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From cost accounting to strategic cost management: the experience of Italian higher education cost management in public services has often been viewed with disenchantment. The perception of costs is associated with spending reviews and cuts in personnel, disregarding their strategic role. This chapter re-positions cost management at the strategic level. This repositioning is central to revaluate costs in their true essence: the calculation of how we use resources. This strategic view has two main benefits. The first is related to the results of cost allocation, that offer insights on how we consume our resources for service delivery. The second is related to the process for calculating these costs. There are several decisions in the process that might change the results; these decisions are not purely technical: they are a constitutive process in which managers, if involved, reflect on the services and products but also the organization and their responsibility centres. This chapter poses the attention on these issues, presenting the experience of the Good Practice project. Good Practice is an Italian benchmarking initiative in which state universities voluntarily provide their costs, within the same protocol, in order to have a reference for their strategic management. The project started in 1999 under the initiative of the Italian Government, but from 2003 it has been brought forward and financed by universities directly. The project overall has involved more than 50 state universities during its 20-year life. The chapter focuses in particular on three cases that are representative of how universities adopted a strategic approach to cost management. Three types of cost-strategizing configurations are identified: organizational reshaping, service balance and resource programming. The study offers a picture that is very distant from the often-employed cost-cutting approach. Cost data are instead part of a more strategic vision, although always coupled with other data. The chapter is organised as follows. The next section illustrates the context and the method. Then, the distinctive features of the strategic approach to cost are presented. The empirical cases are illustrated in the third section, followed by a discussion of the managerial implications.

Measuring public service effectiveness has become a central issue for public authorities worldwide, often driven by governmental pressures to ensure value for money. In this context, social media data represent a potential powerful tool in the hands of public authorities to support the evaluation of public service performance. By relying on an action research project in the higher education field, this study explores how social media data can contribute to measure service effectiveness by focusing specifically on Twitter in the higher education field. The final aim of the paper is to develop a set of measures, derived from Twitter data, to quantify the effectiveness of higher education services. This investigation supports a broader discussion about the extent to which social media data can contribute to performance measurement in the public sector.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the coherence between sustainability conceptualization (the "what") and its implementation (the "how") in terms of implemented actions and stakeholders' interactions. The paper proposes a grid approach for the simultaneous evaluation of sustainability conceptualization and implementation.


Design/methodology/approach
This research is based on a multiple case study conducted in ten Italian Universities. In-depth interviews with general directors and administrative staff responsible for sustainable activities have been conducted together with documents and websites analysis.


Findings
The coherence between sustainability conceptualization and its implementation showed heterogeneity of practice. Results propose a grid approach, which highlights six different approaches to explain the connection between the "what" and the "how" of sustainability.


Research limitations/implications
The research is focused on Italian universities and may have overlooked approaches to campus sustainability specific of other countries.


Practical implications
Understanding the coherence between the "what" and the "how" of sustainability can provide university managers with a practical tool of analysis when approaching and evaluating the sustainable campus.


Originality/value
While higher education scholars are widely exploring the conceptualization of a sustainable campus and its implementation, little is known about the coherence between these two realms, despite their importance to facilitate the transition of sustainability vision into real practice. This study contributes to this area by proposing a grid approach to evaluate the coherence between sustainability conceptualization and implementation.

Purpose
Public networks studies have widely diffused in recent years, but scant attention has been devoted to network change. By endorsing the notion of critical crossroads to describe a crucial turning point for the network survival, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why a goal-directed network changes, considering both the benefits and the constraints of the change.


Design/methodology/approach
This study adopts a longitudinal case study based upon an interventionist research approach (Jönsson and Lukka, 2006), with the researchers being immersed in the network life of a group of Italian public universities over a period of 17 years.


Findings
This paper proposes an empirical derived framework about network evolution that identifies two different types of crossroads (i.e. resource-driven crossroads and management driven) as drivers for network evolution. The main determinant behind these crisis situation were found in the heterogeneity of the network actors and, while overcoming the crossroads, informal sub-networks were found emerging.


Originality/value
This study enlarges current public network literature by focusing specifically on how and why networks change, an aspect underinvestigated by current literature.