Stephen Jeffares

Leadership for Collaboration

Abstract ‘Leadership’ and ‘collaboration’ are integral to twenty-first century governance and management but, despite a growing literature, understanding about leadership for collaboration is hampered by a lack of specificity and nuance in theory and empirical research. This article responds to these limitations by working within an interpretive framework and employing Q-method to uncover different interpretations of leadership for collaboration operant among public managers in Wales. The article uses the concept of situated agency to explain why public managers offer diverse interpretations of leadership for collaboration despite working within the same governance framework, and to identify challenges to public managers in determining appropriate leadership for collaboration.

Beyond the Berlin Wall?: Investigating joint commissioning and its various meanings using a Q methodology approach

Abstract Joint commissioning has been extensively alluded to in English health and social care policy as a way of improving services and outcomes. Yet there is a lack of specificity pertaining to what joint commissioning actually is and what success would look like. In this paper we adopt a Q methodology approach to understand the different meanings of joint commissioning that those involved in these arrangements hold. In doing so we get beyond the more orthodox interpretations of joint commissioning found in the literature although the appeal of joint commissioning as a ‘good thing’ is still prominent across these accounts.

Four Viewpoints of Whole Area Public Partnerships

Abstract Total Place was a policy initiative introduced in the final year of the UK New Labour government to pilot whole area public partnership working. Whilst the title ‘Total Place’ did not survive the change of government in 2010, the underpinning desire to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in public spending will remain central to government policy, particularly in a time of economic retrenchment. This paper argues that the success or failure of such policy interventions substantially depends on the way they are understood by local actors. It explores how Total Place was viewed in one of the pilot areas. Utilising Q methodology, four main viewpoints emerge with striking patterns of shared, ambiguous and divergent discourses, particularly about partnership working, financial management and citizen empowerment. The paper concludes that for the successful implementation of a complex policy initiative such as Total Place, it will be as important to surface and discuss issues where people disagree, as to reinforce views which are commonly held and understood.

Why do pregnant women participate in research? A patient participation investigation using Q-Methodology.

Patient participation in study design is paramount to design studies that are acceptable to patients. Despite an increase in research involving pregnant women, relatively little is known about the motivational factors that govern their decision to be involved in a clinical trial, compared to other patient groups.

Evaluating collaboration: The creation of an online tool employing Q methodology

The continued prevalence of different forms of collaborative working within public policy requires adaption in evaluation practices. In recent years evaluation toolkits, audits and guides have migrated online, but with varying success. At their worst, such tools can offer a disengaging user experience, limited coverage of issues or normative bias. This article outlines POETQ, designed to be engaging, comprehensive and methodologically robust. An overview of this approach is set out alongside an analysis of its merits. The article concludes by reflecting on the kinds of evidence that policy makers actually want to generate in relation to the topic of collaboration.

Public Managers, Media Influence, and Governance: Three Research Traditions Empirically Explored

Nowadays, media and media logic have become important and inherent elements in everyday practices of public administration and policy making. However, the logic of the media is often very different from, and conflicting with, the logic of political and administrative life. So the question of how public managers experience and deal with media attention is more relevant than ever. An analytical sketch of the literature on the relationship between public managers and media provides three main categories of literature (public relations, agenda, and mediatization tradition). These three categories are used to develop statements (so-called Q-sort statements) to capture the way public managers experience their relationship with the media. A group of managers involved in oversight then sorted these statements into order of preference. The research reveals three different groups of managers who show different attitudes to media attention and whom we have labeled as adaptors, great communicators, and fatalists.

Rethinking network governance: new forms of analysis and the implications for IGR/MLG

Our position is that network governance can be understood as a communicative arena. Networks, then, are not defined by frequency of interactions between actors but by sharing of and contest between different clusters of ideas, theories and normative orientations (discourses) in relation to the specific context within which actors operate. A discourse comprises an ensemble of ideas, concepts and causal theories that give meaning to and reproduce ways of understanding the world (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). Consequently, network governance can be understood as the inherently political process through which discourses are produced, reproduced and transformed. Democratic network governance thus becomes the study of the way in which the core challenges of democratic practice are addressed – how is legitimacy awarded, by what mechanisms are decisions reached, and how is accountability enabled. Three approaches to the discursive analysis of democracy in network governance are considered - argumentation analysis, inter-subjectivity, and critical discourse analysis – and their implications for the study of intergovernmental relations and multi-level governance (IGR/MLG) are discussed. Case examples are provided. We conclude that the value for the study of MLG/IGR is to complement existing forms of analysis by opening up the communicative and ideational aspects of interactions between levels of government and other actors.

Identifying Policy Viewpoints

With definitions of policy ideas and their lifecycles now in place, this chapter explores how to map the viewpoints surrounding policy ideas by considering the example of Total Place (Grint & Holt, 2011; H. M. Treasury, 2010). The chapter explores the importance of capturing early conversations surrounding a policy idea, and discusses the implications for later stages of its lifecycle. Capturing and mapping this subjectivity requires a sensitive and systematic method. The method applied in this chapter is called Q methodology, a long-established technique in psychology and behavioural science which is of growing interest to public policy research.

Theorising Policy Ideas

What is a policy idea? In 2009, the soon-to-be Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron set out an idea where the people of Britain worked out answers to big social problems, saying that ‘A big part of that answer is the Big Society. I think we are on to a really big idea’ (Cameron, 2009). Once elected into government, Cameron continued, for the first year or two at least, to set out his vision for a Big Society. The idea attracted international attention, as far afield as Australia (Whelan et al., 2012). It led many scholars to interrogate the intention and charter of this type of policy-making by big idea (Alcock, 2010; Bailey & Pill, 2011; Cotterill et al., 2012; Davies & Pill, 2012; Evans, 2011; Glasman & Norman, 2012; Kettell, 2012; Mycock & Tonge, 2011; Pattie & Johnston, 2011; Sullivan, 2012). Previous work has been largely concerned with the meaning of policy ideas like the Big Society; this chapter instead asks what these big ideas are, and explores the issues prompted by asking such a question.

Interpreting Social Media Data

This chapter is all about the challenge of interpreting and ascribing the meaning of social media data. The challenge is brought into sharp relief by court judgements where teams of lawyers spent weeks poring over the meaning of tweets in order to determine if they were threatening or libellous (see Paul Chambers, ‘or I’m blowing the Airport Skyhigh’ tweet in January 2010 or Sally Bercow’s ‘*Innocent face*’ tweet that led to a trial in May 2013). The question of this chapter is: what is happening on the days when a policy idea is widely discussed? The frequency charts profiled in Chapter 6 show dramatic fluctuations in activity directed to specific policy ideas. This raises questions as to what is occurring within that variation. It also raises questions as to what themes are contained within that activity; which of it is new that day; which of it is a continuation of themes from previous days. This chapter focuses on exploring this activity so that we can begin to understand the lifecycle of policy ideas when they are discussed online.