11 - British services in the 1990s: a preliminary assessment

Summary

Introduction

To bring the story up to date, it is necessary to attempt a preliminary assessment of the performance of British services during the 1990s. No attempt will be made to provide a detailed assessment of individual services along the lines of the earlier chapters in this section, since historians have not yet had a chance to see the archival evidence that has informed judgments on earlier periods, and the literature is too sparse. Nevertheless, it is possible to provide the same quantitative information that has formed the backbone of earlier chapters, and hence bring the productivity trends up to date.

The most important development during this period has been in the area of technology. Whereas technological change for most of the twentieth century favoured standardisation, centralisation and large scale, the information and communications technology revolution of the 1990s has favoured customisation and decentralisation, but without sacrificing the high volume and high productivity of industrialised services. This trend mirrors the earlier retreat from mass production to flexible production that occurred in manufacturing during the 1980s (Edquist and Jacobsson, 1988; Milgrom and Roberts, 1990). Just as the trend towards standardisation and scale in services occurred unevenly between sectors in earlier periods, the information revolution of the 1990s has had an uneven impact on different sectors. Nevertheless, for services as a whole, these trends can be seen as favourable to Britain, where social capabilities remained adapted towards customisation and small scale rather than standardisation and large scale.