Search results

"Healthcare in most developed countries face a complex and partly contradictory mix of financial, social and political challenges. Fiscal strains combined with New Public Management agendas have caused severe cutbacks and calls for greater efficiency in public healthcare, resulting in a growing concern about service quality. Co-production and Japanese Healthcare explores a possibility to address these issues from a new perspective that emphasizes greater collaboration between the staff and patients. Here professionals and patients/clients act as 'partners to co-produce healthcare through their mutual contributions'. Japan has a unique system of two user-owned healthcare providers with nearly 200 hospitals, 500 clinics and 50,000 beds. However, they differ from each other and from public hospitals, in terms of their work environment, service quality, governance models and social values. This volume compares cooperative and public healthcare providers at ten hospitals across Japan with survey data from the staff, as well as from the patients and volunteers at four hospitals. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of healthcare management, public and non-profit management, human resource management"--

The OECD con­sid­ers co-production an impor­tant social inno­va­tion. This paper dis­cusses alter­na­tive def­i­n­i­tions of inno­va­tion, since tra­di­tional def­i­n­i­tions, employed by econ­o­mists for indus­try and man­u­fac­ture, do not fit well with pub­lic ser­vice pro­vi­sion. It then presents some def­i­n­i­tions of co-production, dis­cusses the rela­tion­ship between staff and their clients, and asks whether co-production is based on indi­vid­ual acts, col­lec­tive action or both. It briefly dis­cusses sev­eral fac­tors that can con­tribute to mak­ing co-production more sus­tain­able. This paper con­cludes that gov­ern­ments should develop more flex­i­ble, ser­vice spe­cific and orga­ni­za­tion spe­cific approaches for pro­mot­ing co-production, rather than look­ing for sim­ple "one size fits all" solu­tions to the chal­lenges fac­ing pub­lic ser­vice deliv­ery in the 21st Cen­tury, par­tic­u­larly for endur­ing wel­fare ser­vices. Finally, it rec­om­mends more research to pro­mote sus­tain­able co-production.

This article analyzes hybridity in third sector organizations (TSOs) in relation to the coproduction of public services. It begins by discussing hybridity in terms of the overlap between the third sector and other social institutions like the state, market, and community, illustrated by the welfare triangle. Then, it briefly introduces three different public administration regimes. It argues that changing from one area of overlap to another may place TSOs in an unfamiliar, or even alien, environment, resulting in increased hybridity and complexity. After it turns to coproduction and notes, it can refer to a variety of phenomena at various levels that contribute to the growing hybridity and complexity for TSOs and their leaders. It concludes that TSOs can orient themselves toward one of two main kinds of hybridity. A number of hypotheses are presented and some preliminary conclusions about the importance of coproduction for the governance of hybrid organizations are reached at the end of the article.

"This article seeks to make a contribution to a wider political science dialogue on the importance of cooperative solutions in the Scandinavian countries, with a focus on their role for democratic development and with Sweden as the empirical setting. In the article, the author maintains that democracy and the market could and should be more closely related to each other through intelligent organizational design and elaborates on a possible future for cooperative solutions outside of the traditional cooperative field and more mature industries." (author's abstract)