Suchergebnisse

This article sheds light on entrepreneurship in the public sector. The purpose is to provide insights into internal entrepreneurship process of transferring innovative projects into a permanent operation. The empirical material is drawn from a project realizing a new and unproven organizational solution in human services with the aim of improving young people's mental health. Employees of social services and education departments jointly conduct the project. References based on internal entrepreneurship and project management constitute the article's frame of references. An interactive research approach is used. The results show that it was not enough to establish a strong horizontal organizational support and produce exceptionally good results in order for the project to be transferred into a permanent operation. The funding of the project was outside the management system and thus not incorporated into routines and procedures such as budgeting and follow-up reporting. Consequently, descriptions of the innovative project's success and efficiency gains were not linked administratively to the management system. The lack of information to the top management led to no decision being made about permanentizing the project. The findings highlight the hierarchical relation; the importance of make an innovative project visible to the top management through the management system.

This article investigates frontline staff's perceptions of how management affects theirview of value creation during day-to-day work with vulnerable children. The empirical data is based on dialogues during 15 meetings with 8 welfare professionals fromeducation, social services, and children's and adolescent psychiatry. The analyticalapproach used in this article makes use of the service dominant logic (SDL) as a conceptual framework for studying frontline staff's perceptions. The findings indicate that perceptions of management affect the staff's view of value creation in orientationssuch as: (1) the delivery of ready-made expert solutions, (2) the simplification of value- creation processes, and (3) disconnected service systems. Overall, one conclusion drawn is that the SDL can be used as an analytical approach to understanding and exploring value creation in welfare services, thus contributing towards developing managerial applications for supporting frontline staff to a greater extent from a service perspective; however, there are some definite limitations.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the problem of management systems in human services dealing with children and young people not supporting efficient resource utilization, as well as how to deal with this problem.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on six years (2002‐2007) of research into human service organizations with regard to social activities focusing on children and adolescents. The authors conducted this research in collaboration with representatives of social services, health services, schools and pre‐schools in three municipalities in southern Sweden (2002‐2005) and four municipalities and two county councils (2005‐2007) in different parts of Sweden. The researchers met these representatives at seminars held every month. The seminars primarily served the purpose of discussing problems and opportunities, as well as allowing experiences to be exchanged between the representatives.FindingsThe circumstances of dependency between social services, schools and pre‐schools are obviously given in their inter‐relationships. Efficient resource utilization thus presupposes resources being distributed on the basis of transverse dialogues held between different actors. The organisational structure and management control systems should therefore be designed so that they support meetings and dialogues between actors involved in different activities and on different levels in social services, schools and pre‐schools.Originality/valueThis paper shows that dialogue across boundaries will provide the prerequisites for the knowledge‐ and experience‐sharing that is necessary to bring about efficient resource utilization in human services directed towards children and young people. Some proposals regarding a more effective and ethically legitimate utilization of resources are also made.