Networking and performance in public organizations : a study of primary schools in the Netherlands

  Public organizations are responsible for the delivery and provision of public services on which citizens rely. To maintain the quality of or improve these services, public organizations must exploit resources from the environment of the organization. To attain a predictable and controllable flow of resources, public managers must interact with a wide array of different organizations and actors in the organization’s environment that are potential sources of support. The main question of this dissertation concerns the conditions under which public managers’ interactions with organizations and actors in the environments of their organizations contribute to organizational performance. The context of this study is Dutch primary education. Specifically, we study the networking activities of Dutch primary school principals. One of the main conclusions of this dissertation is that specific managerial networking activities moderate the negative effect of specific environmental challenges. We find, for example, that the negative effect of red tape on school performance is attenuated by school principals’ networking activities with external organizations, such as local- and national government organizations and interest groups. Insights into the conditions under which specific managerial networking activities are beneficial can help public managers make strategic decisions about which networking activities to prioritize in certain situations.  This study was supported by the “Vidi” Program of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (452-06-001) to René Torenvlied.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Transforming input into output: how downward networking mediates the effect of external networking on organizational performance

The politics and administration of institutional chang

The implementation of value-based healthcare: a scoping review

Background: The aim of this study was to identify and summarize how value-based healthcare (VBHC) is conceptualized in the literature and implemented in hospitals. Furthermore, an overview was created of the effects of both the implementation of VBHC and the implementation strategies used.Methods: A scoping review was conducted by searching online databases for articles published between January 2006 and February 2021. Empirical as well as non-empirical articles were included.Results: 1729 publications were screened and 62 were used for data extraction. The majority of the articles did not specify a conceptualization of VBHC, but only conceptualized the goals of VBHC or the concept of value. Most hospitals implemented only one or two components of VBHC, mainly the measurement of outcomes and costs or Integrated Practice Units (IPUs). Few studies examined effects. Implementation strategies were described rarely, and were evaluated even less.Conclusions: VBHC has a high level of interpretative variability and a common conceptualization of VBHC is therefore urgently needed. VBHC was proposed as a shift in healthcare management entailing six reinforcing steps, but hospitals have not implemented VBHC as an integrative strategy. VBHC implementation and effectiveness could benefit from the interdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare and management science.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Representative Bureaucracy and Specialist Knowledge in the European Commission.

The article addresses an issue that has received little attention in the literature on representative bureaucracy, namely the relationship between representativeness and specialized expertise in public administration. While representation may strengthen the legitimacy of public bureaucracies, what implications does it have for expert knowledge in these organizations? This issue is examined by looking at the recruitment of civil servants to the European Commission, an international bureaucracy where the question of geographical representation is of fundamental importance. Based on a quantitative analysis of nearly 200 recruitment competitions for the organization from 1958 to 2015, the article finds that competitions related to EU enlargement where nationality was an explicit criterion put significantly less emphasis on specialist qualifications and knowledge than other competitions. This indicates a negative relationship between geographical representation and specialized expertise in recruitment to the European Commission. Implications for broader debates about representative bureaucracy and international public administrations are discussed.</p