Petri Virtanen

The evolution of public services from co-production to co-creation and beyond

Purpose – Based on the concept of “intelligent public organisation” as a new theoretical trajectory for New Public Management (NPM) theory, this paper brings together the recent critical discussion on NPM as it relates to public services and service science while specifically pinpointing the nature of public sector intelligence, evaluation, as well as management and leadership of public services. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper highlights the ongoing discussion on service-dominant logic and reflects the major innovations in service research, innovation studies, organisational learning, development methods, and evaluation from the public services’ perspective. Findings – It is argued that contemporary public management theories and practices – and theories reflecting the role of public services – should make more use of that body of literature focusing on substantive service-dominant theories found in marketing and business studies. The paper concludes that t...

The Effects of the Internet of Things and Big Data to Organizations and Their Knowledge Management Practices

New technologies are promising us many upsides like enhanced health, convenience, productivity, safety, and more useful data, information and knowledge for people and organizations. The potential downsides are challenges to personal privacy, over-hyped expectations, increasing technological complexity that boggles us. Our point is this change requires scientific discussion from the point of management, leadership and organizations – that is, it is time to discuss the meaning of these challenges seriously also in terms of existing traditions of management science. This review type article discusses the nature and role of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and other key technological waves of ubiquitous revolution vis-a-vis the existing knowledge on management, organizations and knowledge management practices in organizations. Recent changes in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence and automation technology indicate that all kinds of intelligence and smartness are increasing and organizational cultures are going to change indicating fast changes in the field of modern management and management sciences. Organizational processes form the base for the knowledge-based decision-making. Developing and utilizing smart solutions – like the utilization of Big Data – emphasize the importance of open system thinking. Digitalized services can for instance create new interfaces between service providers and users. Service users create social value while they are participating in co-producing activities. Hence, the IoT and Big Data undoubtedly strengthen the role of participation in service production, service economy, innovativeness in-between organizations (as a joint processes) and leadership models incorporated in service-dominant –logic. Moreover, IoT, Big Data, and especially digitalization bring about the renaissance of knowledge in decision-making.

Public service systems and emerging systemic governance challenges

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address questions related to public service delivery. Specifically, the authors note that existing research relating to public services is usually based on a number of oversimplifications, and that a novel conceptual understanding of change management practices related to public services is necessary. As such, the authors base the argument on the observation that the notion of public services has evolved into one of service systems, which call for new kinds of conceptual and theoretical approaches in order to understand this transformational shift. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is intended to be inherently interdisciplinary – meaning that the authors discuss systemic governance challenges in a specific context (public service) relating this notion to a body of literature that is relevant to this context, though one which has not previously been used in this way (e.g. Modern Systems Theory, New Public Management and New Public Governance). This paper hig...

Street-level bureaucrats as strategy shapers in social and health service delivery: Empirical evidence from six countries

In this research article, we discuss the social construction of public services within the conceptual and theoretical framework provided by Lipsky. We are interested in what it means if/when street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) have an active role in the construction of a service system. We argue that there are multiple realities in terms of the construction of public services and we approach the question by deploying Lipsky’s notion on SLBs by empirically analysing middle managers’ views on how SLBs act and their role in this construction process. This paper is based on empirical interviews (N=100) collated in 2012 from Barcelona, Den Bosch, Glasgow, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, the Greater London area, and the US state of Vermont. The research collation strategy was to include reform-oriented cities and countries in terms of developing and delivering public services. We found that SLBs have three different kinds of strategies in the construction process: policy-making, working practices, and professionalism. We found that there are no conflicts arising from SLBs’ beliefs, organisational demands, and rules and regulations. Instead, SLBs try to solve conflicts or bridge gaps between policy-making and practical work in the boundaries between SLBs and service users. Based on this research, the role of SLBs and the built-in flexibility and agility of public service leadership and organisations must be addressed and developed further. The role of organisational learning and changing organisational cultures must also be scrutinized in the context of public service systems. The analysis of professional resilience in the context of public services planning needs more theoretical and empirical attention. The resilience of organisations and the capacities of SLBs need to be researched more. Finally, there is the need for better cultivation of the role of the SLBs and service users with regard to accountability aspects (horizontal and vertical).

Towards a Framework for Understanding the Outcomes of Economic Engagements with Africa: A Human Capital Development Perspective

In the last few decades, the world has experienced significant economic and political transformation, which has led to adjustments in economic interaction between countries. However, this new pattern of economic engagement has not attracted adequate investigation from management researchers. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by advancing a conceptual framework that can guide researchers towards investigating new patterns of economic engagement across countries. Chinese economic engagement in Africa is used to exemplify how the conceptual framework can be used. The paper concludes by providing directions for research.

Knowledge Management and the New Configurations of Health Markets

Throughout this book, we make a strong case for complex society. Complex society is an entity which becomes conceivable by deploying the concepts and methods of complexity theory. In this chapter, we argue that both complex society and complexity theory affect how health policy is formulated and planned, as well as how knowledge management functions are implemented in the field of service ecosystems constituted by public, private and non-governmental healthcare organisations. Organisational knowledge management has attracted considerable attention in recent years in the fields of public policy, public management and health policy in particular. Nonetheless, there are few widely shared views according to which the term itself is defined, much less a consensus on how best to apply it in healthcare service delivery. In this chapter, the role of organisational knowledge is explored (by making a distinction, for instance, between the use and exchange value of information). This chapter discusses how to manage knowledge internally and externally in order to achieve organisational success in healthcare services. We propose that intelligent knowledge leadership has to address how health organisations and service systems overcome their fundamental knowledge problems, and these problems have to be approached from the service-user point of view. Until this problem—and the constitution of two-dimensional horizontal accountability addressing the collaboration of service providers and the value produced for the service users addressed in the upcoming chapters in this book—is explored and defined, organisations run the risk of addressing the symptoms rather than the causes. Since we live in an age of a complex society and complex public policies, uncertainty refers to a lack of information.

Intelligence in Public Policy

This section of the book is especially based on the latest literature on public policy analysis. It discusses broadly the current challenges in organising and running public policies and health policy in particular. We argue that there is a lot of talk about complexity in society, but there is eventually little evidence on what actually constitutes this complexity and how public policies deal with the complexity domain. Moreover, it seems that the problem of existing policy-planning mechanisms and public policy-evaluation paradigms is that they do not fit in with, in particular, the current societal challenges and nexus problems (embedded and constructed somewhere in between existing policy areas). This, in turn, means that there is an urgent need to constitute new kinds of evaluation systems incorporated with the idea of intelligent public policy making. This calls for new methods and methodologies, new institutional settings for evaluation systems and new accountability understanding. This part of the book deals with what the promotion of intelligence presupposes from the perspectives of public policy, decision-making, implementation and evaluation. The starting point in our reasoning is especially knowledge management and decision-making procedures at the level of health policy. In this chapter, we discuss issues like forecasting and the urgent need to develop specific ex ante evaluation methods and procedures, and it underlines putting an emphasis on forecasting societal and health policy-related problems instead of ex post trials. As a result, we argue that a new governance model is evolving within the complexity framework: the New Public Integration. Moreover, this chapter analyses the emergence of new information bases for health policy and the role of big data and the Internet of (Intelligent) Things in particular.

The Fundaments of Intelligence in the Future Health Policy

This concluding chapter summarises the main contents of this book. It presents, in short, the main ten fundaments of the intelligence of health policy—deployable to other fields of public policies as well—divided in four cohorts of fundaments. These cohorts are orchestrated as contextual, conceptual, service-related and leadership-related fundaments. By fundament, we refer here to theoretical cornerstones—axioms or established principles if you like—of why and how we think intelligence will be rooted in the public policies of today and especially in the future. In our approach, contextual fundaments (i.e. the complexity of the society and societal change, the evolution of institutions, horizontal accountability and the value of increased public value in terms of legitimation of public policies) shape the societal setting for planning, running and evaluating health policy; conceptual fundaments (i.e. systems thinking, loosely coupled systems, open innovations, knowledge and agency) create and regulate the structure and the functioning logic of the public policy system; service-related fundaments (i.e. the service dominant—logic and value co-creation) reframe the production logic of public goods and services and heighten the role of service users in the heart of the health policy; and leadership-related fundaments (i.e. knowledge sharing and policy integration and new forms of public sector leadership) provide the practical functioning logic for the health policy actors and interventions. This final chapter of this book outlines these fundaments, providing short commentaries for each of the fundaments (and their sub-criteria) addressed.

Intelligent Healthcare Organisations and Patient-Dominant Logic in the New Service Space

This chapter examines the characteristics of intelligent healthcare organisations. We propose that an intelligent organisation is able to operate interactively at the boundaries between different organisations and institutions. This view holds that an intelligent organisation shares its expertise and cross-social and healthcare professional silos, learns from mistakes, has unlearning capabilities and acts adaptively in relation to changes in the operating environment. This means that the existing and classical organisation theories do not suffice anymore. This chapter discusses the need for a new interpretation of organisational theories from the perspective of intelligence with special emphasis on research discussion concerning the crossing of organisational interfaces. We also discuss the role of isomorphic mechanisms in the field of healthcare: this view holds that healthcare organisations are becoming more and more homogeneous. In addition, we incorporate the concept of ‘service space’ into the development of intelligence in the field of healthcare organisations, developed and theorised by the authors in our earlier publications. To briefly formulate this concept, we understand a ‘service space’ as a space of relations and networks of service providers, embedded as integral parts in service (eco)systems, among agencies (personal, organisational) acting through communication (flows), utilising the possibilities of ubiquitous technologies and providing customer-driven services by deploying service-dominant logic. This chapter puts the healthcare organisations at the heart of the emerging service systems. This perspective includes the idea that intelligent organisations and service systems strengthen their legitimacy only if they take seriously the role of service users, patients and citizens in various forms of co-creation and co-production of services. The concrete topics of this chapter include the rise and fall of classical organisation theories, the evolution of ‘service space’ and the new challenges for public management leadership theories and service-dominant logic—putting service users at the heart of service planning and implementation. These topics highlight the transformation from co-production to co-creation and beyond, patient-centred service models and processes as well as the role of organisation’s development activities in enhancing organisational intelligence.

Systemic Governance Challenges and Well-Being

This chapter discusses the role of contemporary systemic governance challenges in society. Of particular interest is the question of how these challenges affect human health and well-being. By definition, health is a rather difficult concept since it contains many elements and dimensions. In this chapter, we argue that today we need a much broader understanding about human well-being than the ‘mere’ definition of health. Well-being addresses human life more comprehensively. Systemic governance challenges, based on the ongoing and pervasive technology revolution, exist as a result of changes in the quality and quantity of human beings, the stock of human knowledge particularly as applied to human command over nature and the institutional framework that defines the deliberate incentive structure of a society. These changes have an effect on the way we think, our ability to understand societal problems and our health and well-being. Governance challenges redefine the role of governance. We suggest that there are definitely limits for governing because of the complexity of society. Consequently, this affects how health policies and healthcare organisations operate in local, regional, national and transnational service spaces—service ecosystems consisting of public, private and non-governmental healthcare service providers. This also means that public sector management paradigms transform towards a new framework—a framework in which the role of government is to coordinate, integrate and set guidelines and meta-level societal objectives. This view holds that the current public sector management paradigms of the NPM and NPG have not only reached their maturity but will eventually come to an end. The complexity of society calls for complex public policies and a new understanding and analysis of the integrative role of the government. This, in turn, requires the competence to carry out a system-level redesign of healthcare.