Leading-Edge Research in Public Sector Innovation

Abstract

IntroductionThe need to deal with complex problems in contemporary society has given rise to a growing interest in collaboration across the public, private, and non-profit sectors (Ferlie, Hartley, and Martin, 2003; Osborne, 2006; Christensen and Laegreid, 2011). As such, collaborative governance initiatives emerge in public organizations with the aim of involving stakeholders in co-creating solutions for problems related to issues of policy and service innovation (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Sorensen and Torfing, 2013). The assumption is that interorganizational collaboration can co-create public value and innovation through:[A]n emergent process - one driven more by a concern about solving certain common problems than by a desire to respond to narrowly conceived incentives. This emergent process of bringing together parties to identify opportunities for public value creation leads to strong demands for a kind of 'simultaneous engineering' [...] as a process of collaborative design. (Ansell and Torfing, 2014: 10)However, in addition to its potential, the literature highlights considerable challenges of multi-actor interactions and interests. These issues are addressed in conceptual and practice-based models as design and implementation issues in terms of, for example, stakeholder inclusion, decision-making processes, power relations, and trust building (Vangen, Hayes, and Cornforth, 2014).As such, social interaction within and between collaborations is stressed as the potential source of both success and failure owing to actors' idea generation and value creation, but also interest conflicts, and goal confusion (Bryson et al., 2012). For instance, various actors concerned with healthcare issues, such as nurses, doctors, politicians, and patient organizations, may have different definitions of a shared problem. Through collaboration, they engage in dialogue that may broaden their understandings of both the problem and its possible solutions. However, this may also cause misunderstandings, frustration, and ineffective work. Despite efforts to theorize such aspects in terms of design and implementation issues, the practices to organize this form of governance remain tricky accomplishments (Huxham, Vangen, and Eden, 2000; Vangen and Huxham, 2011). Thus, a growing interest in understanding the emerging processes of collaborative governance designs and their socially dynamic and open-ended generative mechanisms is stressed (Ansell and Torfing, 2014: 3; Bryson et al., 2012: 24). This makes communicative interactions and discourse critical aspects to consider in relation to design and implementation in collaborative governance theory and practice (Purdy, 2012). However the conceptualizing of such is underdeveloped and their significance to understanding the organizing of this form of governance remain unexplored in greater detail.In light of this, the article contributes with theorizing and unfolding communication and discursive aspects of the emerging processes of collaborative governance designs with the aim of understanding such accomplishments in greater detail. In so doing, it draws on organizational discourse studies of interorganizational collaboration and change, although these are not particularly concerned with public organizations (Hardy, Lawrence, and Grant, 2005; Thomas, Sargent, and Hardy, 2011). These offer useful concepts of communication and meaning negotiations, with which the article explores how collaborative governance designs emerge, are organized and change. The findings are based on an ethnographic case study of two local governments' collaborative governance practices in an effort to innovate quality - management methods for public daycare services in Denmark. Here daycare is a central welfare area, as up to 97% of all 0-6 year-old children are enrolled in daycare services. As such, these both ensure the gender equality in the labor force and serve as part of the overall Scandinavian education model (Plum, 2012). …