National case studies on restructuring in public service have previously suggested that there are different trajectories in service development in education and health for the North, South and offshore States in Europe, and that these services and the professional knowledge development for work within them are highly dependent on national contexts and politics. However, there are also some significant challenges to national independence and variation. According to recent research the issue of differences in public service development is more than a little ambiguous and seems mainly to be due to a time slippage in relation to the socialisation, habituation and commercialisation of service labour, such that behind a surface variability is a general context of structural similarity! Research now describes common cycles of public to private transformation in production relations that were formerly untainted by commerce but involve the direct buying and selling of labour power. These conversions have occurred very recently in some cases and sometimes in very concentrated forms in others and they also seem to be expanding in scope with negative consequences for many service workers and lower-class fractions of service recipient-consumers.