Alford Coprodn paper IRSPM 2015
Panel D107
D107Alford
Co-production, publicness and social exchange:
Extending public service-dominant logic
John Alford
University of Melbourne
and
Australia and New Zealand School of Government
Paper for International Research Society for Public Management 2015 Conference
University of Birmingham, 30 March - 1 April 2015
N.B. Amended title – original submitted title was:
From ‘optional extra’ to embedded co-production: Extending Public Service-Dominant Logic
2
Co-production, publicness and social exchange:
Extending public service-dominant logic
John Alford
ABSTRACT
The emergence of the idea of public service-dominant logic, and the consequent reshaping of
the notion of co-production as an unavoidable phenomenon rather than an ‘added-on’
optional extra, hold out the promise of a more authentically public sector-oriented conceptual
framework for understanding the core businesses of government (Osborne 2010; Osborne et
al 2012; Radnor et al 2014). But insightful as it is, there remains room for this idea to be
extended to incorporate still more of what is distinctive about public sector management.
Firstly, it is thus far limited to considering individual clients, who receive private value in the
services they consume. It needs to comprehend the consumption of public value by the
collective citizenry – a difficult challenge because the citizenry forms and expresses
‘preferences’, and relates to services, in a different way than individual clients. Secondly,
many public services entail the application of coercion – the legal authority of the state – to
those with whom they deal in service-encounters. This is at odds with the notion of
‘delighting’ customers, since it means disadvantaging them for the sake of the collective
citizenry.
This paper first extends the argument in support of the basic idea of co-production as a
necessary feature of public services, utilising the concepts of inter-dependency and exchange.
The paper then explores three areas that require extension of the theory: what co-producers
actually contribute; the importance of distinguishing public value; and the use of legal
compulsion. Utilising social exchange theory, it proposes concepts for comprehending and
handling each in ways that retain – indeed depend on – acknowledgement of public servicedominant logic.
N.B. This abstract slightly amended from the originally submitted abstract, which was entitled:
‘From “optional extra” to embedded co-production: Extending public service-dominant logic.’
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Co-production, publicness and social exchange:
Extending public service-dominant logic
John Alford
Introduction
Co-production research and practice some time ago reached a stage where it cannot progress
much further without new theory supported by empirical evidence (Ferlie 2003; Andrews and
Boyne 2011). One theoretical candidate for this role is public service-dominant logic (PSDL)
developed by Stephen Osborne and his colleagues in recent years (Osborne and Strokosch
2013; Osborne et al 2013; Radnor et al 2014). This framework brings together two hitherto
separate ‘takes’ on co-production, from the field of (generic) management as it applies
specifically to services, and from public administration. It takes us some way towards a better
understanding of the necessity of co-production for public services, of the links between coproduction and citizen participation in decision-making, and of how services management
concepts can be operationalised for co-production.
These are significant advances, but like all good theories, they can be taken further, as the
authors of the PSDL framework recognise. They identify some undeveloped aspects, each of
which constitutes a lacuna in the research. Here the focus is on three of them: the
unavoidability of co-production in services management; the implications of ‘publicness’;
and the use of coercive power. In an attempt to develop these aspects, this article begins with
an account of PSDL, then examines each undeveloped aspect in turn. It does not so much fill
the gaps as suggest pathways toward doing so.
Public service-dominant logic
The management aspect of the PSDL framework grew out of a reaction against the
shortcomings of public management theory, especially New Public Management (NPM). As
Hood (1991) and many other writers have pointed out, the rhetoric of NPM called for the
importation of the characteristic tools of private companies to the public sector, including
focusing on results, grouping activities by outputs, performance monitoring, incentive based
remuneration, separating ‘steering’ from ‘rowing’, and outsourcing.
At the same time, NPM has attracted an extensive and at times vociferous critique from
public administration scholars (e.g. Pollitt 1990; Considine 1988), arguing that the body of
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techniques employed in private sector management are unsuited to the circumstances of
government organisations. In particular, they suffer from their difficulties in measuring
performance, in comparing ‘apples with oranges’ in expenditure decisions, in disentangling
‘policy from administration’, and in co-operating horizontally or vertically with other
organisations (Pollitt 2003; Hood 2005).
This critique was somewhat totalising in nature. It comprehended generic management as an
undifferentiated set of techniques, which not only separately but also collectively were
dysfunctional in government (Boston et al 1996; Self 1993; Pollitt 1990). What made the
position of Osborne and his colleagues different was PSDL’s recognition that particular
aspects of business management were the locus of the dysfunction, namely: (1) its
preoccupation with intra-organisational rather than inter-organisational management; and (2)
its derivation from the product/manufacturing origins of much management theory – what
they called the ‘fatal flaw’ of public management theory.
Firstly, while suitable for managing within the organisation, generic management approaches
such as NPM were poorly suited to the increasingly fragmented but interdependent world of
post-modern society. Governments found themselves dealing with more complex, intractable
dilemmas calling for responses on multiple fronts (Head and Alford forthcoming; Kettl 2009)
and new forms of ‘networked governance’ began to spill beyond the NPM boundaries to deal
with these problems. Theories such as Osborne’s New Public Governance (2010) emerged to
encompass these developments.
Secondly, the origin of NPM was not the whole of management theory but rather a particular
(and important) strand that focused on product manufacturing, as opposed to service
management. This was crucial, because the great majority of the work of the public sector is
delivering services, but services management has a radically different logic to product
manufacturing. To the extent that it rests on product-dominant assumptions, NPM and
generic management are not ‘fit for purpose’; they fail to comprehend the workings of public
services.
For a start, services are intangible, whereas products are concrete. Consequently, services are
hard to store and to demonstrate; their value lies in the experience rather than an inanimate
object. Further, they are produced and consumed at the same time, by contrast with
manufacturing where a good emanates from a production process, can be stored, and is
available to be consumed afterwards. Finally and by corollary, the user is not only a
consumer but also a producer of the service, by virtue of the inseparability of production from
consumption.
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In response to the distinctive features of public services, Osborne et al have over time
fashioned a framework resting on a public services-dominant logic (PSDL), drawing from
relevant literature in services management, co-production and the public administration
scholarship on citizen engagement. Central to this orientation, if not explicitly named in the
literature, is customer focus (or client focus), the watchword of public organisations’ efforts
to improve services. As its label suggests, this means putting the needs and preferences of the
client front and centre in the ongoing management of the organisation, so that clients will not
just be satisfied but also delighted with the service, and consequently likely to return for
more, as well as to recommend it to others. In particular, co-production draws a vital link
with a central idea in services management: the ‘moment of truth’ (Gronroos 1990; Normann
2002), when the service provider and the client ‘confront’ one another:
‘At that moment they are very much on their own. What happens then can no longer be directly
influenced by the company. It is the skill, motivation and the tools employed by the firm’s
representative and the expectations and behaviour of the client which together will create the
service delivery process’ (Normann 2002, 21).
The PSDL framework offers the possibility of integrating insights from different vantagepoints. But it contains three important aspects meriting further research, each of which is
flagged by Osborne et al as warranting closer examination:
1. The necessity of co-production in services.
2.
‘Publicness’: the fact that the services are public in nature.
3. The coercion of unwilling clients.
The necessity of co-production: interdependence and exchange
Osborne et al draw our attention back to the unavoidability of co-production in services. They
contend that the co-production research to date has regarded co-production as an ‘add-on’ to
organisational production, which public managers can choose to use or not after weighing up
its relative merits. This perspective, Osborne et al rightly argue, fails to recognise that in
services (as opposed to product manufacturing), co-production is usually a necessary and
unavoidable part of the service system, not least because of the inseparability of production
and consumption in services.
Many researchers have tended to assume that co-production is an ‘optional extra’ which
would be nice to have but is not essential (e.g. Boyle and Harris 2009). But other writers,
going back to the origins of the concept in the late 1970s, have regarded co-production as an
inescapable element of some public services. Indeed, the acknowledged originators of the
term, Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in the Indiana University Workshop on Political
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Theory and Policy Analysis, identified some circumstances in which co-production was
unavoidable because the work of the organisation was mutually reliant upon that of citizens
or consumers – in which case there was no choice but to retain and try to enhance coproduction (Parks et al 1981). More than ten years ago, Alford observed on the basis of case
studies across three countries:
‘In all these cases, it is impossible for the organisation to create value or deliver a service unless
the client actively contributes to its production. The question for the organisation is not whether
it should use client co-production but rather how it can best elicit it’ (2002, 41, emphasis in
original. See also Alford 2009, 24-5; Loeffler et al 2008; and Whitaker 1980, 242; Pestoff
2012).
But the issues Osborne and colleagues do raise about the nature of co-production and the
roles of citizens and service-users within it have previously been only scantily addressed.
They are addressed here with the help of the PSDL framework as an intellectual springboard.
Exchange
Co-production largely if not entirely involves some kind of exchange, in which the parties
give and receive either work or other valuable behaviours. In other words, it entails unfolding
contingent actions by the actors. It can be called an exchange because each behaviour of one
towards the other is prompted by a behaviour that the other either has already engaged in or is
likely to undertake. This is not an economic exchange (that is, of money for goods or
services), which is a prompt quid pro quo, with a clear nexus between the money and the
service. Rather it is a social exchange, and most importantly involves an exchange of
behaviours rather than tangible objects (Ekeh 1974; Levi-Strauss 1949/1969; Homans 1961;
Blau 1964).
Social exchange means the exchange of a broader set of things than only tangible items such
as money or goods. People may give each other things that have intrinsic value or are of
social significance, such as respect or status, or which have purposive value, such as
affirming fairness. In fact, social exchange can be of anything which the parties value. Thus a
householder may be more inclined to recycle if the neighbours also do it, while a visa
applicant may be more compliant if she feels the system treats her fairly and respectfully.
Further, it can entail ‘generalized exchange’ (Levi-Strauss 1949/1969, 220), which involves
at least three actors who ‘do not benefit each other directly but only indirectly’ (Ekeh 1974,
48). These exchanges do not entail quid pro quo, and indeed can involve delayed reciprocity,
but the overall result over time is that all of its participants have both given and received
something in a circular process. Thus a drug agency provides ‘maintenance’ drugs and
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counselling to addicts, who work to ‘kick the habit’ (adding to the measured success of the
agency), and in the process become less problematic members of society – manifested in the
public experiencing reduced crime, less threatening behaviour, and lower infection rates –
which in turn prompts greater community support for the agency.
Both these aspects of social exchange typically entail more diffuse and deferred reciprocity
than economic exchange. Exchanging less tangible values means that calculation of the
precise benefits given and received is more difficult, whereas generalized exchange involves
delayed reciprocity, in which people hope that they may benefit at some unspecified time in
the future, and and less precisely. These relationships depend on trust among the parties,’
(Ekeh 1974, 59). Both types of exchange embody reciprocity, in which the giving by each
party to the exchange is conditional upon that of the other parties, albeit not as precisely.
More particularly, this reciprocity is likely to expand if each party perceives the exchange to
be value-creating – that is, where each gains more than s/he loses.
At the same time, it has to be recognised that exchange is not the only mechanism affecting
choices about whether to harness co-production. Another factor is coercion, which typically
involves the threat of punishment for failing to co-produce (or perhaps for doing it
excessively and inefficiently). This raises a number of issues which are dealt with later in this
paper. The other influence has to do with their norms and values, that is, their ‘identification’
or ‘alignment’ with the mission. In this case, citizens or service users support and consent to
co-production (Alford and O’Flynn 2012). They ascribe positive virtues to it such as fairness
in how it is determined as well as implemented, or they agree with the purposes it serves.
These two influences – exchange and identification – tend to interact in practice. One party
will be more likely to give to another if norms are present among the parties which attach
value to the group, its rules and its common purposes. These norms will in turn be fostered by
the experience of successful reciprocity, opportunities for which often arise where services
throw citizens/clients and organisational staff together in inevitably co-productive
relationships.
Independence, dependence and interdependence
What does it actually mean to say that co-production is unavoidably necessary in services? It
turns out that while co-production is strictly unavoidable in more than a few public services,
many others where it seems necessary actually exhibit a degree of avoidability. What makes
it variable is typically the cost – financial or intangible – of eliciting co-production. However,
to ascribe unavoidability requires three conditions to be met: interdependence; basic
capability of available co-producers; and absence of alternative producers. Where any of
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these conditions is relaxed, the necessity of co-production will vary according to the degree
of relaxation.
Firstly, co-production is unavoidable when: either the parties depend on each other for
productive contributions; or only one depends on the other, but is able to offer something else
valuable to that other party, such as convenience, respect, assistance, etc. Figure 1 shows
different permutations. Interdependence is present in a student visa program, where both a
foreign applicant for a visa and the government immigration agency depend on each other for
achievement of their service goals. The applicant has to provide information of high integrity
and the agency has to process that information expeditiously, thereby making them
interdependent (Cell 4). By contrast, recycling is more a matter of the municipal council’s
reliance upon the householder to separate different types of rubbish, making this a
relationship of one-sided dependence (Cell 2). This does not rule out co-production as a
strategy in this case: instead of reciprocating with householders by performing some work
that they find a vital part of the overall task, the council may need to apply some other
measure to prompt co-production. It could use the actual collection service as a mildly
coercive lever, by making the prior sorting of waste a pre-condition for collecting a
household’s garbage. Alternatively, the council could apply incentives, such as payment for
certain garbage that has recycling value, such as cans or bottles.
--------------------------Figure 1 about here
--------------------------But this begs the question: what does ‘dependence’ mean? What is it that parties might rely
on each other for, to the extent that they are willing to change their behaviours or actions in a
way that positively affects the other party? The answer is: anything without which the
performance of the co-productive task would be impossible. Closer examination unearths a
variety of types of co-productive activity (see Figure 2) which one party can supply to (or
withhold from) another party.
--------------------------Figure 2 about here
--------------------------A broad distinction can be drawn between three categories of contributions: tangible objects,
information, and behaviours. Since service-dominant logic does not offer a role for physical
entities, ‘tangible objects’ will receive only modest consideration here. However, they remain
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in the picture because sometimes the delivery of a service can have the side effect of also
producing goods, as is the case with Meals on Wheels.
Provision of information is a common form of co-production in both the public sector (think
visas) and private sector (think bank loan applications). It can be information about private
selves, again as with visas, or about others within the organisation or the broader society that
is a pre-condition for the agency to do its work. It can be exchanged for other information, or
can be dovetailed with it in a complementary fashion. Usually information is an input or
process rather than an output.
Behaviours account for much co-productive activity. One type is self-enhancement, such as a
drug addict undertaking various treatment regimes toward rehabilitation. Their behaviour is
therefore a critical pre-condition for program success. Related is the enhancement of other
‘selves’, as when parents donate their time to helping as a school aide. Most general is the
variety of possible activities contributing to the organisation generating more value for the
public. Thus a drug treatment agency is better able to achieve its purpose if its clients, for
example, take their Naltrexone and undertake intensive counselling and vocational training;
indeed, the agency simply could not succeed in rehabilitating clients unless they undertake
this work. There is also a role for co-production in the compliance behaviours encouraged in
prisoners and other obligatees.
However, the description so far still does not take us into the realm of ‘unavoidable’. One
reason is that in many services, even if the member of the public in question cannot do the
requisite work, someone else might be able to. It only becomes ‘unavoidable’ for either of
two reasons. One is that there is literally no-one else available to do what is required – for
example, where a farmer has to treat a sick cow himself because there are no veterinarians
within a reasonable distance. The other is where clients seek to alter themselves in some way,
such as getting clean of a drugs habit; there is axiomatically no other ‘self’ to carry out this
task.
There is also another requirement, on the co-producer side – namely that that the citizen or
service-user is capable of performing the task. If the task is beyond the cognitive capacity of
the member of the public, then no reward will induce them to do it. A slightly more nuanced
version of this argument, but one with significant implications, is where the citizen/user is
able to perform the task, albeit poorly or slowly. This raises the possibility of variable
capability on the part of the co-producer.
In summary, to say that co-production is necessary in a given situation is to claim that at least
three pre-conditions have been met:
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•
That the parties depend on each other for co-productive work which is essential for the
achievement of organisational purposes (at least for task completion).
•
That each party is capable of performing the specific work sought from them.
•
That no-one else is able to perform the requisite work, either because the relevant
professional is not available or because only the client in question is able to undertake the
self-transformation role.
These three conditions define an interdependent relationship, for which a co-productive
arrangement would be necessary and possible. A dependent relationship is where the
government organisation relies on citizens or service users to contribute that work, but not
vice versa. This could also be a basis for co-production, assuming the government
organisation could provide the co-producing public with sufficient incentives and enablers for
them to take part.
The point is that while co-production is unavoidable for some activities, its necessity is
variable for others. In the latter case, the need for co-production is a contingent and therefore
an empirical matter, for which the three pre-conditions provide guides.
Client focus and co-production
It is clear from the discussion so far that ‘client focus’ is central to the PSDL framework. But
a little more delving reveals a whole extra dimension in client co-production. I start by
turning on their heads the two basic questions that the orthodoxy in this area dictates that
managers ask:
1. What do our clients want from us?
2. How can we best provide them with what they want?
These questions distil the commonsense understanding about being market-responsive. But
including ‘co-production’ in this picture raises two further questions, which run in the other
direction:
3. What do we want from our clients? The clear answer from the foregoing analysis is that
we want not customer revenue but rather co-productive contributions of information and
behaviours. Identifying the required information and behaviours entails analysing the
production process, broadly speaking, to discern who plays what role in achieving the
sought outcomes, and which ones might be more specifically targeted.
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4. How can we get them to provide it to us? This is a matter of understanding the
motivations and capacities of potential co-producers, and fashioning incentives, appeals,
facilitators or other enablers.
Looking at the situation this way underscores the basic point that although the co-productive
relationship often constitutes an exchange between the organisation and citizens or service
users, this is an exchange of behaviours rather than a transaction of money for goods and
services, and consequently requires some different methods and understandings than those
employed in conventional market exchanges.
A number of techniques, such as backward mapping (Elmore 1980), intervention logic
(Baehler 2002), and program logic (Carter 1991), can assist the visualisation of these
phenomena – each with its virtues and limitations. A method for discerning the roles of the
different actors is public value process mapping (Alford and Yates 2014), which traces all the
steps that might lead to a particular output or outcome. This technique can be helpful in
unearthing actors and activities that might not be clearly visible at first sight, by moving from
the known to the less-known. The very process of working through these steps enables
judgments about how the whole process could be configured.
Take the example of programs for the unemployed run by Australia’s federal government
(see Figure 3). Assume for the moment that the focus is on the output, defined as the client
getting a job and holding it for 3 months (black oval shape). The core process toward that is
the series of black boxes starting with the jobseeker applying to Centrelink (Australia’s
welfare payments organisation) for benefits. Thereafter, the work is shared between
Centrelink, the job agency and the jobseeker, who attends the agency, and receives various
services to assist her in getting a job, such as vocational education training, job referrals, job
search training, travel assistance, etc.
--------------------------Figure 3 about here
--------------------------This set of activities can be divided into three categories. The core process towards the output
is shown in black, and is largely performed by the jobseeker, Centrelink and the job agency.
The grey boxes depict those activities where there is supportive co-production of the output
by various other entities such as the Department of Education and Training or employers. The
white boxes take things further, since their orientation is toward outcomes rather than outputs.
Here the outcomes constitute social impacts, such as improved personal outcomes and
reduced demand on the public purse, rather than simply services emanating from the core
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process. This last aspect offers space for managers to think more expansively about
opportunities for creating value, courtesy of the focus on outcomes.
Thus far, the notion of exchange has been used in a way that implies that reciprocity is
confined to the co-productive work that each side contributes. But it has been noted that some
co-production relationships are unequal and dependent – that is, one side may contribute a lot
of time and effort while the other provides hardly any. This is a difficult setting for social
exchange, with its presumption of the rough equality of contributions over time.
But it was also noted that it was open to either of the parties to supplement their workcontributions with other ‘gifts’ (Titmuss 1970), which could include anything the other party
valued, and either tangible or intangible, economic or non-economic things. This is an area
where research has made much progress (see: Loeffler et al 2008; Bovaird et al 2015; Alford
2002), and will not be covered here. But it is worth noting that the positive gestures which
might form at least part of what is offered include a variety of value-types, such as material
incentives, intrinsic rewards, social affiliation, or normative values.
All of these motivations can be mobilised by governmental action, such as monetary
incentives, legal obligations, publicity, education or convenience. Depending on how these
government actions are framed and applied, they can constitute a ‘gift’ to potential coproducers. In the same way, members of the public are more likely to contribute usefully to
the organisation’s purposes if they are positively motivated rather than grudgingly compliant.
‘Publicness’
A missing element in the PSDL framework is that it takes insufficient account of the fact that
these are public services. Although it mentions the importance of this fact, its actual analysis
has largely tended to be about ‘generic services-dominant’ logic, in which the customers
interact with the service system as individuals. To explain this, I revisit the notion of client
focus. As discussed above, this entails managers asking: ‘What do our clients want from us?’
In the private sector, the simple way of answering this question is to look at how well the
service is selling. In Hirschman’s (1970) classic terms, customers typically express
dissatisfaction with a product (or an organisation) by the mechanism of exit. They ‘vote with
their feet’ by no longer buying the service. More precise methods are possible through market
research: gathering, aggregating and analysing information from individuals, through various
forms. This information then guides the nature of the ‘offer’ that firms make to consumers.
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But government organisations have not one but two primary types of public, each of which
receives a different kind of value. So far this analysis has considered only one of these: the
individuals we will call clients or service-users, who receive private value (and who, as we
shall see, have varying roles in relation to the organisation). But it has neglected the other
kind of ‘public’: the citizenry, who collectively consume public value (Moore 1995).
Space precludes exhaustive consideration of public value here but it has different facets. One
is the instrumental, such as remedies to market failures of various types (Stokey and
Zeckhauser 1974; Hughes 2003) and the conditions for markets to function, such as the rule
of law. The other is broadly the things people value which transcend their own self-interest:
aspirations for the society as a whole, founded in normative principles or imparted by social
milieu (Moore 1995, 44-48) or the institutions facilitating deliberation about these social
purposes, such as parliaments, or election commissions.
What makes the distinction between public and private crucial is that the task of finding out
what public value the citizenry want is much more challenging, precisely because it is
collective in nature. It is very difficult to aggregate citizens’ preferences to arrive at an
overall definition of public value, since they all have different wants and aspirations, each of
which may be adjusted in an ongoing fashion as others’ preferences change. Thus the primary
channel through which a manager learns what the citizenry wants is through government,
where citizens engage with each other in advocacy, debate and negotiation. The processes of
political interaction and deliberation inform their mandates, and are enabled by the
structuring of governments as some form of democracy. Of course, any of these forms is
imperfect, and prone to shortcomings such as inability to develop crisp mandates, inequality
of power between different interests, or short time horizons (Alford 2002b, 339). But they are
arguably the most acceptable forms of government to the citizenry at large.
The upshot is that the ‘public sphere’ has a quite different logic to the private sphere. In
particular, its desires and its satisfactions are expressed not so much through the mechanism
of exit (since that is less available for many public sector users) as through that of voice –
complaints and demands through direct communication. Crystallising a clear understanding
of public value is an inherently political process. But while the PSDL framework refers to
‘the distinctiveness of public services’ and acknowledges that ‘Unlike for a business,
consumer satisfaction alone is not an adequate measure of service performance’ for public
service organisations, it does not yet incorporate a way of crisply distinguishing between the
two sectors. It tends to lump them together in an undifferentiated fashion, for instance in
describing ‘strategic orientation’ as ‘the capacity to understand the needs and expectations of
citizens and service users’ (Osborne et al 2013, 141).
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This is also the case with the continuum of modes of co-production (Osborne and Strokosch
2013). It distinguishes three modes of which the third – enhanced co-production – entails
both the planning and design and the actual work being shared between the organisation and
the user. This formulation usefully anticipates innovations in services borne of the experience
and involvement of users at both the operational and strategic levels. But leaving aside the
question of whether participation in planning and design can be subsumed within coproduction, this categorisation again misses the distinction between public and private value.
Most of this potentially fruitful analysis focuses on the service-user role rather than that of
the citizen.
The issue also applies to the operationalization of the framework through ‘serviceblueprinting’ in a university student enrolment process (Radnor et al 2014). This synthesis
sets out the respective roles of and interactions between the work of the organisational
producers and the service-user co-producers. However, it omits the citizenry and the public
value they consume, and focuses almost entirely on the student/clients. Consequently, it is
difficult to discern what value the community as a whole received and what the students
received. But at the same time, this technique points to a valuable method for answering these
questions. These omissions have significant implications for the application of the PSDL
framework, posing a challenge to the public manager, who has to determine how the
distribution of value is affected by managerial decisions. In managing the actual service
system, how much weight should be given to the citizenry at large vis-à-vis the direct serviceusers?
Where the respective interests amount to a zero-sum conflict, the manager’s task is to
engineer some sort of compromise – that is, an agreement on the respective shares of the
value (tangible or intangible) to be assigned to each. This would not be a problem if the
interests under consideration were shared, so that both sides could benefit by shifting from
one situation to another. But the real world does not often offer shared value. In fact, we live
in a world of different interests.
Interestingly, however, these differences offer opportunities to capitalise on the variations.
For example, a public manager might find a way of benefitting one party or value without
harming another – or even more profoundly, of dovetailing their interests, so that each gains
more than they lose. In managing co-production, the presence of different types of values
and/or different actors can make for complicated discussions. But by increasing the number
of variables in play, it can also expand the range of possible solutions.
Ultimately, of course, ascertaining what is of value to the citizenry is a matter of collective
deliberation – whether by direct participation or representation in any of its numerous forms.
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But public deliberation is always difficult, precisely because there are differing actors with
differing interests and knowledge. On the one hand, organisations may be prone to
perpetrating ‘snow jobs’, where they take advantage of their superior knowledge or power to
present a rosy picture of the problem under consideration or to ‘seduce’ representatives of
opposing interests into a cosy or non-critical stance. On the other, some participatory
processes may be vulnerable to individuals with other agendas, for whom the process
provides a ready-made audience. Or it may be that the process is prone to difficult
interventions by periodic one-issue complainers.
Although Osborne and Strokosch’s (2013) suggestion of the continuum of modes of coproduction lacks clear delineation between the public and private, it nevertheless usefully
attempts to find a place for participation at multiple levels. In particular, the idea of
‘enhanced co-production’ is an effort to do what has not really been attempted before: to
combine different aspects of participation which bring together disparate knowledge from the
workplace or front counter, the service planning level and the organisational or sectoral level.
What it needs is a coherent appreciation of how to involve both the individual service-users
and the collective public in suggesting and advocating to the government organisation, as
well as with each other.
All of this suggests that, as with many aspects of public management, there may be no one
right way to facilitate and benefit from public participation. Fortunately, some important
work has raised precisely this possibility. Thomas (2012) distinguishes different roles for
members of the public, and argues for a contingent approach to enabling and harnessing
participation. He proposes a series of rules, which inform choices about who to involve, what
to involve them about, and how to involve them. Thus, although the call for enhanced
participation is difficult, it is not impossible. Decision frameworks like Thomas’ can enable
different participation opportunities for the different constituencies involved. Drawing the
distinction between the collective citizenry and the individual service-user enables thought to
go into what kind of participation there should be.
Coercion
The third aspect of the framework meriting clarification and elaboration is the fact that some
government organisations are in the business of imposing obligations on their service-users.
They disadvantage the ‘client’ in this way for the sake of the wider community, even though
s/he is unwilling to receive the service and/or is coerced into doing so. This is discordant with
the notion of ‘client focus’ which is central to service management. Far from creating
‘delighted’ customers, compelling them to obey the law seems more likely to alienate, annoy
or embitter them.
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16
This dovetails with the discussion of publicness above. Thus far, the distinction has been
drawn between the citizenry and service-users, and public and private value. However,
service-users have differing relationships with government organisations in a number of
respects. Apart from the standard ‘paying customer’ – encountered in some public sector
agencies such as postal services, public transport and utilities – service-users occupy different
roles. One is what will here be called the beneficiary. They pay no money directly to the
service-providing government entity – although they may pay indirectly through taxes – but
receive the service (or some part of it) for free, as in public schooling or welfare services.
Here the government usually seeks not so much to delight customers as to ration the service,
through devices like queues or eligibility rules. This role is one of the arenas through which
the client engages in social exchange.
A third role is the obligatee, the unwilling recipient of the service who is the focus of this
section (Moore 1995). Because they are unwilling, they must be compelled to comply with
the obligations imposed by the organisation. This not only applies to ‘law and order’ agencies
such as the police or prisons, and to regulatory authorities, but also to government
organisations whose primary mission is not regulation, but who need to secure compliance
from their service-users.
These are roles rather than categories because each user is a mixture of their different aspects.
For instance, a jobseeker is in the main a beneficiary (receiving benefits, training and/or job
referrals) but is also an obligatee, in that s/he can be breached for failing to actively search for
work and comply with administrative rules.
The obligatee role, with its emphasis on compliance, seems unsuited to co-production, which
is normally understood to be a process of voluntary exchange. But compliance is an outcome,
not a process. It entails people acting in a manner consistent with the public purposes the
agency serves. The critical point here is that people act in this way for a variety of reasons,
only one of which is compulsion. They may comply because they feel the law should be
obeyed regardless, or because they support the rules’ purposes, or because they do not want
the shame of being found out, or because it is relatively easy to do so. In short, their
compliance may be more or less voluntary. And to the extent that they do comply, they
further the achievement of valued outcomes.
Moreover, the more voluntary the compliance, the more useful it is for the organisation. It is
likely to be cheaper, since it will require fewer resources for enforcement. It is also likely to
be of higher ‘quality’, especially if the obligations are complex. The more complicated the
rules, and the harder the obligations are to specify in advance, the more the agency relies on
2 March 2015
17
the obligatees to exercise discretion and take positive or intricate steps. Grudging compliance
is usually not enough in these situations; they require observing the spirit as well as the letter
of the law. This calls for regulatory tools that help and persuade obligatees rather than coerce
them to comply – for instance, providing information, simplifying the co-productive task,
cutting the obligatees some ‘slack’, or appealing to their normative values. Notably, these
gestures can be seen as ‘gifts’ in social exchange terms.
In this context, securing compliance poses a challenge for regulatory agencies. Research
shows that the application of coercion has limitations. One is that it can be difficult to frame
rules that cover all the possible situations. What might be valid for some obligatees’ coproduction might make little sense for others’; this is one reason why rules are often
experienced as ‘red tape’: they impose obligations which make little sense to some (Bardach
and Kagan 1982).
Another is that people’s ‘compliance postures’ vary (Braithwaite 1995). Some are willing to
obey the law always, simply because they see it as the right thing to do. Others
(‘recalcitrants’) will take any opportunity to avoid their obligations. In between are:
‘incompetent non-compliers’, who want to comply but find it technically difficult to do so;
and ‘contingent compliers’, who will comply provided the agency demonstrates that it is
seriously enforcing the rules against the recalcitrant, so that they don’t feel like ‘suckers’ for
complying.
What makes this complicated for organisations imposing obligations is that no single strategy
will encompass all these postures. A (‘soft’) strategy based on help and persuasion will allow
the recalcitrant to take advantage of the laxer regime, and also disillusion the contingent
compliers. On the other hand, a coercive strategy will alienate the voluntary compliers, and
completely fail to reach the ‘incompetents’.
Clearly, the solution lies in applying different strategies to different groups – and indeed, that
is what many ‘obligation-imposing’ agencies around the work have done, mainly under the
rubric of ‘responsive regulation’ (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992). This is depicted as a
‘regulatory pyramid’, with ‘softer’ interventions at the bottom and tougher ones higher up. It
offers a way of capitalising on opportunities for voluntary exchange without leaving the
system vulnerable to recalcitrants.
In summary, unwilling clients may not be as big a problem for the PSDL framework as they
seem. Despite appearances, they can contribute value-adding co-productive effort just as
other service-users can. More importantly, this contribution can be at least partly voluntary.
To the extent that it is voluntary, their relationship with the organisation can be seen as one of
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social exchange – ‘exchange’ because each provides something to the other; ‘social’ because
it involves more than just an economic quid pro quo.
Conclusion
Many theoretical breakthroughs are the result of scholars either discerning a connection
between two unrelated phenomena, or perceiving a distinction between aspects within a
hitherto unified entity. The PSDL framework is an instance of both. On the one hand, it has
discerned an affinity between services management and public services – namely its
particular logic of intangibility, inseparability and co-production – and sought to integrate
them. On the other, it has disentangled services management from product-manufacturing
management theory, thereby more clearly enabling the incorporation of co-production into
the former.
This opens opportunities not only to develop better management theory – as foreshadowed by
applying service blueprinting to public sector processes, or clarifying strategic orientation, or
situating relationship marketing as an adaptive process – but also to enhance citizen and
service user participation, based on a more contingent understanding of public sector
deliberative processes than is available via product logic.
This paper has sought to answer the call of Osborne and colleagues to elaborate on aspects of
the framework requiring development or modification, in particular those where their
repositioning into the public sector necessitates an understanding of the ‘subtle nuances’ of
the public sector. It has put forward some arguments and ways of thinking about three
matters.
First, it has provided some conceptual underpinning, based on a social exchange framework,
for the proposition that co-production is unavoidable in services management. It proposes an
elementary typology of categories of co-productive contribution, arguing that co-production
can be seen as an exchange process, encompassing not only the co-productive work itself, as
well as the degree of dependency or inter-dependency with that work, but also the
supplementary ‘gifts’ – tangible and intangible – that round out the degree of dependence.
Second, it has suggested how acknowledging ‘publicness’ is important for managers finding
out what the public wants, and also to identifying sources of co-productive contribution.
Third, it has suggested a way of thinking about the role of coercive power in public
management, and a method of dealing with it that dovetails with the insights of coproduction.
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19
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Figure 1: Dependence and interdependence in co-production
Does not depend on Party A
for productive contribution
Does not depend on Party B
for productive contribution
Depends on Party B for
productive contribution
1
2
Independence of both parties
Dependence of Party A
3
4
Party B
(e.g.citizen or service user)
Party A
(e.g. government organisation)
Depends on Party A for
productive contribution
Dependence of Party A
2 March 2015
Interdependence
Figure 2: Types of co-productive contributions by citizens and service-users
Category of
co-production
Co-productive activity or behaviours
Benefit to govt organisation or its work?
Co-producer contributes input, process,
output or outcome?
Physical objects
By-products (e.g. Meals on Wheels).
Additional value to primary service
(Joint) output
Pre-condition or enabler for completion of
task.
Usually either an input or a process.
Self-enhancement (e.g. drug addict).
Precondition for task-completion.
Process (interactive with program).
Enhancement of other selves (e.g. parents
as school teaching aides).
Enabler for task-completion.
Input or process.
Pre-condition or enabler for completion of
task.
Usually input or process.
Precondition for task-completion.
Varies between all of above.
Info re private self (e.g. student visas).
Information
Info enabling govt organisation’s taskachievement.
Info re broader society characteristics and
attitudes (e.g. census).
Behaviours
Contributing to improved quality,
responsiveness, efficiency, etc of
organisation’s work.
Contributing to improvement in aspect of
society or nature.
Compliance with obligations (e.g. prisoner).
Figure 3: Public value process map for employment services
Department of
Education and
Training
Contract and
administer Job
Network Australia
Jobseeker
applies for
Centrelink
payment
Choice of job
agencies
provided to
jobseeker
Training
provider
Data provided
to DET
Star system
facilitates
user choice
Benefits
contingent on
attendance
Centrelink
Jobseeker
attends
agency
Jobseeker
chooses
agency
Job agency
Agency
provides
jobseeker with
training and
opportunities
Appointments kept
Careful
consideration
of options
CV improved and
updated
Jobseeker
Employer
Lower
burden on
government
resources
Jobseeker
gains
employment
Job interviews
attended
Jobseeker
engagement with
training
↑ financial,
health and
psychological
outcomes for
individuals