Search

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.

The care for disabled people in Flanders is currently undergoing a major social policy reform under the introduction of a personal budget scheme. Disability services in Flanders are explicitly expe...

Despite widespread concerns about nonprofit organizations becoming “business-like” by hybridizing toward the market sphere, systematic knowledge about the extent and coherency to which this phenomenon finds traction beyond the liberal welfare context remains largely absent to date. Based on survey data ( N = 496), this study addresses this lacuna for the region of Flanders (Belgium), an emblematic case of a post-corporatist welfare state. We find that (a) business practices are on the rise yet not prominently present, and (b) the theorized conceptual coherence of this phenomenon corresponds with a more fragmented empirical reality. This raises the question to what extent the conception of nonprofit hybridization toward the market sphere as a “monolithic threat” to the distinctiveness of the nonprofit sphere is an empirical reality in a post-corporatist welfare context.

Neo-corporatist relations consist of a stabilized institutional exchange between government, civil society and other social spheres. Current research suggests a destabilization of this relationship...

In their recent systematic review of co-production and co-creation in this journal, Voorberg, Bekkers, and Tummers (2015) called co-creation a ‘magic concept’, to justify both its extraordinarily i...

The position of civil society is changing, as many traditional organizations have become dependent on governments and markets for financial resources. At the same time, new kinds of civil society are on the rise, in the shape of self-organization and social movements. These new players challenge the position both of government, of traditional civil society and of relevant institutions. Simultaneously, citizens are taking on new roles in relation to both government and civil society. They start acting as co-producers, participating in the design, production and evaluating of public services. The question is how governments and administrations are able to cope with these new developments.

The normative tendency towards optimism tends to mask a number of potential pitfalls. This chapter addresses seven potential evils of co-creation and co-production: the deliberate rejection of responsibility, failing accountability, rising transaction costs, loss of democracy, reinforced inequalities, implicit demands and co-destruction. It argues that scholars should fully open up to these possibilities and make them part of the research agenda, because otherwise they risk damaging their own academic credibility. Based on a review of literature on co-creation and co-production of public services, Voorberg concludes that while little research systematically studies the outcomes of co-creation or co-production, the research on this topic that is available focuses mainly on effectiveness. In order to avoid pitfalls, co-creation and co-production need real investment of time and money by government, but also an openness to comprehend the concerns of different actors involved.

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

This article aims at contributing to the study of arm's length agencies by focusing on what are considered to be core concepts of agencification: autonomy and control of public agencies. The balance between autonomy and control is studied for a set of Flemish public agencies, from three angles: (1) To what extent can we observe the practitioner model of disaggregation, managerial freedom and results based control in Flanders?; (2) Which autonomy-control balances do we find empirically? Departing from two extreme cases – control loss and false autonomy – I conclude that there is a lot of variation amongst Flemish public agencies as to their autonomy-control balances; and (3) Based on a third set of empirical conclusions, I try to broaden the normative discussion on the accountability debate that surrounds arm's length agencies, by proposing a broader concept of steering and control. I conclude the article by proposing four directions for future research on this specific topic of agency research.

In contemporary welfare states, governments increasingly rely on private actors for delivering public welfare services to citizens (Snavely & Desai, 2001; Salamon, Sokolowski et al., 2004; Anheier, 2005).1 Due to their grass-roots bottom-up nature and rather small scale of operation, non-profit organisations (NPOs) have become appealing partners for public policymakers who wish to involve the organised civil society in the policy process. The argument is that NPOs, by their nature of being exponents of organised civil society, have greater opportunities for tailoring services to clients’ needs and are better able to influence local social behaviour as well (Salamon, 1995; Boris & Steuerle, 1999). For governments that engage with the organised civil society, the key challenge then becomes one of ensuring that NPOs remain publicly accountable for the deployment of sometimes very substantial public funds. Still, this may not reap some of the indisputable benefits attributed to NPOs’ activities that to a large extent derive from their flexibility and autonomy of not just being another arm of government (Huxham, 1995; Boyle & Butler, 2003). This chapter approaches the above issues of NPOs’ accountability and autonomy from the perspective of NPOs involved in publicly funded welfare programs. A large of amount of scholarship has already focused on the impact of governmental interference on the NPOs’ functioning and autonomy, but this discussion remains far from being settled (Toepler, 2010)

Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) is the world’s largest alliance of a wide range of regional, national and local campaigns dedicated to ending poverty and inequality. Thousands of member groups have formed platforms in more than 110 countries, involving NGOs, trade unions, community groups, faith groups, women and youth organizations as well as other groups and celebrities. Together with the UN Millennium Campaign, GCAP has annually mobilized millions of people against poverty.

In their comparative work on public management reforms, Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004: 40) refer to politico-administrative systems as those fundamentals of political and administrative systems that change only gradually or infrequently, and which may therefore be regarded as rather stable characteristics of the environment in a given polity. A politico-administrative system, in their view, includes structural, cultural and functional elements. Drawing from this and other sources (Christensen and Laegreid 2001b; Wollmann 2003b), we identify and distinguish here between different levels of politico-administrative analysis, which will serve to illuminate later chapters both theoretically and empirically. The emphasis in this chapter is on characterizing the politico-administrative regimes in Norway, Ireland and Flanders across a range of relevant dimensions. The implications of these regimes for agency autonomy, control and internal management are then discussed in Chapter 7.

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.

This chapter maps the development of agencies in the three states, with a particular focus on ‘waves’ or agencification and related administrative reforms. We respond to the first empirical research question, setting the background of this study: RQ 1: To what extent are agencies created by the governments of the three states, in what form, with what legal-structural status, and in which policy domains? What tasks are they performing? How is the creation o f agencies evolving over time? While clearly delineating what does or does not constitute an agency differs according to politico-administrative regimes, the definitions discussed in Chapter 2 provide a compass for our inquiries. Each state is considered in turn, beginning with Norway. The last part of the chapter compares the actual agency landscapes in the three states in terms of task, size, budget, governance structures and other characteristics.

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.