public services

Updating your course reading lists? Check out our essential reading recommendations for Public Policy, Politics and Social Policy from Policy & Politics

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by Sarah Brown and Elizabeth Koebele

All articles featured in this blog post are free to access until 31 October 2024

It’s that time of year again when  course syllabi are updated with fresh research. We hope to make this easier with the essential reading list below, which features some of the most significant research relevant to public policy students that we’ve published over the last year. We feature nine articles and a special issue for teaching topical themes such as health policy, policy learning and advocacy. All articles are ideal for Public Policy, Politics and Social Policy classes alike.

As always, we welcome your feedback on the articles featured, as well as future unit topics you’d like to see covered! Let us know what you’re teaching and how we can help!

Health policy

Our first theme focuses on a substantive policy area that is increasingly taught in public and social policy courses, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and on-going climate crisis: health policy.

Our first article, “Analysing the ‘follow the science’ rhetoric of government responses to COVID-19” by Margaret Macaulay and colleagues, has been one of the most widely read and cited articles of last year and was the winner of our Best Paper prize for 2023. This is not surprising, as it advances bold and well evidenced claims on a hot topic in public health governance. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic – and in the face of widespread anxiety and uncertainty – governments’ mantra that they were “just following the science” was meant to reassure the public that decisions about pandemic responses were being directed by the best available scientific evidence. However, the authors claim that making policy decisions based only on scientific evidence is impossible (if only because ‘the science’ is always contested) and undemocratic (because governments are elected to balance a range of priorities and interests in their decisions). Claiming to be “just following the science” therefore represents an abdication of responsibility by politicians. 

Our second featured article, entitled What types of evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system? by Geoff Bates and colleagues, explores the use of evidence to influence different groups across the urban development system to think more about health outcomes in their decisions. Their three key findings are: (i) evidence-based narratives have wide appeal; (ii) credibility of evidence is critical; and (iii) many stakeholders have priorities other than health, such as economic considerations. The authors conclude that these insights can be used to frame and present evidence that meets the requirements of different urban development stakeholders and persuade them to think more about how the quality of urban environments affects health outcomes. 

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What role should charitable funding play in the provision of public services?

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by Helen Abnett, James Bowles and John Mohan

Our recent research, published in Policy & Politics, shows that in the English and Welsh National Health Services (NHS), support from NHS-linked charities funds a wide range of goods and services. This includes substantial spending on amenities intended to make hospital visits more comfortable for patients and staff. Charities pay for newspapers, toiletry packs, toys for play areas, cushions and books. Charity support also funds education and wellbeing activity and medical research.

We also find that support from charities funds basic hospital equipment and furniture, such as vital signs monitors, bladder scanners, pulse oximeters, mattresses, and chairs, as well as some larger pieces of medical equipment (x-ray machines and ultrasounds).

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Design of services or designing for service? The application of design methodology in public service settings

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by Kirsty Strokosch and Stephen P. Osborne

The design of public services has traditionally been conducted by managers who aim to improve efficiency. In recent years though, human-centred design has been used increasingly to improve the experience of public service users, citizens and public service staff (Trischler and Scott, 2016). Design also encourages collaboration and creativity to understand problems and develop solutions (Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). This can include user research to understand current experiences and/or testing prototypes through quick repeated cycles of re-design.

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Do women leaders of nonprofit public service organisations help to reduce the gender pay gap?

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By Rhys Andrews

It is often assumed that female leaders are motivated to actively represent other women within the organisations that they lead by helping them to achieve promotions, pay rises and improved working conditions. In the public sector, such leaders are thought to act as ‘femocrats’ advancing gender equality through their deeds and decisions. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the potential for women leaders to actively represent female employees in the nonprofit organisations that are now responsible for many public services in the UK and elsewhere. In my recent article in Policy & Politics , I examine the role that women leaders might play in reducing the gender pay gap in Welsh housing associations – nonprofit public service organisations that provide most of the social housing in Wales, and which have a strong commitment to gender equality.

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SPECIAL ISSUE BLOG SERIES: Blog 6 – Strategic Management as an Enabler of Co-creation in Public Services

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ongaro et alEdoardo Ongaro, Alessandro Angelo Sancino, Irene Pluchinotta, Hannah Williams, Martin Kitchener and Ewan Ferlie

In our recent contribution to the special issue on Strategic management of the transition to public sector co-creation, our article offers an important contribution to the integration of strategic management and co-creation by demonstrating how the co-creation of public value may be enabled by strategic management.

We demonstrate this by conceptually elaborating, and then empirically illustrating, the potential for models of strategic public management to enable the co-creation of public service solutions that enhance public value. Our main research question explores how and under what conditions the adoption of models of strategic management in Public Service Organisations (PSOs) can support and enable the co-creation of public service solutions. Through our analysis, we aim to fill a gap in the literature by considering the importance of an underlying strategic orientation towards value creation that provides a value base upon which to embed these approaches within PSOs. Continue reading →

SPECIAL ISSUE BLOG SERIES: Blog 2 – Co-creation: the new kid on the block in public governance

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Special issue blog series on strategic management of the transition to public sector co-creation

Ansell and TorfingChristopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing

In our recent article in our special issue on Strategic management of the transition to public sector co-creation, we reminisce briefly about the time when bureaucracy with its hierarchical command structure and emphasis on compliance with written rules was the only game in town. This was understandable, since the public sector was tasked with solving simple problems through large-scale provision of services such as schooling, health care and social welfare. This task called for exploitation of the bureaucratic forms of organisation propagated by industrialisation.

Then, from the 1970s onwards, the criticisms of the public sector for being inefficient and delivering poor services and failing governance solutions started to grow and the public sector was confronted with the question whether to ‘make or buy’. As a result, we saw the expansion of quasi-markets where public and private service providers competed for contracts and customers. This development turned citizens into demanding, dissatisfied and complaining consumers expecting service without having to contribute anything themselves towards problem solving. In the increasingly cash-strapped public sector, this development seems to be unsustainable. We need to mobilise the manifold resources of users, citizens and private stakeholders in order to provide needs-based services and create new and better solutions through mutual learning and innovation. Continue reading →

Can citizen involvement in the recruitment of front-line employees help to identify candidates who will be effective at co-production?

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Trischler P&PJakob Trischler

In our recent open access article in Policy & Politics, Johan Kaluza and I take as our starting point for our argument the point that public service organisations should recognise citizens as active co-producers rather than passive recipients in service design and provision. Indeed, there are a number of studies showing that citizens are capable and willing to contribute to public service outcomes that are beneficial not only to themselves but also to the broader citizenry.

However, an important question in the co-production debate is how organisations can effectively engage and enable citizens to become co-producers. We argue that one answer to this question lies in the role taken by front-line employees. Through direct contact and collaboration with service users, they can ‘activate’ citizens to co-produce. Taking this argument one step further, we ask if the actual recruitment of these front-line employees could be a co-produced process with respective service users involved? But what happens when relevant users are actually involved in the recruitment of social workers, teachers, or employment officers? Continue reading →

Has privatisation influenced public service equity? Evidence from China

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HuanmingWang_etalHuanming Wang, Rui Mu and Shuyan Liu

Since the late 1970s, governments in many countries have adopted privatisation reforms, including contracting-out public services, transferring functions and responsibilities to the private sectors, and selling enterprises to private interests. The practice of privatisation in some developing countries has led to the problem of unequal treatment. For instance, many local governments in China outsourced their public services (e.g. public bus services, water supply and waste disposal services) to private companies. This included the delegation of operations entirely to these private entities. Government subsidies were allocated to the private operators, but these subsidies could not cover the full costs incurred by those private operators.. In this context, the private operators had to concentrate their services in densely populated areas and neglect the needs of more sparsely populated areas, resulting in the inadequate provision of services in the latter areas. As a result of this, some local governments withdrew from these privatised arrangements in order to ensure a more equal provision of services.

Our recent Policy & Politics article explores whether and to what extent privatisation and its reversal influence public service equity in China. Our paper focuses on public bus services in China, the provision of which has been subject to both privatisation and subsequent re-nationalisation, and draws upon an extensive programme of research that covered 245 cities. The Coefficient of Variation (CV) method was used to measure equity, and the multiple-regression method was adopted to test the relationship between privatisation and equity. Continue reading →

New Policy & Politics Virtual Issue on the Welfare State: free to download until the end of November

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Sarah Brown2By Sarah Brown, Journal Manager

From a prevailing, long-standing debate in the journal on the welfare state, we bring you a collection of our best and most recent articles. To highlight just a couple: Anthony McCashin’s How much change? Pierson and the welfare state revisited provides a structural overview of the impact of globalisation on analyses of the welfare state.

Meanwhile Sharon Wright, through forensic scrutiny, exposes the gulf between the discursive constitution of the welfare subject by policy makers, and the lived experiences of those subjects in her article Conceptualising the active welfare subject: welfare reform in discourse, policy and lived experience.
All of these articles seek to critically evaluate this contentious area of policy and point towards purposeful research agendas for the future. Download them now before 30 November while they’re free to access! Continue reading →

New Policy & Politics Virtual Issue on Public Services and Reform: free to download until the end of November

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By Sarah Brown, Journal ManagerSarah Brown2

Try our new themed virtual issues which are free to download from 1-30 November:

Public Services and Reform
In this new virtual issue, we bring you our most impactful and recent research from diverse perspectives with a coherence of focus on increasing our understanding of public services and reform.

To introduce two highlights from the issue, opening the collection is one of our most innovative articles on how health discourses are linked to population health outcomes, hence the title: Working-class discourses of politics, policy and health: ‘I don’t smoke; I don’t drink. The only thing wrong with me is my health’. Moving from health to employment, Rebecca Taylor analyses the changing dynamics that come into play as the provision of employment services increasingly moves to public, private and third-sector organisations in her article entitled UK employment services: understanding provider strategies in a dynamic strategic action field. Covering a diverse range of public industries, other articles in the collection offer insightful studies across education, social care, disability, counter-terrorism, local government and state regulation.

Download them now before 30 November while they’re free to access! Continue reading →