Despite an international resurgence of interest in coproduction, confusion about the concept remains. This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and clarify the concept of ...coproduction in public administration. Based on some definitional distinctions and considerations about who is involved in coproduction, when in the service cycle it occurs, and what is generated in the process, the article offers and develops a typology of coproduction that includes three levels (individual, group, collective) and four phases (commissioning, design, delivery, assessment). The levels, phases, and typology as a whole are illustrated with several examples. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for research and practice.
Co-production has become a buzzword for both scholars and practitioners in the past decade. This introduction to the thematic issue 'Co-production: Implementation problems, new technologies and new ...designs' unpacks the concept of co-production and illustrates how it has been operationalized on the ground in diverse country-specific contexts. To facilitate the analysis, we make a distinction between 'traditional' and 'non-traditional' forms of co-production, even though the practice has not really been around long enough to have established a tradition in the true sense of the word. However, these two distinct forms of co-production are highly useful conceptual lenses through which to view the finer details and nuances, to identify the enabling conditions and to foreshadow the governance challenges, but also to highlight the innovating role co-production plays in forging public services and public policies. Thanks to the rich and varied ways in which the contributors have approached this central topic; the thematic issue enables the research and practice to more fully appreciate the ins and outs of co-production and suggests the most promising directions for future study.
This paper looks at how the relationship between performance measurement system use(s) and organizational performance is affected by the type of performance information use and moderated by New ...Public Management (NPM) cultural orientation. Analysing data from a survey of Italian public managers, it shows that only monitoring and attention-focusing types of uses of performance measures are directly associated with organizational performance, whereas strategic-decision-making and legitimizing uses are not directly related with organizational performance. Moreover, an NPM orientation moderates positively the relationship between monitoring uses of performance information on organizational performance, and negatively the relationship between legitimizing uses and organizational performance.
Purpose
– Budgeting is central in public organizations. From a research viewpoint, it is an extremely multifaceted and potentially rich field to investigate and develop. The changing institutional ...and socio-economic landscape, moreover, requires a profound reassessment of its roles and features in accounting studies. The purpose of this paper is to review the existing European literature on public budgeting, looking at how public administration, public management, and accounting contribute to current budgeting theories and practices and to advance a proposal on how they can individually and jointly contribute in the future.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors collect and analyze all the papers on public budgeting in the European context that were published in all the issues of 15 major accounting and public-management journals since 1980.
Findings
– Budgeting has so far played a rather marginal role in European public management and accounting research. Among the existing papers, most focus on the Anglo-Saxon context, look at the intra-organizational aspects of budgeting, emphasize its managerial and allocative functions, either adopt an interpretive theoretical framework or make no explicit reference to theory, and rely on qualitative analyses. Public budgeting lies at the intersections between different disciplines and professions, but this multifacetedness has been largely neglected by the existing literature. These intersections thus offer significant opportunities for future research. Building on the distinction between the intra- and inter-organizational foci of budgeting, between its different functions (i.e. allocative, managerial, external accountability), and between the accounting and the public administration and management perspectives, the authors propose possible future research topics.
Originality/value
– Budgeting plays a central role in public organizations and is used to allocate a large share of national incomes. This paper explores the existing literature and puts forward some potentially fruitful avenues for future research.
This article investigates whether certain organizational arrangements in (local) public appointment processes could encourage the use of appointments as a tool of good governance rather than as a ...tool of patronage. Specifically, we studied the role of six organizational arrangements in 10 case studies of intra- and inter-organizational public appointment processes held in Italian local government. We found that good governance (in terms of perception of overall integrity and fairness) was found in processes of public appointments where there was independent scrutiny, and when the process involved local councillors and/or external stakeholders – that is, actors beyond those with the formal power to appoint. In these cases, making appointments was seen as a tool of good governance rather than of patronage. These organizational arrangements were more relevant than other ones such as the transparency of public advertisements, job descriptions and educational/professional requirements, and media and public awareness. The article describes the relevant literature and the research study, and discusses implications for research, policy and management.
Points for practitioners
In terms of policy implications, the article discusses the importance of ensuring transparency and some form of checks and balances in the power of making public appointments, as well as of promoting more awareness among citizens and society in general of the issue of public appointments. From a managerial point of view, the article suggests that public managers should consider the implications of the different organizational arrangements that can be used in public appointment processes to exploit the good governance potential of public appointments.
Abstract
Drawing on upper echelons theory, the article investigates the potential impact of top managers’ background and demographic characteristics and personality traits on organizational decisions ...in the public sector. The top-management figure being investigated is the municipal chief financial officer (CFO) and the specific organizational decision under analysis is the extent of revenue misrepresentation during both budget formulation and execution. The empirical setting is provided by the CFOs of Italian municipalities with populations above 15,000 over a 3-year period (2012–14). Financial data are drawn from existing databases. Non-financial data are collected through an online survey. The results show that top managers’ individual characteristics and traits do influence the extent of accounting manipulation. In particular, revenue misrepresentation was found to be smaller in the presence of female managers, managers with degrees in business administration, and managers describing themselves as “conscientious”. These effects on accounting manipulation were moderated by auditors’ and opposition councilors’ oversight, managers’ experience, and the presence of local elections. The article extends upper echelons theory and its applications in several directions: from the private to the public context, from CEOs to CFOs, from managerial decisions in general to accounting choices, and from background and demographic variables to personality traits.
Budgeting has traditionally been the process through which governments decide how much to spend on what, limiting expenditures to the revenues available and preventing overspending. Over time, public ...budgets have taken on different roles, becoming tools for bargaining and allocating power, for planning and controlling, for providing impulses to the economic and social environment and for ensuring transparency and stakeholder involvement (Saliterer, Sicilia, and Steccolini Forthcoming). As such, budgets play, among others, political, economic, managerial and accountability functions. They perform a political function as they reflect stakeholders’ preferences and power positions, representing the same time the result of past decisions and bargains, and the basis for future discussions. They define the boundaries of public intervention in the economy, and the degree of redistribution of wealth in the economic system, fulfilling an economic function. They are also increasingly used to hold managers accountable for the attainment of results and use of public resources, thus filling a managerial function, and to hold public organizations accountable to the general public, satisfying an external accountability function.
Combining insights from public administration, accounting, and psychology, this article explores the microprocesses by which public managers use performance information, investigating whether the ...type of performance information use and the request to justify decisions affect the way in which information is processed. The study draws on data from a series of artifactual survey experiments with Italian municipal executives. Findings show that managers process information differently under ex post rather than ex ante performance information uses. More specifically, managers are more likely to be subject to framing bias under ex post than under ex ante uses of performance information. This interaction seems to be robust when subjects are asked to provide justification for their decisions.
This paper offers a systematic literature review of the studies investigating the impacts of municipal amalgamations. These are presented and discussed by distinguishing five categories: economic ...impacts, impacts on democracy, impacts on services provided, impacts on administrative staff, and socioeconomic impacts on population. Although the heterogeneity of impacts makes it difficult to draw some final conclusions on the effects of amalgamations, findings seem to suggest that cost savings and efficiency gains are modest, several aspects of local democracy are eroded, improvements of services are limited, and the duties of municipal staff increase, fostering professionalism but also stress.
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