and discourses are often incomplete, contradictory, inconsistent or misaligned. This also means that resistance does not necessarily take the form of some neat, unified or progressive agency. In the spirit of Foucault, ‘counter-agency’ appears ambiguously circular. Local negotiation of central policy-making is viewed as dynamic and malleable within certain limits.

Front-line workers may concede power reluctantly to users at the behest of central government initiatives. As Kate Morris and Gale Burford show, service user ‘empowerment’ in family-group decision-making contends with the power of social workers to undermine or contain participation. Central actors may respond to local resistance by discursive manipulation and forced compliance, something that occurs in Sadie Parr and Judy Nixon's analysis of Family Intervention Projects. That this is not simply a rational cause and effect process is compounded by the emotional labour of gendered, raced and aged welfare professionals, as in Shona Hunter's biographical analysis of a GP's account of health care modernisation processes.

Against all binary oppositions, Janet Newman and John Clarke talk about subversion through ‘assemblages’ of multiple discourses, practices and identities or, more simply, ‘a field of relationships’ composed of unequally situated interactions. Similarly, Marion Barnes usefully draws from social movement studies to critically examine how contentious relations are framed and alliances constructed and dismantled in public participation forums. She sees it as too simplistic to dismiss these as exercises in cooption of the less powerful by the more powerful as in ‘unidirectional’ accounts of power. While participants often lack ‘oppositional consciousness’, nevertheless the authority of the public official is ‘subverted’ as participants learn institutional practices and vocabularies.

This raises questions about the concept of ‘subversive citizens’. Subversive of what? Policy discourse, service objectives, professional autonomy, user passivity and governance are listed as being variously ‘subverted’. In his analysis of Bail Support Schemes, Nathan Hughes restricts ‘subversion’ to struggles between official stakeholders rather than those between user-citizens and salaried officials. Even the police are conceived by Louise Westmarland and John Clarke as subversive of public policy because they resist consumer models of reform.

While this rightly places an emphasis on participation and interaction, ‘subversion’ risks becoming an empty signifier that can be bent to account for almost any interaction between service users and staff, staff and managers, local and national policy cultures, rather than its more familiar sense of oppositional commitment to undermine or overthrow authority. Decades ago Anselm Strauss described more routine conflict, ambiguities and tensions as a ‘negotiated order’ without any particular implication that the assemblage (if you prefer some French cachet) had been ‘subverted’. Strauss's notion seems to me a more judicious way of conceptualising much of the public official–citizen interaction otherwise so well documented throughout much of this collection.

Surprisingly, John Flint's chapter provides the book's only sustained discussion of citizenship, apart from a summary reflection by the editors in the concluding chapter. Far from resistance to power, Flint shows how the concept of subversion is also part of the armoury of governance in the regulation of ‘problematic’ or ‘suspect’ communities. This focus challenges the idea framing the book that simply by engaging with public policy, ‘citizens’, however defined, have become ‘subversive’ subjects forcing public policy off its preferred course.

If semantics are put to one side, Subversive Citizens represents an original and substantial contribution to the renewed interest in policy contention and how policy boundaries are constantly redrawn.