User and community co-production has always been important, but rarely noticed. However, there has recently been a movement towards seeing co-production as a key driver for improving publicly valued outcomes, e.g. through triggering behaviour change and preventing future problems. However, citizens are only willing to co-produce in a relatively narrow range of activities that are genuinely important to them and are keen that their co-production effort is not wasted by public agencies. Moreover, there are concerns that co-production may involve greater risks than professionalised service provision, although services may be quality assured more successfully through involving users and embedding them in the community. While offering potential significant improvements in outcomes, and cost savings, co-production is not resource-free. Co-production may be ‘value for money’, but it usually cannot produce value without money.

From Engagement to Co-production: The Contribution of Users and Communities to Outcomes and Public Value

Organizational scholars pay insufficient attention to noncapitalist enterprises, which limits management theorizing. This article is based on a participatory action research project conducted in the town of Asbury Park in New Jersey, where community researchers attempted to map the solidarity economy of the region in order to promote a different kind of economic development. It presents the findings of the project, which involved investigating the economy and surveying collective forms of organizing in sectors such as agriculture and finance. Examining the well-developed Brazilian solidarity economy movement as contextual background, the lessons from that movement could prove useful to incipient US efforts. Using the findings of the Asbury Park project, the significance and implications of supply chains in sustaining alternative economies will be explored.

Mapping noncapitalist supply chains: Toward an alternate conception of value creation and distribution

For at least fifty years and from uncertain beginnings, management has steadily advanced to become a dominant feature across the public sector. Management is necessary and, when purposefully and judiciously applied, can be efficacious. But it lacks the constitutional bearings of the traditional public administration that it has in large measure displaced. And, in the absence of the “sudden death” market discipline of the private sector, from which many of its practices have been imported, management has often become the self-serving entity described in this article as managerialism. Specified here in “ideal type” terms, managerialism is not so much the product of a conspiracy, rather that of a conjunction of factors, often lending plausibility to the need for more management. This article identifies some of these factors and their ill effects on the public sector.

The managerial imperative: Fifty years’ change in UK public administration

The governance dynamics of the emergent European administrative order : explaining the strategy process of EU Agencies

Existing change management models have been developed from research undertaken largely within the for-profit sector, with little reference to the unique challenges of the nonprofit sector. This article identifies a number of characteristics of change management that may be unique to the nonprofit sector. The research sought to understand change from the perspective of those within the sector who experienced it using Grounded Theory in a rich single case study as the methodology, applying an inductive reasoning approach to the development of theory. Results point to the impact of four key characteristics that require a more substantial focus in planned change models when applied to nonprofits. These include formal reflection for change agents and change recipients, development of trust, and confidence in the organisation before the actual change, focussing on the individual experience of change, and the sequencing of events from a planning perspective.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/42CA164E5E49A624CEC7C2F7D30B3A94/S1833367216000067a.pdf/div-class-title-a-longitudinal-qualitative-case-study-of-change-in-nonprofits-suggesting-a-new-approach-to-the-management-of-change-div.pdf

A longitudinal qualitative case study of change in nonprofits: Suggesting a new approach to the management of change

Now everyone wants to have a strategy. To be without a strategy is to appear directionless 
and incompetent – whether it be a strategy for the organization as a whole, for the corporate 
centre, for the service delivery units, for consultation with stakeholders, for staff remuneration, for introducing changes to front office opening hours, for office paper recycling …. 
Sadly, by the time a word has come to mean everything, it means nothing. So can we rescue 
any meaning for this much over-used word ‘strategy’?

Tony Bovaird

Papers

Strategic management in public sector organizations