Emerging governances, different perspectives

Linking with the debate around new public management (NPM) and new public governance (NPG), the article studies different conceptual approaches for explaining dynamically changing systems that locally deliver integrated health and social care. To make our case, we analyse three health and social care ecosystems: London in England, Tampere in Finland, and West Lothian in Scotland. We argue (a) that network analysis is suited to NPM striving for efficiency, rather than NPGs seeking service effectiveness and innovation; (b) that classifying service systems as networks or ecosystem has important strategic and management implications; and (c) from examining three self-classified local public service ecosystems, that these distinctions are misunderstood in practice.

Logics and Agency in Public Management Research

The article analyses the negative effects of the use of logics in public organisation research on active human agency. We build up a new conceptual model with which to approach logics in current research on organising public services; suggesting ways in which current models using logics in public organisation research can be strengthened. Our contribution is two-fold: we argue that Elder-Vass’ approach benefits from close synthesis with social learning theory (including recent thinking on trust, emotions, and distributed learning) and secondly, that grounding all usage of logics in logic-of-practice helps avoid a reification of logics and thirdly that situated learning better suits public organisation problem solving that the application of ‘new’ universal solutions.publishedVersionPeer reviewe