Co-Production as Seen From a Top Management Perspective

Background

The new understandings developed in the theoretical field of co-production focus on the new roles of the frontline staff directly involved in developing new practices for citizens in need of care. Important and relevant research has been done in this field, showing that citizens enjoy taking part in their own recovery and can make a substantial contribution to the efficiency and quality of their own care and treatment when invited into collaborative co-production processes (Pestoff, 2014, 2019). The research field of co-production is currently debating how to define the concept (Brandsen, et al., 2018; Brix et al., 2020; Pestoff, 2019). As a response to New Public Managements focus on cost cutting and quality improvement, co-production suggests a new way to involve citizens in new partnerships with frontline professionals (Pestoff, 2019). In this chapter we follow Nabatchi et al. (2017), p.769 definition of co-production;

In this chapter we follow these researchers and the additional recommendation to study co-production as a “complex social phenomenon” made by Brix et al. (2020), p. 169.

Research indicate that the top management play a key role in making it possible and legitimate for frontline staff to engage in collaborative processes with citizens, but this claim has not been the main subject of current research. Research on the managerial role indicate that barriers to further implementation of co-production have be identified as lack of communicational infrastructure between citizens and front staff, power and trust issues, conservative administrative cultures, and unclear incentives for administrative staff (Voorberg et al., 2015). However the review by Voorberg et al., (2015), suggest that further research is needed on managerial sensemaking on the topic of co-production as a means of creating citizen involvement seen as a democratic virtue and/or an objective to create efficiency and effectiveness in public organisations.

How policy makers and top managers make sense of issues of co-production in public organisations and implement co-production strategies in practice is therefore interesting to investigate further. As Voorberg et al. (2015) p. 1348 states “the responsibility to succeed co-creation/co-production initiatives seem to lie with the public organization”. They also suggest that rather than taking a rational approach to value assessment “…the added value of co-creation/co-production is defined as a process of sensemaking in which citizen involvement is seen as having important political value (Weick, 1969, 1995).” p.1349. Krogstrup & Brix (2019) and Brix et al. (2020), also suggest using a sensemaking perspective on co-production and adds that it can be studied as a new organisational recipe that is spreading among managers and other professionals in the public sector.

In this chapter we therefore turn our attention to the heads of three public organisations in order to investigate their sensemaking processes and how they construct the co-production turn in their respective organisations (Weick, 1995). Seen from a sensemaking perspective (Weick, 1995) and strategy as practice perspective (Paroutis et al., 2016), we explore how important the concept is to them. A key term in sensemaking is identity and the role of identity construction as a part of this process. The focus in this chapter is Alvesson & Willmott’s (2002) concept of identity work, where construction of identity is seen as an ongoing process. We ask them how the managers construct their own role and managerial identities in the strategic implementation processes. In the chapter it is analysed how their actions can be construed as forwarding the concept or inhibiting the implementation of co-production between frontline staff and citizens.