Search

Although the non-profit marketization literature argues that governments’ performance-based accountability demands can hinder non-profit organizational performance, rational planning literature suggests a more positive yet indirect impact. To unravel the mechanisms at play for those steering their organization, we investigate (1) if performance-based accountability can alter how non-profit directors’ perceive organizational performance and (2) if such relationship is mediated by rational planning inspired practices. Results from structural equation modelling on two-wave survey data among 297 non-profit directors in Flemish non-profits confirm that management tool use and performance measurement are central in explaining how performance-based accountability impacts subjective performance.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) hybridizing toward the market domain by adopting business practices has sparked an ever-growing debate. There is research showing a rather positive effect on organizational legitimacy. However, considering the literature discussing other performance dimensions (e.g. social effectiveness), this trend is argued to erode the prosocial underpinnings of NPOs, increasingly leaving their stakeholders wondering what distinguishes them from business enterprises. When examining these previous studies, most research only focuses on one dimension of organizational legitimacy and/or one type of stakeholder. In this study, we aim to provide a more fine-grained picture of how nonprofit-business hybridity impacts nonprofit legitimacy by adopting (a) a multi-dimensional understanding of legitimacy, and (b) a multi-stakeholder perspective. We draw on survey data from Flemish NPOs to sample two matched pairs of opposite cases, i.e. a ‘low’ and ‘high’ hybridized NPO for qualitative examination. Our findings suggest that nonprofit-business hybridity is significantly detrimental for stakeholders who are closely involved, and beneficial in the eyes of stakeholders who are more distant from the organization.

Background: This paper presents the findings from a qualitative research project that explored what ten people with intellectual disabilities who receive care and support in a residential care faci...

Personal budget schemes for people with disabilities are imbued with a conception of autonomous and rational individuals. The policy objective to enlarge people’s opportunities conflicts with the p...

This article deals with the different roles of the street-level professional in achieving public value in a co-productive community development project. The article focuses, in particular, on the question of how engaged street-level professionals combine different roles – as friend, leader, representative and mediator – in order to empower and include their target audience, thereby contributing to public value creation. This question was explored in a qualitative case study in a community development project in Ostend (Belgium). The study indicated that the street-level professional needed to adopt different role combinations in a well-considered way in order to influence the co-productive process that affected public value creation. More specifically, the combination of friend–leader, as well as the leader–mediator combination, can empower co-producers and thus create personal value for these co-producers. Moreover, professionals carefully consider the combination of friend–leader to support community value over personal value. Also, by combining the friend, leader and representative roles, professionals can include more co-producers and create a stronger sense of community value. This article concludes that there is a need for an engaged professional who has sufficient time and autonomy to apply the combinations as needed. Additionally, we note that more research on these different role cocktails is necessary in order to provide a clear framework of the different combinations that professionals can apply. Points for practitioners From our research, we can make two key recommendations for practitioners. First, in order to empower and include vulnerable participants to co-produce, professionals need to develop the right skill set to fulfil the roles needed to engage with participants. Second, and relatedly, this also implies sufficient autonomy (vis-a-vis policymakers) for the professionals at the street level, which will enable them to consider what is needed for the co-production project to become successful in terms of inclusion and empowerment.

In spite of the belief instilled by the New Public Management reforms that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can benefit from more management, more measurement and more market practices, systematic knowledge on the organizational effects of NPOs incorporating business practices in their day-to-day functioning remains absent to date. This research note addresses this limitation by reviewing 49 research articles. The focus lies on the redefinition of nonprofits' mission and income streams, changing governance arrangements and shifting management practices. We find that, despite numerous detrimental effects cited in the literature, (a) generating commercial income can contribute to the financial stability of NPOs, and (b) hybridization towards the market domain can strengthen the organizational legitimacy of NPOs, suggesting that imitating for-profit enterprises might contribute to nonprofit functioning in perception, rather than in practice.

This article explores how social workers deal with the ambiguity that arises from their ability to transform the private needs of individuals into issues of public concern. It is argued that the current shift towards joined-up working, which is epitomized by the creation of interorganizational networks, could encourage new opportunities for social work. These horizontal and nonhierarchical forms of cooperation serve as platforms for debate to ensure regular discussions about the causes of and potential solutions to complex societal problems. This article relies on a case-study of bottom-up networks in two Belgian cities where social workers from various policy fields voluntarily joined forces to look after hard-to-reach groups of homeless people. The primary data were obtained from document analysis, semi-structured interviews with network participants, and direct observations of network meetings. These data were analyzed by conducting a directed content analysis. The examination shows that the jo...

Co-production is often considered a solution to improve service quality and production efficiency, yet research on the reasons why citizens participate in the creation and/or implementation of public services is still limited to specific sectors. In this article, we study the different citizens’ motivations discussed in the literature. We distinguished two categories of motivations, personal and circumstantial. By means of a guided survey, we collected data on these different motivations in a Belgian case in the unstudied setting of community development. The results show that even in a community development case, where material incentives are used to entice citizens in a vulnerable socio-economic position to participate, the reasons behind co-production are still more diverse and complex than simple benefit maximization.

It has been repeatedly stated that the topic of network effectiveness has often been neglected. This has led to a situation of ‘network euphoria’ amongst practitioners and policymakers with regard to the creation of networks as a means to (re-)organize welfare provision. Starting from a case study of networks for welfare provision in two Belgian cities, this article focuses on the effectiveness of service delivering networks at the client level, which is understood as the contribution of the network in improving the conditions of life of those being served or targeted by the network. Therefore, we focused on the collective efforts via these networks (e.g. by creating a night shelter or by conducting case consultations) to look after a population of homeless people who face multiple problems and are not able yet to benefit from welfare provision. Our findings revealed that these networks were able to realize a ‘collaborative advantage’ by filling in service gaps and by overcoming fragmentation of care. Nevertheless, these networks equally maintained criteria that restricted the accessibility or usefulness of welfare services provided to homeless people. In the concluding section, we highlight some of the factors that could help us to explain our findings and highlight the tension between the effectiveness of networks at the client level and the effectiveness at the organizational level.

Public sector challenges translate in more complex job demands that require individual innovation. In order to deal with these demands, many public organizations have implemented employee performance management. In a multilevel study, we examine when employee performance management affects individual innovation. We contribute by focusing on consistent employee performance management and Leader-Member Exchange (LMX). Based on goal-setting theory, we first argue that employee performance management fosters individual innovation when it entails consistent subpractices. Subsequently, LMX is theorized to function as a moderator in this linkage. We use multilevel data from 68 elderly homes and 1095 caregivers in Flanders to test our hypotheses. The study reveals that individual innovation is related to consistent employee performance management, and that LMX functions as a moderator in this relationship. Our findings contribute to scholars' understanding of effects from employee performance management in public organizations.

This chapter conceptualizes 'democratic quality' of participation and co-production. It focuses on the current knowledge about the determinants of democratic participation and co-production. Looking at the literature, democratic quality of participation can be made more specific by looking at concepts like equity, inclusion (or exclusion), (lack of) impact while participating or co-producing, and empowerment of participants or co-producers. The literature on participation in general provides us with some answers to the question under which circumstances co-production is democratic in nature or not. The literature also provides us with some first assumptions on potential drivers for democratic co-production: professional support, a sense of competency and salience may be important to lift target groups over the threshold. Care is needed, however, in translating knowledge from the broader participation literature to more specific co-production and co-creation research, as there may be empirical differences between general citizen participation and specific co-production, in terms of 'who's in', and what 'representativeness' means.

This study aims to explain citizens’ engagement in co-production activities in the domain of community safety. We use a multiple case study design by looking at neighbourhood watch schemes in Belgium and the Netherlands. We applied Q-methodology to map the opinions of citizens about their co-productive efforts, and to cluster these opinions into co-producers’ profiles. Discussing differences and similarities in profiles enables a more generalized understanding of the reasons why people co-produce. We conclude with some policy-relevant points about incentivation when local governments want to achieve an increase in citizen co-production. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03003930.2017.1281803 ispartof: Local Government Studies vol:43 issue:3 pages:323-343 status: published

In this article we discuss the extent to which service-delivering nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are committed to fulfill an expressive advocacy role, and we look at the advocacy strategies these organizations adopt. Furthermore, we question whether a close relationship with government compromises the NPOs’ willingness to perform these advocacy activities. Based on a large-N sample of more than 250 NPOs in the Flemish welfare sector, our research shows that the overall commitment to an advocacy role was rather low. Rather than focusing on a role as adversary of government, NPOs seek to adopt “softer” strategies such as the use of insider contacts with policy makers, the participation in umbrella organizations or building coalitions with other NPOs. Finally, we found mixed evidences concerning our initial hypotheses. Most importantly, as the dominant source of public income did not stifle the NPOs’ commitment to advocate, we found little support for a resource dependence framework.

Private nonprofit organizations (NPO) involved in publically funded welfare programs face the challenge of maintaining autonomy in their strategic decision-making processes. In this article we study the extent to which NPO managers perceive this autonomy vis-à-vis government in defining the NPO’s mission, their working procedures, the target groups to be served and the results to be achieved. Empirical evidence is taken from a large-N sample of 255 NPOs engaged in social welfare provision in Belgium. Our findings suggest that public resource dependence does have a negative impact on the perception of NPOs about the level of organizational autonomy. Still, we will argue that, when looking at the relative share of public income in the NPO’s total budget, the nature and intensity of the consultation process between government and NPO and some measures of organizational capacity, this picture is less black and white than presumed.

In many Western countries, alongside NPM-rhetoric, important tasks of public service delivery have been devolved to autonomous single purpose agencies. This was also the case in Flanders (Belgium). This reform rhetoric also has a clear vision on how tasks in the policy cycle are to be distributed between actors: policy-making is a political prerogative, supported by core governmental departments, whereas executive agencies have policy implementation as their main task. This article addresses whether this ideal-typical model really exists, drawing on two case studies of policy initiatives in Flanders. Our observations confirm a policy-operations divide between politics and administration, but it needs refinement: ministers and their advisors make the strategic policy decisions, in which they are assisted by executive agencies. Ministerial departments are hardly involved in the policy-making process. Executive agencies are more than policy implementers alone, as they often have a large input in the operational stages of policy-making.

In this introductory article to the thematic issue, our aim is to discuss the state of the art in research on co-production of public services. We define co-production, for the purpose of this article rather narrowly, as the involvement of individual citizens and groups in public service delivery. We discuss the concept along three main research lines that emerge from the literature: what are the motives for co-production? How can co-production be organized effectively? What are the effects of co-production? Secondly, we also critically assess the state of the art and discuss some conceptual and methodological issues that are still open to debate. Thirdly, we propose some directions for future research: greater methodological diversity and the need for empirical and comparative research with a specific attention for theoretical advancement in co-production research.

The involvement of private actors (non-profit and/or for-profit) in public service provision has a lot of consequences and implications not only for users and service providers, but also for government. This article explores the consequences for the relations within public-private service provision networks, by focusing on the governance regime of childcare in Flanders. Our case analysis clearly shows that public-private service provision networks may threaten the transparency of the service provision field for users, and challenge the role of the oversight authority, often requiring a two-level steering of the service provision field: a direct steering of individual service providers and the network and/or market steering of the whole service provision field (in a community or region). Governance regimes comprising service providers of different sectors may complicate this kind of network steering, as there seem to exist at least six relationships within such networks. Furthermore, we noticed that service providers may face conflicting (public) accountabilities.

Civil society is dead; hurrah for civil society! This simple statement describes the sociopolitical debate in many modern welfare states. Traditional forms of (ideologically or religiously driven) social organisation have gradually declined. Various drivers behind this development have been identified, notably individualisation and changing life patterns, a point to which we will come back later in this chapter. But states have also arguably played a role in this. Welfare-state growth propelled an era of ‘big government’ during the 1970s and 1980s. Although the ‘crowding out’ thesis of a direct trade-off between the size of government and the size of civil society has been largely disproven (see e.g. Salamon, 1995), the collaboration between civil society and the state in the provision of social services has led many organisations to lose contact with their traditional member groups and, by implication, their original legitimacy.

As public service deliverers, funded by public money and performing tasks on behalf of government, many non-profit organisations (NPOs) are under pressure to increase their performance. More and more NPOs have to prove they work efficiently, effectively and in line with the overall mission. As a result, the challenges these organisations are confronted with put pressure on their management. For NPOs, innovation and performance are managerial key issues. Ultimately, the question is what the factors are that lead to innovation and/or improved organisational performance in NPOs, given their important role in public service delivery, often acting as agents of government. For academics, this creates an ambitious research agenda. With a risk to oversimplify the picture, we could summarise this agenda as consisting of some crucial descriptive and explanatory questions. Major descriptive research questions concern the level of innovative behaviour of NPOs, their performance, and their organisational governance characteristics. In terms of explanations, there is a possible relationship between organisational governance features and organisational performance, between organisational governance features and innovation, and between innovation and organisational performance. In this chapter, we discuss the recent academic research concerning these issues, and, secondly, based on the assessment of this literature, we will propose some directions and challenges for such a research agenda.

This article deals with the tendency within the field of social work practice to create inter-organisational networks for welfare provision. We highlight the opportunities that then arise for social work to tackle social exclusion, and to perform its mediating role between the public sphere of government and the private sphere of individuals and families. We argue that the advantages of inter-organisational networking and collaboration can be realised by overcoming fragmentation of care at the micro level of welfare provision to citizens, but also by using these networks as a forum for debate to challenge dominant conceptualisations of complex social problems across organisational and sectorial boundaries. However, we also point to the danger of a so-called ‘network euphoria’, and discuss some of the risks associated with working together through networks. Therefore, the central argument of the article implies that those involved in these networks need to develop a common framework, or value base, with reference to human rights and principles of social justice.

The creation of executive agencies outside core departments has been a major element of administrative reforms throughout Europe during the past two decades, driven by a managerial logic, which also has been at the core of most academic works on "agencification." In this article, the authors take a different perspective by focusing on executive agencies' influence in the policy process. The authors analyze the policy influence of a large executive agency with service delivery tasks in the context of a parliamentary system of government (Flanders, Belgium). A comparison of the agency's influence in two major policy processes shows that a complex interplay of policy content, patterns of interaction, and mutual trust with the political leadership and organizational characteristics helps in explaining the observed patterns of influence. The findings also raise normative concerns regarding potential problems of disconnecting operations from policy formulation via agencification. © 2012 SAGE Publications.

In previous chapters we discussed the features of the ideal-type agency as elements within the NPM doctrine, and asserted that there are international pressures for similarity and convergence towards this NPM model. In our model, we expect that these doctrines are being transformed when they meet state-specific polity, administrative culture and actor constellations. This transformation may lead to different responses in different states (state-level pressures for divergence and dissimilarity).

This chapter addresses the basic characteristics of our comparative research design; the subjects studied (population), the measurement instruments used (survey and document analysis) and procedures chosen for analyses (types of statistical techniques used). The first part describes the survey populations in Flanders, Norway and Ireland, based on the understanding of what constitutes a public sector agency as outlined in Chapter 2. Choices made for the purposes of enhancing the comparability of our three samples are described. We then focus on the design of the surveys in the three states, their particularities and similarities, and how we proceeded in constructing a common data set comprising similar information for all three states stemming from these surveys. This process included the conscious identification and selection of comparable data, and the exclusion of data that were not considered to be directly comparable. Lastly, the chapter addresses the various types of statistical procedures undertaken when comparing agencies in the three states, and their inherent strengths and shortcomings.

In this chapter we bring the analysis to its final stage. Having already analysed the influence of state-level and agency-level characteristics separately, we now focus on the effects of interaction between the two. More specifically, we study those agency-level characteristics that affect the autonomy, control and internal management of agencies in a direct way, independently from the influence of state-level characteristics. Integrating the findings on state-level characteristics outlined in Chapter 9, we now know which characteristics, both at state and agency level, make an impact directly and independently from one another. We discuss whether, and to what extent, the structural-instrumental perspective, the cultural-institutional perspective and the task-specific perspective, as well as the environmental perspective outlined in Chapter 3, may be of relevance in explaining the autonomy, control and internal management of agencies. Chapter 13 thus deals with the final research questions: RQ 6: How do agency-level characteristics interact with state-level characteristics in explaining agency autonomy, control and internal management? RQ 7: Which of the four theoretical perspectives has the strongest explanatory power with respect to the level and pattern of autonomy, control and internal management in the three states? Or do all four theoretical perspectives add explanations to the empirical data?

Since the 1980s, the structuring and functioning of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) public sector has undergone major shifts (cf. OECD 2002a; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). One of the most observed trends in public sector organization in OECD states is the shift from a centralized and consolidated public sector to a decentralized, structurally devolved and ‘autonomizing’ public sector, including the disconnection of policy design, implementation and evaluation (Christensen and Laegreid 2001a, 2006). Systems of public administration have been disaggregated into a multitude of different kinds of (semi-)autonomous organizations, denoted as ‘agencies’ or ‘quangos’ (cf. Flinders and Smith 1999; Pollitt and Talbot 2004). This disaggregation through ‘agencification’ is the result of a process of vertical and horizontal specialization, based on geography as well as on different types of purposes, tasks, customer groups or processes (Christensen et al. 2007; Roness 2007). In this process of agencification and autonomization, the responsibilities and autonomy of public organizations are redefined (structural aspect). Moreover, the way that they are controlled by government, including the mechanisms of accountability, are redesigned, mostly from ex ante to ex post, and from input to results based rationals (functional aspect).

In Chapter 8 we discussed the extent to which agencies use management techniques, and whether differences or similarities exist in their use between agencies in different states. We emphasized comparisons across states, and whether the similarities and dissimilarities were upheld for agencies with certain features. In this chapter we analyse the extent to which agency characteristics, and the autonomy and control of agencies, make a difference for their use of various management techniques. Thus, we aim to answer the fifth research question: RQ 5: What agency-level factors influence the internal management of agencies? To what extent does the level of autonomy and control affect the internal management? As shown in Chapter 9, there is a wide variation in the degree to which agencies use management techniques — our dependent variables. Taking all agencies in the three states together, we see that half of them use techniques such as allocation of resources internally on the basis of performance and cost-calculation systems. Techniques related to quality management systems are used by approximately 35 per cent of the agencies. Techniques like multiyear planning (85 per cent), public reporting (93 per cent) and customer surveys (68 per cent) are applied by a (large) majority of the agencies in Norway, Ireland and Flanders.

The previous chapter shows that the dominant pattern for managerial autonomy, result control and use of management techniques is that Norwegian agencies rank higher than the other two states, and that they are closer to the NPM ideal-type model of agencies. Flemish agencies report using more management techniques than Irish agencies, but with regard to managerial autonomy and result control, agencies in these two states are quite similar, demonstrating low to moderate levels. In this chapter we discuss the third research question: RQ 3: How can we explain similar/dissimilar levels and patterns of autonomy, control and use of management techniques between the three states by referring to aspects of their politico-administrative regimes (state-level characteristics)? In Chapter 7 we formulated hypotheses on the importance of environmental pressures, politico-administrative culture, structural and functional elements of polity, and actor constellations and deliberate actions on agency autonomy, control and internal management (see Table 7.1). In the change management approach, hypotheses focused on the influence of environmental or state-level characteristics on the extent to which a state would adopt more radical NPM-type agency reforms. Such reforms would result in agencies which report relatively higher levels of managerial autonomy, result control and use of management techniques.

The influence of management on the performance of public sector organizations has regained academic interest with the rise of the ‘management matters’ thesis, itself inspired to a large extent by the doctrines of ‘managerialism’ and the ‘New Public Management’. These doctrines advocate the adoption of private managerial tools (e.g. Hood 1991; Osborne and Gaebler 1992) within public sector organizations in order to increase their efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of service delivery. The amount of empirical evidence on the influence of managerial styles and strategies on organizational performance has been growing rapidly, but the contextual factors remain very unclear. Besides, not much is known about the influence of specific managerial tools on performance of public sector organizations. Finally, studies in this area mainly focus on governments as a whole rather than on individual public sector organizations.

In Chapter 8 we presented the extent of perceived agency autonomy and control for all agencies and for agencies within each of the three states. We emphasized comparisons across states, and examined whether the similarities and dissimilarities were upheld for agencies with certain features. In this chapter we check whether, and to what extent, agency characteristics make a difference for their autonomy and control. Thus, we aim to answer the fourth research question: RQ 4: What agency-level factors influence the degree and pattern of autonomy and control of agencies? The analysis is based on the discussion of the importance of structural, cultural and task features for agency autonomy and control in Chapter 10. As noted, in most instances the hypotheses being formulated imply variations in opposite directions for autonomy and control. The hypotheses are summarized in Table 11.1, together with the main arguments why these agency characteristics will make an impact on agency autonomy (and control).

Autonomous bodies established by or reformed under NPM-inspired reforms should be, from a normative point of view, characterized by (1) structural disaggregation, (2) managerial freedom, (3) contractual relationships with the oversight authorities, and (4) tasks on the operations side of the policy-operations divide. We aim to investigate the extent to which real-life agencies reflect these normative characteristics, by taking as an empirical setting the Flemish and Italian public sectors. Our findings suggest that in reality, the normative NPM ideal type agency is only rarely observed. Secondly, we want to explore the effect of the country, the age, and the tasks of the agency on the extent to which it reflects the characteristics of the NPM ideal-type. We find that Italian agencies better reflect the ideal type compared to their Flemish counterparts, and that there is virtually no effect of agencies' age and tasks on the extent to which they reflect the NPM ideal typical agency.