Are you researching shared services, procurement cooperatives, one-stop shops or e-government? Are you interested in public management reforms since the global financial crisis? If so, this call for papers may be of interest. We're looking for contributions to a new research agenda on how public organisations collaborate with one another in order to achieve efficiency gains. More details are below and in the attachment.
Collaborative Efficiency In Government: The Trend, The Implications
ECPR Joint Sessions, 24 - 28 April 2016, Pisa
Dr Thomas Elston, University of Oxford,
Prof Dr Koen Verhoest, University of Antwerp
Call for papers
The fiscal crisis has had a dramatic effect on public administration across Europe and the wider world. In attempting to re-balance budgets, governments of varying political hues have adopted strategies to reduce the size and cost of the state bureaucracy.
An emerging trend, which this Workshop shall explore, is the pursuit of collaborative efficiency measures in local, regional and national governments. These are reforms to organizational structures and processes that reduce operating costs through inter-organizational collaboration. Efficiencies result from the new economies of scale and scope, pooled investments, and professionalization that are made possible by joint working. Example reforms include (but are not limited to):
· Shared service centers and common processing units, where back-office (HR, finance) and middle-office (subsidy, audit) functions are grouped together and provided from a single platform to multiple organizations;
· Joint procurement arrangements, where multiple agencies collaborate to purchase common goods and services in order to secure bulk-buy discounts and reduce transaction costs;
· Infrastructure consolidation, where the same electronic service delivery platform is designed and used by multiple agencies for different purposes;
· And public service 'one-stop-shops' and front-line integration between entities.
· Similarly in many countries inter-municipal agencies and companies aim to pool activities in order to overcome the limited scale of the involved local authorities.
Collaborative efficiency measures often detach activities from their rightful organisations and re-cluster them in service-specific agencies. In part, this simply reverses the prior trend away from 'process'-based administrative design and toward autonomous organizations during the heyday of new public management. Yet, collaborative efficiency measures are extending into new areas of the public sector (e.g., municipal government); are involving new types of private sector collaboration; and often rest upon new forms of information technology. Thus, collaborative efficiency is an intriguing mix of old and new ideas about how best to manage government organizations, presenting many opportunities and challenges for new academic research.
A four-day workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions in April 2016 will examine these reforms, and we invite scholars working in public administration, organisation theory, political science and related disciplines to participate. The best papers will be included in a bid for a special issue on collaborative efficiency in a quality international public administration journal.
Topics that papers might examine include:
· The administrative doctrines that underpin collaborative efficiency reforms;
· Patterns of convergence and divergence within and between countries;
· The impact of collaborative efficiency upon organizational performance, efficiency, political control and accountability;
· The (co-)governance of collaborative efficiency arrangements by multiple actors, and the barriers to partnership working;
· The impact of collaborative efficiency upon organizational identity, autonomy, and reputational risks for the partner organizations.
Further details about the nature of collaborative efficiency reforms, suggested topics for conceptual and empirical research, and details of how to submit abstracts for review are provided in the attached detailed call for papers.
Deadline for paper proposals:
1st December 2015, online at http://ecpr.eu/Events/PanelList.aspx?EventID=101
Notification of successful authors:
Mid-January 2016
Contact the Co-Directors for further information:
thomas.elston@bsg.ox.ac.uk ; koen.verhoest@uantwerpen.be