Juggling competing public values : resolving conflicting agendas in social procurement in Queensland

Organisations within the not-for-profit sector provide services to individuals and groups government and for-profit organisations cannot or will not consider. This response by the not-for-profit sector to market failure and government failure is a well understood contribution to society by the nonprofit sector. Over time, this response has resulted in the development of a vibrant and rich agglomeration of services and programs that operate under a myriad of philosophical stances, service orientations, client groupings and operational capacities. In Australia, these organisations and services provide social support and service assistance to many people in the community; often targeting their assistance to clients facing the most difficult of clients with complex problems. Initially, in undertaking this role, the not-for-profit sector received limited sponsorship from government, relying on primarily on public donations to fund the delivery of services. (Lyons 2001). Over time governments assumed greater responsibility in the form of service grants to particular groups: ‘the worthy poor’. More recently, government has engaged in widespread procurement of services from the not-for-profit sector, which specify the nature of the outcomes to be achieved and, to a degree, the way in which the services will be provided. A consequence of this growing shift to a more marketised model of service contracting, often offered-up under the label of enhanced collaborative practice, has been increased competitiveness between agencies that had previously worked well together (Keast and Brown, 2006). One of the challenges which emerge from the procurement of services by government from third sector organisations is that public values such as effectiveness, efficiency, transparency and professionalism can be neglected (Jørgensen and Bozeman 2002), although this is not always the case (Brown, Furneaux and Gudmundsson 2012). While some approaches to the examination of social procurement - the intentional purchasing of social outcomes (Furneaux and Barraket 2011) - assumes that public values are lost in social procurement arrangements (Bozeman 2002; Jørgensen and Bozeman 2002), alternative approach suggest such inevitability is not the case. Instead, social procurement is seen to involve a set of tensions (Brown, Potoski and Slyke 2006) or a set of trade offs (Charles et al. 2007), which must be managed, and through such management, public values can be potentially safeguarded (Bruin and Dicke 2006). The potential trade-offs of public values in social procurement is an area in need of further research, and one which carries both theoretical and practical significance. Additionally, the juxtaposition of policies – horizontal integration and vertical efficiency – results in a complex, crowded and contested policy and practice environment (Keast et al., 2007),, with the potential for set of unintentional consequences arising from these arrangements. Further the involvement of for-profit, non-profit, and hybrid organisations such as social enterprises, adds further complexity in the number of different organisational forms engaged in service delivery on behalf of government. To address this issue, this paper uses information gleaned from a state-wide survey of not-for-profit organisations in Queensland, Australia which included within its focus organisational size, operational scope, funding arrangements and governance/management approaches. Supplementing this information is qualitative data derived from 17 focus groups and 120 interviews conducted over ten years of study of this sector. The findings contribute to greater understanding of the practice and theory of the future provision of social services

21st Century politics: new faces/new spaces

Politics has been described as a man’s game and a man’s place. Further, the design of houses of politics also embeds this dominant masculine ethos. Traditional Chambers have been large with only limited seating arrangements ensuring that only privileged elite can participate and both officials and the public are located at some distance and separate from the elected officials. Such a Chamber ensures that Members need to face each other and the dominant interaction is adversarial. Within this system however, women have been able to carve out new spaces, or use existing ones in different ways, to become more involved with the mechanisms of parliament and provide alternative routes to leadership. In doing so, they have introduced elements of the private domain (nurturing, dialogue and inclusion) to the public domain. The way in which space is used is fundamental and its treatment has consequences for individuals, organizations and societies (Clegg and Kornberger 2006). Dale’s (2005) work emphasises the social character of architecture which recognises the impact which it has on the behaviours of individuals and nowhere is this more pertinent than the way the Australian Parliament House operates. This paper draws on the experiences of Australian parliamentarians to examine the way in which the new Australian Parliament House shapes the way in which the Australian political cultural norms and practices are shaped and maintained. It also seeks to explore the way the Members of Parliament (MPs) experience these spaces and how some MPs have been able to bring new ways of utilising the space to ensure it is more accommodating to the men and women who inhabit this building at the apex of Australia’s political life. In doing so, such MPs are seeking to ensure that the practices and processes of Australia’s political system are reflective of the men and women who inhabit this national institution in the beginning of the 21st century

Cities in the airports 'shadow' : underlying interests and discretionary power in airport-region development

The previously distinct boundary between airports and their cities has become increasingly blurred as new interests and actors are identified as important stakeholders in the decision making process. As a consequence airport entities are more than ever seeking an integrated existence with their surrounding regions. While current planning strategies provide insights on how to improve and leverage land use planning in and around airports, emerging challenges for implementing and protecting these planning ideals stem from the governance shadows of development decisions. The thesis of this paper is that improving the identification, articulation and consideration of city and airport interests in the development approval process (between planning and implementation) can help avoid outcomes that hinder the ability of cities and their airports to meet their separate/mutual long-term objectives. By applying a network governance perspective to the pilot case study of Brisbane, analysis of overlapping and competing actor interests show how different governance arrangements facilitate (or impede) decision making that protects sustainable ‘airport region’ development. ---------- Contributions are made to airport and city development decision makers through the identification and analysis of effective and ineffective decision making pathways, and to governance literature by way of forwarding empirically derived frameworks for showing how actors protect their interests in the ‘crowded decision making domain’ of airport region development. This work was carried out through the Airport Metropolis Research Project under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (LP0775225)

Researching inter-organisational collaboration using RO-AR

This chapter focuses on the application of Research Oriented Action Research (RO-AR) to research inter-organizational collaboration within and across the public and non-profit sectors. RO-AR is a phenomenological action research methodology developed by Colin Eden and Chris Huxham (1996, 2006) which they and others have used to research aspects of management and organizations generally and inter-organizational collaboration specifically; the latter being the focus here. To that end, this chapter draws on a program of empirical research into governing, leading and managing collaborations that has been ongoing since 1989, and which has relied primarily on RO-AR. As a program of research, it is concerned with the development of conceptual knowledge that can inform practice and which has accumulated into the still evolving theory of collaborative advantage (TCA) (Huxham and Vangen 2005; Vangen and Huxham 2014). The aim in this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to RO-AR and to explore its applicability to research on collaboration. Action Research, of which RO-AR is a particular type, was pioneered in the United States in the 1940s, most notably by Kurt Lewin (1946). Lewin argued that research for social practice needs to be concerned with ‘the study of general laws … and the diagnosis of specific situations’ (36). He pointed, among other things, to the need to design methods for recording ill-structured data and to focus on the relationship between perception and action through taking an interpretist approach to research. In a similar vein, action research aimed at understanding organizations and organizational change began at the Tavistock Institute in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1947. With the aim of conducting research and developing knowledge, the Tavistock Institute developed new participative approaches to organization change and development. In the years that have followed, a number of related approaches have emerged including action science (Argyris, Putnam, and Smith 1985), action inquiry (Torbert 1976), action learning (Mwaluko and Ryan 2000; Revans 1982), appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987; Cooperrider, Whitney, and Stavros 2008) and participatory action research (Argyris and Schon 1991; Whyte 1991). Given the growth in popularity of these kinds of research methods, the literature is unsurprisingly both large and somewhat confusing. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding inherent differences, these methods all involve learning from interventions in organizations with the purpose of bringing about change and advancing knowledge. A distinguishing feature between them is the relative emphasis on change (or practical transformation) and the development of more general knowledge (i.e. theory). The primary purpose of the systematic engagement with action in praxis may be the immediate development of an individual, an organization or a community (e.g. via appreciative inquiry or action learning) or it may be to inform the development of theory on the aspect of management or organizations that is being researched, as is the case with RO-AR. The validity of RO-AR, however, rests fundamentally on the intervention being useful in practice. This close relationship with practice enhances the potential of a theory ultimately developed to inform other contexts. Eden and Huxham distinguish RO-AR from other action research approaches in the following ways (2006: 388): • from organizational intervention projects that do not satisfy characteristics of rigorous research • from research within an organization that does not satisfy characteristics of action orientation • from forms of action research that do not have research output as their primary rasion d’etre. The aim of this chapter is to highlight key features of RO-AR and to show how it may be used to produce good research on collaboration. In what follows, we look at the relevance of RO-AR to research on collaboration, provide and account of the application of the method in developing the theory of collaborative advantage, along with an overview of issues pertaining to data capture and analysis. The chapter also offers a brief evaluation of the method and some thoughts on rigor and relevance for researchers who may wish to apply the methods in future research on collaboration

Creating change in government to address the social determinants of health: how can efforts be improved?

Background: The evidence base for the impact of social determinants of health has been strengthened considerably in the last decade. Increasingly, the public health field is using this as a foundation for arguments and actions to change government policies. The Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach, alongside recommendations from the 2010 Marmot Review into health inequalities in the UK (which we refer to as the ‘Fairness Agenda’), go beyond advocating for the redesign of individual policies, to shaping the government structures and processes that facilitate the implementation of these policies. In doing so, public health is drawing on recent trends in public policy towards ‘joined up government’, where greater integration is sought between government departments, agencies and actors outside of government. Methods: In this paper we provide a meta-synthesis of the empirical public policy research into joined up government, drawing out characteristics associated with successful joined up initiatives. We use this thematic synthesis as a basis for comparing and contrasting emerging public health interventions concerned with joined-up action across government. Results: We find that HiAP and the Fairness Agenda exhibit some of the characteristics associated with successful joined up initiatives, however they also utilise ‘change instruments’ that have been found to be ineffective. Moreover, we find that – like many joined up initiatives – there is room for improvement in the alignment between the goals of the interventions and their design. Conclusion: Drawing on public policy studies, we recommend a number of strategies to increase the efficacy of current interventions. More broadly, we argue that up-stream interventions need to be ‘fit-for-purpose’, and cannot be easily replicated from one context to the next

An exploratory study of noble cause corruption: the Wood Royal Commission New South Wales, Australia 1994-1997

Noble cause corruption occurs when a person tries to produce a just outcome through unjust methods, for example, police manipulating evidence to ensure a conviction of a known offender. Normal integrity regime initiatives are unlikely to halt noble cause corruption as its basis lies in an attempt to do good by compensating for the apparent flaws in an unjust system. This paper explored the nature of noble cause corruption using statements and evidence given by police officers in the Wood Royal Commission (1994-1997). The overall findings are that officers involved in corrupt practices suffered from a failure of leadership and from a lack of inclusion. Officers were motivated to indulge in noble cause corruption through a desire to produce convictions where they believed the system unfairly worked against their ability to do their job correctly. This perception was supported by a culture of exclusion, which depicted police as a victimised group which was stigmatised and oppressed by the judicial system and the community. To deter police from engaging in noble cause corruption, strong leadership, better equipment and long-term incentives are suggested to minimise this type of behaviour within the police organization

Desperately seeking innovation nirvana:Australia’s cooperative research centres

The Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program has been one of the flagship programs of Australia’s National Innovation System (NSI) for 30 years. But compared to other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), statistics indicate that Australia has persistent low levels of business expenditure on research and development (BERD), while World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) reports highlight poor diffusion-of-innovation characteristics. In response to reports of this ilk, and in line with the generally evolving nature of NSIs, the CRC program, and the Australian NSI system, has developed and matured. In a wide-ranging longitudinal review of the program’s policy documentation, we discover that a number of changes have affected the language used within the program, the targeted organizations, and, crucially, the duration of the funding periods. We conclude that, within the confines of the nation’s historical and geographic context, the CRC program exhibits similar characteristics to NSIs elsewhere. In addition, there may be scope for Australia to split the CRC program into separate streams, and that even further support for integration into the Asia-Pacific markets is likely to be beneficial to the diffusion of Australian innovation

New citizen collectives, their democratic potential and their implications for public management

This issue-paper written by the panel-conveners introduces the panel’s topic, delineating its focus and discussing its scientific and practical relevance. It presents core concepts and ideas, aiming to provide context, direction and a common language to the panel discussions and the panelist papers. The paper discusses the rise of new citizen collectives (grass roots initiatives, community trusts, social enterprises, citizen initiatives) as new forms of civic engagement in policy fields such as energy, spatial planning, social care, community provisions and social services more generally. Under such models, citizens take the lead in dealing with common, or localized problems and public issues and are directly engaged in developing and implementing solutions and services. The emergence of citizen collectives give rise to new practical and theoretical questions concerning the meaning of these citizen collectives for local communities and government. The implications of this growing reliance of citizen collectives as vehicles for policy development and service delivery on the community sector has yet to be fully explored. In this paper, we aim to describe the rise and the forces shaping these new citizen collectives and to analyze their institutional characteristics, including to what extent they are new. Furthermore, we explore what these initiatives have to offer in terms of their democratic potential and what they mean for government and public management in particular, providing an agenda for further research into this blooming topic. The paper ends by identifying a number of issues, which if more deeply examined, will better help us to understand the functioning of citizens collectives and the challenges they face from a public management perspective. We think these issues are worthwhile for further debate during our panel and are summarized in the concluding section of this paper