In this chapter we use two stories – one about citizens and one about non-citizens – to explore some of the issues that are brought into view by the phrase ‘subversive citizens’. These stories generate three such issues for us: first, what is it that is being subverted through the active engagement of people as workers in or users of public services or public institutions? Second, what does it mean to call these actors ‘citizens’; in what ways is this identity significant (and how does it differ from other terms such as ‘worker’, ‘user’ or ‘resident’)? Third, how do we understand the field of relationships in which such actors act? That is, how is the practice of subversion located, framed and understood? The stories have been told to us by friends and colleagues: they are drawn from their work and experience, rather than from our own. But both of the stories, when we heard them for the first time, provoked puzzled reflections on what was at stake when citizens (and non-citizens) acted in these particular settings.

We begin, however, with some thoughts about the field of relationships in which these actions take place. Subversion, like related conceptions of transgression or resistance, tends to be framed in binary terms. Sometimes these binaries appear as topological metaphors (the distinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches, or between centre and periphery, for example). Elsewhere they are temporal metaphors: the opening phase of policy formulation succeeded by implementation, when the objectives of policy may be subverted or inflected in practice (by ‘street-level bureaucrats’ or by innovative users). More generally, several perspectives share a view of social life organised in power-structured dyadic relationships (even though they may disagree about much else). For example, Marxism's distinction between dominant and subordinated classes has echoes of the Hegelian conception of the master–slave dyad that has proved influential in psychoanalytic and literary approaches (Jenks, 2003). Meanwhile, Foucault's understanding of power stresses that it is intrinsically and intimately involved in the incitement of its other: resistance. In what follows we want to step away somewhat from these binary distinctions and dyadic models of power relations and towards an engagement with the multiple forms of power and lines of force that are in play in particular situations, the heterogeneity of which has to be negotiated and mobilised by actors in those situations.