Clarke (2017, p 23) argues that, rather than a wholly new project, austerity is ‘assembled anew in specific times and places, but in ways that draw on or at least try to mobilize – older stocks of knowledge and sentiment’. Privatization is one of these older stocks of knowledge and sentiment that have yet to be wholly actualized in most developed countries (Starr, 1987). Clarke (2017, p 26) argues further that it is helpful to think about the present as ‘the accumulation of failure: failed, stalled, or incomplete hegemonic projects that try to combine economic, social, and political restructuring with the securing of popular consent to that project’. Privatization can be viewed as an incomplete hegemonic project, and a central aspect of neoliberalism that austerity has revisited with enthusiasm, once again trying to win popular consent to reduce and remove public entitlements and services. Although little evidence has been produced to back the claim, neoliberals have long argued that privatization provides cost savings, efficiency and greater accountability through increased competition and consumer choice (Yarrow, 1986; Kamerman and Kahn, 2014). These arguments have resurfaced boldly in the post-2008 global financial crisis (GFC) and current iteration of austerity.

Although privatization is often thought of as a singular phenomenon, this chapter will identify seven forms of overlapping and interwoven privatization. In the current era of austerity, privatization has been able to extend its reach through these integrated processes and, in some cases, operate almost by stealth as an overarching ideological force that legitimizes private market relations in places where it once would have been thought to be contrary to a public sector ethic of entitlement and equity. This is a growing dynamic across many public and non-profit/voluntary services and organizations. Services and assets are privatized in their entirety, as well as piece by piece through the contracting out of various aspects of the organization such as human resources management, cleaning, security, management itself, specialists, consultants and the use of temporary workers hired through for-profit agencies. As Armstrong et al (1997) argued earlier in the era of neoliberalism, among political economists, private and public are increasingly not viewed as ‘dichotomous, readily separable entities.