The New Public Management brings this idea of consumerism directly into the debate about the appropriate relationship between public administrators and citizens by conceiving of the recipients of government services (or delivered by contracted agencies) as consumers or “customers.” Like other elements of the New Public Management, the customer-service orientation is clearly related to the experience of business, in this case the customer- service movement of the last twenty-five years. In such books as In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman 1982) and Service America (Albretch and Zemke 1985), management consultants made the argument that if businesses are fully attentive to customers, then everything else, including profits, will fall into place. The customer is conceived as constantly calculating satisfaction utilities: “We can think of the customer as carrying around a kind of ‘report card’ in his or her head, which is the basis of a grading system that leads the customers to decided whether to partake of the service again or go elsewhere” (Albretch and Zemke 1985, 32). The customer is clearly a construct derived from the classic model of economic man.