Forms Of Co-production Research Articles

From traditional regionalism to national distinction: German television co-productions through time

This article offers a historical perspective on co-productions of high-end television drama in Germany. It argues that such co-productions have seen three distinct phases that although overlapping, are described by industry insiders and critics as distinct periods where one form of co-production is dominant at a particular time but then becomes residual as other forms take over. These three forms are, first, public broadcaster-led co-productions, second, ‘Europudding’ co-productions, and finally, distinctive co-productions in TVIV. This article shows that these phases are connected to stylistic as well as industrial changes, which do not always overlap with the description of industry insiders.

Application of ICT in the co production of social services

Aim/purpose – The purpose of this article was to identify the information and commu- nication technology (ICT) tools fostering the co-production of social services, acknowl- edging that the technological environment is an important contextual condition enhanc- ing the development of co-production. Design/methodology/approach – The method used was systematic literature review (SLR). Findings – As a result of the review, the catalog of solutions and tools offered by infor- mation and communication technologies was presented. The results of the research car- ried out indicate that the co-production of social services is favored by the use of such ICT tools as mobile applications, crowdsourcing, open data, big data, real-time data collection and analysis, gamification, and social media. Research implications/limitations – The main implication of the research is the com- prehensive catalog of ICT tools that can be used to facilitate social service co-production. ICT tools also favor the emergence of new forms of co-production; there-fore, the acquaintance of these tools can accelerate this process. The study is constrained by sev- eral limitations. The study is constrained by several limitations. First, applied methodol- ogy, which is qualitative, analyzes secondary data. Second, the co-production in the social services area includes many and various services, and ICT application and impact can differ by specific type of service. Originality/value/contribution – This paper contributes to research on the co-production of social services, particularly in terms of the use of new technologies in this process, in two ways. First, the development of the catalog of ICT tools favoring social service co-production. Their application fosters the involvement of contextual actors, increasing the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of social services. In this way, the social service co-production contributes to better addressing the citizens’ needs, increasing their quality of life and well-being, and unleashing their potential. Second, by taking the PSL perspective and situating factors favoring co-production within a service ecosystem framework, this paper draws attention to public value emerging from new relations, extensive dialogue, delibera- tion, common arrangements, and collaborative activity in virtual communities. Keywords: co-production, public services, social services, public management, ICT. JEL Classification: H41, H83, O33, O35, Z18.

A Comparative Analysis of Co-Production in Public Services

This study investigates current research trends in co-production studies and discusses conceptual approaches. The conceptual paper contains studies on co-production in the field of public administration. This study identifies significant gaps in the field of study by systematically examining 32 co-production research works. The study’s contributions include (1) defining two common characteristics of co-production, (2) classifying three forms of co-production by end-users, and (3) discovering that the aims and performance of co-production are more effective for service providers when the strategy is citizen-centric. Future research should (1) concentrate on the reasons for co-production failures or successes, (2) identify additional barriers to co-production in service production, (3) investigate influences on service providers as well as structural impacts on the co-production process, and (4) provide practical assessments of co-production research.

The cruel optimism of co-production

PurposeIn this paper, the author reflects on her researcher experiences of attempting to construct co-productive epistemic relations in her ethnographic doctoral research about a gallery youth collective. The paper engages with debates about the nature of co-productive relations, advocating for a more affective approach which attends to multiple, temporary moments within the research, rather than seeking a grand or unified process of collaboration.Design/methodology/approachThis methodological paper draws on the records and reflections the author generated in the process of undertaking collaborative ethnographic research, considered with a specific theoretical resource (Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)) to construct a reflexive narrative from her doctoral research experiences.FindingsThe paper discusses the multiple, shifting ways in which research relationships unfolded in the author's doctoral research and the impasse this generated in the author’s understanding of desirable co-productive relations. Reflecting with Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011) allowed the author to understand the Covid-19 crisis as the rupture of the author’s attachment to this relational fantasy. Beyond this rupture, the author was able to more fully attend to fleeting, affective moments as a form of co-production within the research.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the growing anthology of critical and reflexive narratives about co-production; these collectively provide a resource for researcher reflection and for teaching about collaborative practices.

The Application of \u2018Elite Interviewing\u2019 Methodology in Transdisciplinary Research: a Record of Process and Lessons Learned during a 3-Year Pilot in Urban Planetary Health Research

This paper sets out the rationale and process for the interviewing methodology utilized during a 3-year research pilot, ‘Moving Health Upstream in Urban Development’ (UPSTREAM). The project had two primary aims: firstly, to attempt to value economically the health cost benefits associated with the quality of urban environments and secondly, to engage with those in control of urban development in the UK in order to determine what are the barriers to and opportunities for creating healthy urban environments, including those identified through the utilisation of economic valuation. Engagement at senior level with those who have most control over key facets of planning and development implementation—such as land disposal, investment, development delivery and planning permission—was central to the approach, which encompassed the adoption of ‘elite interviewing’, a method developed in the USA in the 1950s and used in the political sciences but relatively unutilized in the health and environmental sciences [1]. Two rounds of semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 15 senior decision-makers from the UK’s main urban development delivery agencies, both public and private. The ‘elite interviewing’ approach successfully enabled the UPSTREAM project to capture and analyse the information received from the interviewees, all of whom held influential or leadership posts in organisations that are important actors in the process of planning, developing and constructing the built environment in the UK. Having academic and practitioner research leads on an equal footing created some minor tensions, but it also appeared to strengthen the rigor of the approach through a broad knowledge of context ‘in-house’. This form of co-production at times challenged academic traditions in qualitative analysis, but it also appeared to build trust with interviewees and provided greater clarity of the real-world context under investigation. Findings from this study are written up in a separate paper.

Enabling and Constraining Conditions for Co-production with Vulnerable Users: A Case Study of Refugee Services

ABSTRACT This article explores co-production as processes occurring at three levels: at the level of service interactions, at the organizational level, and at the system level. We propose next that two forms of co-production may take place at these three levels: co-production through direct participation and co-production through representation. We use these conceptualizations to outline a framework for analyzing conditions for co-production with vulnerable users, and we explore the applicability of the framework in the context of public services for refugees. Insights from the case are finally used as a basis for evoking more general discussions on co-production with vulnerable users.

RESEARCH ON THE COMMUNITY CO-PRODUCTION PRACTICES: A CASE STUDY OF LONDON AND CHANGSHA

Co-production, the process where the citizens and the government co-produce the public services, is an essential innovative model on national-social resources integration in the field of Public Administration, responding to the global fiscal austerity. Since the beginning of the 21st century, co-production has become the research hotspot abroad in such fields as urban governance, community governance, and urban planning. There is an absence of studies on the application of co-production in the community planning practices in China. Thus, in-depth exploration on the co-production valuing the whole-process participation is expected. After reviewing the domestic and foreign literature, the author first introduces the connotation of co-production, reviews its key theory implications, and then discusses the roles and forms of co-production in the community planning and community governance practices based on the case study of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and the Fengquan Gujing Community in Changsha City. The research comes up with three suggestions to the current problems in China’s community planning practices: 1) fostering the self-organizations by viewing “the producers as consumers”; 2) empowering communities with “content innovations”; and 3) encouraging value integration with inclusiveness of public values and private values.

Ageing and the Case of Democratic Medicine in Japan.

Aging populations present serious challenges to societies for the provision of care and support for their eldest members. These include increased demands on families for care at home, shortages of professional care workers and facilities, and financial strains on governmental budgets. However, these conditions also provide space for the elderly to adapt institutions to secure care and support. This essay examines the ways the elderly work through Min-Iren, a federation of medical institutions in Japan, to meet their needs. Premised on a "democratic" model of solidarity, Min-Iren institutional structure provides participating elderly substantial power to modify ostensibly medical institutions. Drawing from 18months of fieldwork, this essay ethnographically explores how the elderly refashion Min-Iren clinics and hospitals to offer venues for socializing, community building, and political action as well as conventional medical care. On the medical side, Min-Iren institutions enact a form of coproduction of health. However, interpreted from the perspective of social capital, Min-Iren institutions' forays into local social milieus resemble activities of civic organizations and foster social engagement, collective action, and social support. In the hands of the elderly, Min-Iren medical institutions, thus, endeavor to improve individual and neighborhood wellbeing in ways beyond medical care. Min-Iren's model that centers participation and local ownership is general and can be applied to other contexts.

Inclusion by Co-Production of Social Housing: The Slovak Experience

The field of social housing is one of many subjected to the potentials of co-production. Specifically, the Sustainable Development Goals target 11.1 is “By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums”. The current Slovak “State Housing Policy Concept to 2020”, among others, defines specific objectives, e.g. increasing or at least maintaining the same share of public expenditure on housing, introducing a new housing allowance, and supporting the development of the non-profit sector in housing provision. The goal of this article is to investigate to what extent co-production – as joint working of the public, private for profit and private not-for profit sectors – has the capacity to address the gap in the provision of social housing in the Slovak Republic. Using the method of case study, the scale and forms of co-production in social housing are investigated and the key factors and barriers of co-production in this area are analysed. The authors suggest that co-production of social housing is the most efficient method of delivery of social housing, improves sustainability, and helps to include the beneficiaries into society. However, this approach requires extra energy from the stakeholders – especially from public officials – and is thus still rarely used in practice.

Does citizen coproduction lead to better urban services in smart cities projects? An empirical study on e-participation in a mobile big data platform

With contemporary development of digital technology and smart cities initiatives, citizen co-production has created a new government-citizen interface. However, it remains inconclusive whether such citizen-government collaboration has achieved the fundamental goal of improving service quality for citizens. In this research, we tested the relationship between e-participation as a form of co-production and service performance, using multiple large longitudinal datasets from a smart city mobile platform. The results of the analysis show that citizen e-participation, in providing service feedback, is positively associated with the clearance rate of urban service requests in subdistrict service units, after controlling for various factors. We also found that the effect size of e-participation on service performance varies between different types of city services. E-participation has a stronger relative influence on complex problems that may involve multiple agencies, than with simple routine services.

The Dynamics of Co-Production in the Context of Social Care Personalisation: Testing Theory and Practice in a Scottish Context

AbstractIncreasing pressures on social systems have spurred innovations in service delivery models. One such innovation is an increased focus on co-production-based models of care, which focus on increased personal autonomy and service-user self-determination. However, there is little empirical evidence on how co-production interacts with other social policies, such as personalisation. This paper uses data from two qualitative case studies to explore the role of co-production for personalisation in the context of recent Scottish policy initiatives. We use Osborneet al.’s (2016) [‘Co-production and the co-creation of value in public services: a suitable case for treatment?’,Public Management Review, 18, 639–653] co-production matrix to understand what forms of co-production are used in personalisation, what factors act as drivers and barriers, how co-production relates to outcomes, and how co-production theory can inform social policy and legislative reform on personalisation.

Insularized Connectedness: Mobile Chat Applications and News Production

Focusing on recent political unrest in Hong Kong, this article examines how mobile chat applications (e.g., WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, Facebook Messenger and others) have permeated journalism. In Hong Kong, mobile chat apps have served as tools for foreign correspondents to follow stories, identify sources, and verify facts; they have also helped reporting teams manage large flows of multimedia information in real-time. To understand the institutional, technological, and cultural factors at play, this article draws on 34 interviews the author conducted with journalists who use mobile chat apps in their reporting. Building on the concept of media logic, the article explores technology-involved social interactions and their impact on media work, while acknowledging the agency of users and audiences within a cultural context. It argues that mobile chat apps have become hosts for a logic of connectedness and insularity in media work, and this has led to new forms of co-production in journalism.

Understanding co-production as a new public governance tool

ABSTRACTCo-production has become a buzzword for both scholars and practitioners in the past decade. This introduction to the thematic issue ‘Co-production: Implementation problems, new technologies and new designs’ unpacks the concept of co-production and illustrates how it has been operationalized on the ground in diverse country-specific contexts. To facilitate the analysis, we make a distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ forms of co-production, even though the practice has not really been around long enough to have established a tradition in the true sense of the word. However, these two distinct forms of co-production are highly useful conceptual lenses through which to view the finer details and nuances, to identify the enabling conditions and to foreshadow the governance challenges, but also to highlight the innovating role co-production plays in forging public services and public policies. Thanks to the rich and varied ways in which the contributors have approached this central topic; the thematic issue enables the research and practice to more fully appreciate the ins and outs of co-production and suggests the most promising directions for future study.

Co-production for innovation: the urban living lab experience

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are public spaces where local authorities engage citizens to develop innovative urban services. Their strength and popularity stem from a methodology based on open innovation, experimentation, and citizen engagement. Although the ULL methodology is supposed to largely adopt a co-production approach, connections between the two have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The paper seeks to fill this gap by examining through a qualitative analysis three experiences of ULLs made in Amsterdam, Boston and Turin. Specifically, the paper aims to assess whether ULLs can be really conceptualised as a form of co-production and, if so, which elements characterised them as innovative in comparison to ‘mainstreaming’ co-production; Then it analyses benefits and drawbacks related to their implementation.

Political Consumerism and Producerism inTimes of Crisis. A Social Movement Perspective

Local alternative consumerism practices supported by organized citizens seem to provide the only way to save small agro producers from economic failure. At the same time, organized small producers provide incentives to new forms of co-production. By relying on semi-structured and in depth interviews, a focus group, document analysis and participant observation, in this article, we show how Tuscan Solidarity Purchase Groups, together with producers, act in the context of the economic crisis, and how the crisis has influenced them. First, we show how organized political consumers and small producers are intensifying their relations to overcome the threats of the crisis. Secondly, we illustrate how these consumer-producer relations concretize in a co-production experience. Our case study shows that, in the adverse context of the economic crisis, local alternative consumerism practices can develop alternative processes through civic food networks and (re)discover radical forms of food democracy. That is they build a local Sustainable Community Movement.

Is Volunteering Always Voluntary? Between Compulsion and Coercion in Co-production

Governments are increasingly eager to involve citizens in co-production of services. They are seen as a substitution or a supplementary resource in service delivery. Citizens’ involvement relies heavily on their motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic drivers) to partake in co-production. Taking note from prior debate in the volunteerism literature, the article ties volunteer motivation to the process of co-production and citizen–state interaction. Here the state has contrastive options to motivate citizens’ behavior varying between compulsion and coercion. The question is how states’ increased engagement and interaction with volunteers affects volunteer motivation and free choice, the main characteristic of volunteerism. To exemplify this, we analyze the motivation behind state engagement in different forms of co-production: volunteering in rescue and police services and in a volunteer program for the unemployed in Estonia. We conclude that using citizens in co-production is rife with controversies that influence the very nature of volunteerism.

Stakeholder initiatives in flood risk management: exploring the role and impact of bottom-up initiatives in three ‘Room for the River’ projects in the Netherlands

In recent years stakeholder participation has become a popular topic in flood management. Little is known about how and under which circumstances local stakeholders initiate and develop successful flood management strategies and how governmental actors respond to them. Drawing on theories of social movements, stakeholder participation, and citizenship, this paper analyses how local stakeholder initiatives in the Dutch ‘Room for the River’ programme evolve and, in turn, influence such governmental plans and actions. The description and comparative analysis of the three cases leads to three conclusions: first, in all cases, forms of local self-organization play a role, but its impacts are highly dependent on the mix of strategies chosen. Second, forms of coproduction between local stakeholders and government actors are the most viable strategy to realize the positive impact of local initiatives. Third, government agencies tend to react to local initiatives defensively. Much depends on timing and connecting to the right people.

From Residential Facilities to Supported Housing: The Personal Health Budget Model as a Form of Coproduction

:During the deinstitutionalization process in Trieste, an array of different residential facilities were identified and used for different purposes in the course of time. They were integrated in the Mental Health Department and operated in close connection with 24-hour Community Mental Health Centres. Over the last decade, a steady decline in residential beds was achieved also thanks to the implementation of a health budget model in connection with a bespoke therapeutic rehabilitation program. The whole process was focused on reorganizing and transforming existing facilities and organizations to bring them closer to personal needs. Supported housing can be relevant to a recovery process, while the individual health budget has proven to be a crucial design tool shared by users and nonprofit organizations to engage community resources and services and enhance the social capital of people. Empirical data on personalized care projects for people with complex needs show the reconversion of resources from facilities to living environments and social networks, as well as a number of impacts on the overall system, which indicate a true process of coproduction.

THE BENEFITS AND RISKS OF EXPERIMENTAL CO‐PRODUCTION: THE CASE OF URBAN REDESIGN IN VIENNA

Building on the literature on co‐production and the (pragmatist) literature on experimentalist policy‐making we introduce and evaluate a novel form of co‐production: experimental co‐production. We propose a model of this specific form including a list of not only potential benefits but also possible risks and costs. We illustrate and examine this model of experimental co‐production by drawing on the case study of a major urban planning initiative in Vienna, Austria that included an experimental co‐testing phase. We find that while the expected benefits of experimental co‐production were partly realized for the citizens involved, the city government faced major political costs.

Time banks, co-production and foresight: intertwined towards an alternative future

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyse the emergence, operation and features of the time banks that were created during the recent financial crisis in Greece as grass-roots initiatives of different communities, and to examine their relation to the concept of “co-production” and possible relevance to foresight. Time banks are particularly interesting for the future of services: they address all sorts of services while the time-bank “value” of these different types of services does not necessarily reflect their actual value in the free market; impacts may spread from the mere coverage of people’s needs, to increased social capital and community empowerment; and some scholars consider them as flexible forms of co-production, or even as enablers of wider social change. The purpose of the paper is to examine the emergence, and features of the time banks created during the recent financial crisis in Greece as grass-roots initiatives.Design/methodology/approach– Primary information and data were gathered through eight extensive face-to-face interviews with key members of the four time banks based on a semi-structured questionnaire. The methodology also included desk research and review of the information included in time banks’ websites. The selection of these four time banks was based on the fact that they are the most active ones in Athens, which is the capital of the country gathering around 40 per cent of the Greek population and presenting the severest consequences of the financial crises in terms of unemployment, poverty, shutdown of businesses, share of people with no insurance, etc.Findings– Based on a specific analytical framework summarising the available literature, the Greek time banks are compared with each other but also in relation to the findings in the literature, where some interesting differences emerge. The paper also explores the role that foresight can plan in the development of alternative initiatives like time banks. The interesting conclusion is that foresight can help time banks as much as time banks can help foresight in upgrading its processes to deal with challenges of the twenty-first century.Research limitations/implications– The research focuses on the four most active time banks in Athens. While this selection is justified, future research would be good to include all the time banks in Greece.Social implications– The paper explores how time banks in Greece emerged as well as how they can further develop. This is of direct relevance to society as time banks are by default a community initiative.Originality/value– Time banks in Greece have not been previously studied. Second, time banks in general were never linked to approaches like foresight. This becomes increasingly important in examining possible approaches toward more sustainable and resilient societies.