Creating Opportunity Spaces for Co-Production: Professional Co-Producers in Inter-Organizational Collaborations

Introduction

As co-production is becoming more and more institutionalized in organizations in the western world– and especially Northern Europe –there is a need to better understand how this change affects the daily life of the professional co-producers (OECD, 2011; Mortensen et al., 2020; Steen & Tuurnas, 2018). The argument is that the public servants in their (new) role as professional co-producers need to navigate in a work context that is at a “crossroads” constituted by a hybrid collection of different public management regimes, for example, Old Public Administration, New Public Management and New Public Governance (Blomgren & Waks, 2015; Pestoff, 2019). The complexity of this “hybridity” has increased, correspondingly, with the manifestation of New Public Governance as the latest “wave” of public management reform. The argument is that inter-organizational collaborations and networks have increasingly started to play a crucial role in delivering public services, highlighting open government, active citizenship and co-production as core ideas for the progressive development of processes of public administration (Osborne, 2010; Verschuere et al., 2012; Poocharoen & Ting, 2015; Pestoff, 2019). Currently, professional co-producers not only need to perform their work across different administrative boundaries, but sometimes are also expected to collaborate with other co-producers across different organizational boundaries and contexts (Poocharoen & Ting, 2015; Mortensen et al., 2020). Because of this complexity, local responses to the potential of co-producing public services have been numerous and varied, and various definitions have been made to demark what co-production is and what it is not (Brandsen et al., 2018). Instead of aiming at creating a universal and all-inclusive definition of co-production, Pestoff (2019) suggests that the current literature can be reframed into three different schools of co-production: The input-output school, the value chain school, and the public value creation school. This study is connected to the value chain school of co-production that according to Pestoff (2019) is based on a service management perspective building primarily on the research of Bovaird (2007) and Bovaird and Loeffler (2012). It is clearly possible to posit that co-production is a process that can be divided into many different sub-processes in which it (with or without citizens) can take place. In other words, this “school” treats co-production from a processual perspective where activities as sub-processes can for example be commissioned or co-commissioned, designed or co-designed, delivered or co-delivered, and evaluated or co-evaluated, but where the entire process has to have a co-produced activity to be operationally defined as such (Poocharoen & Ting, 2015; Brix et al., 2020). Hence, to enable collaborative co-production processes that cut across administrative and organizational boundaries focus has to be both on the organizational level partners and on the professional and citizen co-producers, as well as on the formal planning and the execution of activities (Poocharoen & Ting, 2015; Pestoff, 2019). Finally, it should be mentioned here that “value” is interwoven in all co-production processes (Alford, 2014; Osborne et al., 2015). As Alford (2014, 306) notes, private, group and public value co-exist in co-production, and can at times even be at odds with each other. This notion is strongly connected to democracy and representativeness in co-production (see, Jaspers & Steen, 2019; Vanleene, 2020), and it is often the professionals who balance between different types of values in co-production, for instance by supporting some service user groups to participate in co-production, or by protecting public value (Steen & Tuurnas, 2018). Finally, co-production can also lead to wider value creation, as citizens engaging as co-producers may create not only the private value they receive from service delivery, but also the public value as it is delivered to other clients or stakeholders who do not necessarily participate in the co-production process (Bovaird & Löffler, 2012).