Abstract
Shared senior management teams are a recent and radical response to financial austerity. They aim to improve the efficiency of public services without the disruption, controversy and transaction costs associated with full-blown organizational mergers. This paper assesses the adoption of this management innovation by English district councils, identifies enablers and barriers to its effective implementation, offers a preliminary assessment of its impacts, and draws out practical lessons for policy-makers.
Highlights
Since the global financial crisis, governments have introduced comprehensive public sector reforms in order to improve the service provision to their citizens while cutting costs
We supplemented this evidence with reports from the Local Government Association (LGA) and local media cuttings to construct a qualitative dataset of all of the shared senior management teams (SMTs) that have been introduced by district councils in England
We interviewed representatives from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), SOLACE, the LGA, the District Council Network, the Shared Management Council Network, the Shared Service Architects, and five retired council chief executives who had direct experience of shared SMTs
Summary
Since the global financial crisis, governments have introduced comprehensive public sector reforms in order to improve the service provision to their citizens while cutting costs. The potential of these reforms to deliver a radically different form of local governance has been inhibited by, among other barriers, the political expediency of budget cuts during an era of austerity (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012). In addition to cutting back provision, councils have responded by seeking to transform the ways in which they manage and deliver services (LGA, 2014). Overmans and Noordegraaf (2014) suggest that organizations have responded to austerity in two main ways: fiscal (focusing only on balancing the fiscal budget); and/or organizational (focused primarily on organizational structures and systems with reducing spending as an indirect result) There is growing evidence that austerity is driving innovation in the public sector (Liddle and Murphy, 2012; Raudla et al 2013) and innovation is at the top of the policy agenda for governments across the world (Koch and Hauknes, 2005; Windrum, 2008; Wu et al 2013). Overmans and Noordegraaf (2014) suggest that organizations have responded to austerity in two main ways: fiscal (focusing only on balancing the fiscal budget); and/or organizational (focused primarily on organizational structures and systems with reducing spending as an indirect result)
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