Co-producing across organizational boundaries: promoting asylum seeker integration in Scotland

This paper questions whether asylum seeker integration is promoted through inter-organisational relationships between non-profit and voluntary organisations (NPVOs) and government agencies. It focuses particularly on the role of NPVOs in service delivery (co-management) and in the delivery and planning of public services (co-governance). It presents a research study on the public services provided to asylum seekers in Glasgow and asks the following questions: What role do NPVOs play in the planning and delivery of public services? When planning and delivering public services, to what extent do NPVOs work across organisational boundaries and what kind of relationships exist? And in practice, what makes inter-organisational relationships work? This paper offers new empirical evidence and also contributes to the theoretical debate around the integration of asylum seekers

Social Enterprise in Europe: At the Crossroads of Market, Public Policies and Third Sector

Peer reviewe

Co-producing early years policy in England under the Coalition Government

During the first half of the current Coalition Government, co-production – a form of participatory governance – was implemented widely in the conceptualization, design and implementation of early years policies. Seen as a revolutionary approach to public service reform, resulting in more effective and more cost-effective public services, the joint approach to co-production by the Department for Education and the Department of Health built on the Labour Government’s strategy to involve ‘active citizens’ as stakeholders in public policy development. Local authority early years managers, directors of children’s services and education trade union officers were among education sector stakeholders involved in this process. Co-production is defined here as sharing features of two models of participatory governance identified by Skelcher and Torfing (2010) in their institutional taxonomy of this concept. The actual experience of co-producing early childhood policy suggests that politics may trump policy-making, despite a high-level commitment to co-production

Why Social Enterprises Are Asking to Be Multi-stakeholder and Deliberative: An Explanation around the Costs of Exclusion.

The study of multi-stakeholdership (and multi-stakeholder social enterprises in particular) is only at the start. Entrepreneurial choices which have emerged spontaneously, as well as the first legal frameworks approved in this direction, lack an adequate theoretical support. The debate itself is underdeveloped, as the existing understanding of organisations and their aims resist an inclusive, public interest view of enterprise. Our contribution aims at enriching the thin theoretical reflections on multi-stakeholdership, in a context where they are already established, i.e. that of social and personal services. The aim is to provide an economic justification on why the governance structure and decision-making praxis of the firm needs to account for multiple stakeholders. In particular with our analysis we want: a) to consider production and the role of firms in the context of the “public interest” which may or may not coincide with the non-profit objective; b) to ground the explanation of firm governance and processes upon the nature of production and the interconnections between demand and supply side; c) to explain that the costs associated with multi-stakeholder governance and deliberation in decision-making can increase internal efficiency and be “productive” since they lower internal costs and utilise resources that otherwise would go astray. The key insight of this work is that, differently from major interpretations, property costs should be compared with a more comprehensive range of costs, such as the social costs that emerge when the supply of social and personal services is insufficient or when the identification of aims and means is not shared amongst stakeholders. Our model highlights that when social costs derived from exclusion are high, even an enterprise with costly decisional processes, such as the multistakeholder, can be the most efficient solution amongst other possible alternatives

Measuring public value: a conceptual and applied contribution to the debate

Countries facing austerity measures need to create public value. Academics and practitioners have been discussing the ways in which public value can be created, managed and measured. This paper contributes to this conversation by proposing a public value measurement model. An Italian case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the model and the organizational implications when public value measures are available to public sector managers, politicians and the public

Measuring public value: a conceptual and applied contribution to the debate

Countries facing austerity measures need to create public value. Academics and practitioners have been discussing the ways in which public value can be created, managed and measured. This paper contributes to this conversation by proposing a public value measurement model. An Italian case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the model and the organizational implications when public value measures are available to public sector managers, politicians and the public

Towards an appreciation of ethics in social enterprise business models

How can a critical analysis of entrepreneurial intention inform an appreciation of ethics in social enterprise business models? In answering this question, we consider the ethical commitments that inform entrepreneurial action (inputs) and the hybrid organisations that emerge out of these commitments and actions (outputs). Ethical theory can be a useful way to re-orient the field of social enterprise so that it is more critical of bureaucratic (charitable) and market-driven (business) enterprises connected to neo-liberal doctrine. Social enterprise hybrid business models are therefore reframed as outcomes of both ethical and entrepreneurial intentions. We challenge the dominant conceptualisation of social enterprise as a hybrid blend of mission and market (purpose-versus-resource) by reframing hybridity in terms of the moral choice of economic system (redistribution, reciprocity and market) and social value orientation (personal, mutual or public benefit). We deconstruct the political foundations of charitable trading activities (CTAs), co-operative and mutual enterprises (CMEs) and socially responsible businesses (SRBs) by examining the rationalities (formal, social and substantive) and ethical commitments (utilitarian, communitarian, pragmatic) that underpin them. Whilst conceptual modelling of social enterprise is not new, this paper contributes to knowledge by developing a theory of social enterprise ethics based on the moral/political choices that are made by entrepreneurs (knowingly and unknowingly) when choosing between systems of economic exchange and social value orientation, then expressing it through a legal form