Catherine Needham

Realising the Potential of Co-production: Negotiating Improvements in Public Services

The concept of co-production – also called co-creation – is gaining widespread attention as a way to increase user involvement in service provision in the UK. It is usually taken as self-evident that more co-production will improve services. However, it is necessary to be clear about how far and in what ways co-production can improve public services. This article looks at the purported advantages of co-production, and considers how these can best be accessed. A case study workshop involving social housing users and providers, conducted as part of the National Consumer Council-Unison Shared Solutions project, is used to illustrate the need for collective dialogue and deliberation between co-producers rather than purely transactional forms of co-production.

Brand Leaders: Clinton, Blair and the Limitations of the Permanent Campaign

The ‘permanent campaign’ is said to have reached its apogee in the incumbent communications strategies of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. However, their assiduous courting of public opinion from within office has been used to explain both the high approval ratings of these leaders and their unpopularity for long periods of their incumbency. This apparent paradox suggests that the permanent campaign model is too blunt an instrument to usefully describe or evaluate incumbent communications. Its assumption of continuity between election campaigning and office-holding fails to explain how the strategic terrain changes once a challenger takes office. The concepts of branding and relationship marketing can be used to highlight the difference between gaining support in the one-off transaction of an election and retaining voter loyalty in a post-‘purchase’ setting. The success of Blair and Clinton in establishing a relationship with voters from within office can be assessed using six attributes of successful brands: simplicity; uniqueness; reassurance; aspiration; values; and credibility. As incumbents, facing challenges in shifting strategic and institutional environments, Blair and Clinton developed messages that were simple and appealed to voter aspirations. Voters remained sceptical about the extent to which these leaders embodied values and delivered on their promises.

Personalising public services : understanding the personalisation narrative

Personalisation as narrative Paternalism, consumerism and personalisation Personalised public services Policy translation: how personalisation spreads Commissioning personalised services Personalising the front-line Personalisation, citizenship and the state Conclusion.

The Reform of Public Services under New Labour

This book critically examines the presence, role and evolution of alternative narratives of consumerism in the reform of the public services in the UK under new Labour. Labours continued and extended application of consumerist narratives to the public services, and the restructuring that this entails, are argued to be evidence of a change to a consumerist citizenship regime. This regime involves members of the public in being prefigured and dealt with primarily as individual consumers by the state via public services. The contributions of the book are twofold. Firstly, it is auseful and conceptually precise foray into the evolutionary construal of arguments for and characteristics of consumerism displayed by various governmental actors which highlights the nature and historical specificity of the changes being implemented on behalf of the public, recast as consumers. Secondly, it is a stimulating methodological contribution that attempts not only to trace these narratives of consumerism as produced by the high levels of government, such as in prime ministerial speeches and department documents, but also compares these to local government interviews and documents, survey data and focus group data to contrast the publics perceptions and attitudes of public services to those who speak and work for the public. These contributions serve to highlight the reconstitution of the public services through the lens of the production of a new consumerist citizenship regime, while also implicitly foregrounding the use of language and narrative in the production of this regime of governance. Conceptually, the book achieves theoretical focus by examining the nature of consumerism,

Personalization: From day centres to community hubs?

The article explores the relationship between personalization reforms of social care services in England and the redevelopment of day centres for older people and people with a disability. Recognizing the ways in which personalization reforms have been driven by a rejection of institutionalization, it considers how intersecting story-lines delegitimize the day centre model and promote alternative shared spaces such as ‘community hubs’. Using responses drawn from a small survey of day centre workers and case study interviews with social care managers, the article argues that the personalization narrative has been much more effective in legitimizing the closure of day centres than in stimulating the emergence of new collective spaces. There are a range of possible explanations for this apparent disconnect between the narrative and the practice context, including a neo-liberal agenda which uses the community hub story-line simply as cover for retrenchment of the welfare state, or an assumption that the financial context has knocked the story off track. However, a broader explanation was considered to be more plausible, acknowledging the difficulty that ambiguous narratives have in marshalling resources and ‘freezing’ change.

Debate: Consumerism in Public Services For and Against

This article began life as a debate for MSc students in a public management class at Queen Mary, University of London, convened by the authors. In seeking to explain the significance of consumerism in contemporary public service reform, the authors took different positions on the normative appeal of consumer-oriented public service reforms. In this article George Jones begins by setting out the advantages of consumerism in public services. In the second part of the article, Catherine Needham sets out to rebut some of these purported advantages. In the conclusion, the authors identify some points of consensus and the key points of disagreement.

Generating 'good enough' evidence for co-production

Co-production is not a new concept but it is one with renewed prominence and reach in contemporary policy discourse. It refers to joint working between people or groups who have traditionally been separated into categories of user and producer. The article focuses on the coproduction of public services, offering theory-based and knowledge-based routes to evidencing co-production. It cites a range of ‘good enough’ methodologies which community organisations and small-scale service providers experimenting with co-production can use to assess the potential contribution, including appreciative inquiry, peer-to-peer learning and data sharing. These approaches have the potential to foster innovation and scale-out experimentation.

Individual Funding for Disability Support: What are the Implications for Accountability?

A range of different countries have experimented with the concept of individualised funding and self-directed support, particularly for long term care. With the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, individual funding looks set to be an area of future development in Australia. Individual funding is concerned with making the financial aspects of care more explicit at the level of the individual. Supporters suggest that it has the potential to transform paternalistic and inflexible systems into ones that grant greater power to individuals. The introduction of individualised funding also poses a number of interesting questions about accountability. The paper considers these accountability dilemmas and provides evidence from different national settings to illustrate how these accountabilities may manifest in an Australian context. The paper concludes by setting out a framework of accountability bringing together these different dilemmas to think about provision of care as a whole.

The 21-super-st-century public servant: working at three boundaries of public and private

In a project on the roles and skills of the 21st-century public servant, interviews with public service workers highlighted three boundaries of public and private: relating to ethics, careers and identities. Two contingent factors shape the capacity of staff to be able to reconcile the public and private aspects of their work: the degree of fiscal austerity and the scope for reflective practice. Strategic workforce planning needs to support staff to manage the different versions of public and private.

Personalisation – love it or hate it?

– The purpose of this paper is to reflect on five reasons why personalisation is so contested. It aims to highlight the shared themes that point to common ground between advocates and critics of personalisation. , – The paper draws on different academic and practitioner perspectives on personalisation, covering both advocates for and critics of the personalisation reforms. , – The paper concludes by suggesting that the development of self-directed support in Scotland has the potential to develop social care change in ways which may be palatable to both sides of the English policy debate. , – People who support and critique personalisation often write in ways which do not directly engage with the perspectives of the other side. Here the authors engage directly with the points of difference to explicate why such a diversity of perspectives exists, and how there is more common ground than might be assumed.