Conference Streams
Public services are funded and designed to achieve valued outcomes from educational attainment to public health to environmental sustainability. Outcome measurement has a history spanning more than two hundred years, but only in comparatively recent history did these high-level goals – as aspirations, indicators of progress or performance targets – influence the operational delivery of public services.
Alongside the New Public Management reforms, a raft of outcome-oriented performance systems, contracting relationships and investment vehicles have sought better outcomes through a transactional and rationalistic approach of disaggregation, incentivisation and commodification. The hypothesised benefits of these reforms find little support in the empirical record, with real risks of perverse incentives, bureaucracy and diminished capabilities in public sector organisations. So what role should high-level goals like outcomes play in a relational service context?
This conference theme will invite deeper theoretical and contextual exploration of outcomes and an outcomes-orientation in public service. The dominant ‘Rationalist Theory’ (c.f. French et al. 2023) can be contrasted with a ‘Complexity Theory’ wherein outcomes are delivered by complex systems of which public services can only play a small part. Public health scholarship, amongst others, have pursued the application of systems thinking and complexity theory to reconsidering how outcomes could shape. Others consider how the dynamicity of outcomes can be captured through alternative approaches to performance management or evaluation. Others like French et al. (2023) outline a focus on dynamic capabilities can provide an alternative theoretical basis to approach to task of designing public services capable of engaging with complexity of outcomes-based working.
An alternative approach is to consider how outcome-based approaches which derive from a more rationalistic and transactional viewpoint might evolve in a relational context. Attention is now placed on how outcomes in contracting relationships and social investment vehicles – e.g. Social Impact Bonds – might meaningfully respond to complexity and harness relationships. How transactional approaches might be modified and extended is now a significant research question, with advocates and sceptics to be found on both sides.
Another approach is to emphasise the plurality of means through which an outcomes-focus can operate. Outcomes can function as motivational tools and sensemaking devices in ‘personal outcomes’ approaches in social care, or in using outcome-based evaluation to drive learning. Outcomes can be used in goal-setting systems like the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Sachs 2012), or the various sustainability or ‘wellbeing frameworks’ which governments at various scales have adopted to influence decision making and policymaking (Wallace 2019). Yet in so doing outcome-based strategic management must confront endemic limits to the local relevance of high-level outcome goals, the potential for added bureaucracy resulting from inspection regimes, and the well-documented difficulties surrounding enacting accountability. Additionally, this may involve adopting new modalities of working to market outcomes regimes and influence behaviour in environments where little direct control exists.
In this theme, we are interested in hosting a range of papers, workshops, and case study presentations from policymakers, practitioners, and academics interested invested in a forward-thinking approach to outcome-oriented governance and public service. Contributors can also propose their own thematic session or workshop linking a number of contributions.
Relational Social Enterprises:
Jonnie Kimmitt
Social enterprises hold an increasingly important role in the delivery of public services, particularly in the UK, and are generally characterised as aiding beneficiaries that have needs which are not being satisfied by a market. Often regarded as a product of the neo-liberal ethos of New Public Management they are now a consistent feature of public service delivery and service relations. This conference theme takes a broad-based approach to understanding the role of social enterprises in this domain.
Prior research has commonly focused on the “mission drift” of social enterprises in mass consumer markets (e.g., microfinance) yet little is known about this phenomenon for those social enterprises who are contracted to run public services. How do social enterprises counteract these organizational challenges? What role does a commissioned outcomes-focus have on organisational development and identity? How is a more collaborative ethos in public service delivery vital for developing organisational identity? Moreover, how do these experiences vary across organisational forms (e.g., charities, co-operatives, non-profits) when compared with social enterprise?
Also, further research is needed on relational and participatory approaches to social enterprise where people who are usually considered the beneficiaries of social enterprises are instead supported to start and/or lead social enterprises. What system supports could be provided to enable traditional beneficiaries of services to thrive as social entrepreneurs? How can public services support these lived experience social entrepreneurs?
Learning Systems and Engaged Scholarship for Relational Public Services: Melissa Hawkins
Key to a relational approach to public services are the role of Higher Education and Research institutions. A number of proposed approaches to systems learning (including Human Learning Systems – HLS) are emerging through innovative forms including partnerships with academics and consultants. Part of this mix is the concept of engaged scholarship which seeks to build boundary spanning practices of applied research and knowledge exchange to produce new models and approaches to change.
We are interested in a range of papers, workshops, and case study presentations from policymakers, practitioners, and academics from theoretical frames and applied contexts who have been exploring the use of methods and approaches which have sought to engage with the complexity of relational public services.
Relational Public Engagement and Deliberation: Martin King
Public dialogue and deliberation is typically conceptualised as small-scale, presenting trade-offs and constraints to applications for research and engagement. Advocates of public engagement and deliberation claim a range of benefits including increased empathy, learning, and more legitimate and wiser decisions offering the potential to surface the wisdom of large groups of citizens supporting better and more legitimate decision-making. Yet the method and practice of application introduce and encounter a range of potential technical, social, and institutional issues which may prevent realisation of these benefits including scale, structure, sustainability, and the incorporation of innovation.
We are interested in a range of papers, workshops, and case study presentations from policymakers, practitioners, and academics from theoretical frames and applied contexts who have been exploring the use of methods and approaches which have sought to engage with the complexity of relational public services.
Data and Measurement in Relational Public Services: David Jamieson
It is increasingly understood that performance targets always create perverse incentives in public services. Using outcomes as targets amplifies this problem because they lie beyond the ability of any individual agent to bring about independently or predictably. Those subject to performance management regimes, therefore, face a significant incentive to take shortcuts – by skewing, withholding, and distorting data to make services accountable without corrupting the measurement and attribution processes on which they rely. There is an emerging sense that a relational approach to the use of data and information with and by stakeholders might be key to more co-productive interpretative measurement processes.
We are interested in a range of papers, workshops and case study presentations from policymakers, practitioners, and academics from theoretical frames and applied contexts who have been exploring the use of innovative methods and approaches to the use of data and measurement which have adopted a relational approach public services.