Contributions Of Ethnography To The Study Of Public Services Management

It takes Two to Tango? Understanding the Co‐production of Public Services by Integrating the Services Management and Public Administration Perspectives

“…This will require its further clarification as a set of testable propositions. A range of methodologies exist that can drive forward this empirical testing and refinement including experimentation (Margetts, ), the analysis of administrative data (Andrews, Boyne and Walker, ), ethnographic study (Huby, Harris and Grant, ) and longitudinal research (Wond and Macaulay, ). Inter alia , key issues for the research agenda include testing and refining the conceptualization of co‐production provided here across a range of areas of public service delivery in order to clarify the extent to which it is a general model or to which there are industry‐specific issues to be taken into account; in particular, exploring the boundaries of the service user and citizen roles, the extent to which they are mutually dependent, and their implications for the nature of co‐production; evaluating a range of public policy and public service delivery options for facilitating the different modes of co‐production identified here, to identify and consider their contingencies; exploring the implications of unwilling, coerced and multiple service users for this framework; similarly, considering the range of relationships that a user might have with their service over time (some public services may be used continuously whilst others may require periodic or sporadic usage) and the implications of this for the nature of co‐production; examining the contribution that ICT and digital technology can make to the practice of co‐production; scrutinizing specific cases where co‐production has failed or proved difficult to facilitate in order to clarify its limitations; and assessing the key skills that policy‐makers, service professionals and service users require to optimize the potential for co‐production, as well as the range of mechanisms for enabling the development of these skills. Only once such an agenda has been pursued will the full utility, and limitations, of this new framework be clearly elucidated.…”

The strategy process as a result of learning, questioning, and performing in a city organization

“…The vision-drafting project started in late 2010 and ended in 2012. The research method was inspired by the ethnographic tradition (e.g., Huby et al 2011;Van Maanen 2011;Jarzabkowski, Bednarek, and Lê 2014) and influenced by Czarniawska's (2007) concept of shadowing, in that key actors and their micro practices were studied on an everyday basis. This proximity to the project enabled the researcher to understand the everyday practices of strategy formulation.…”

The Unsung Heroes of Welfare Collaboration: Complexities around individuals’ contribution to effective inter-agency working in LSCBs

“…This called for a 'privileged perspective' (e.g. Huby et al 2011) through an immersion into a single case study of a generic type of child protection partnerships (such as the 'Brempton' LSCB) to really observe and unravel variables so far overlooked or underestimated by previous research. This comes with particular challenges in gathering and analysing data from multiple sources and then reporting it back to an audience.…”