ABSTRACT
As the various chapters within this book show the application of operational management theory to the public sector is not as some authors would attest oxymoronic. Neither does it necessarily support a neo-liberal stance whereby ‘efficient’ public services is a synonym for ‘smaller’ public services.Rather operational management theories can be utilised to explore mechanisms of efficiency which not only measure the monetary value of public services but also their social value. In this sense efficiency is based on the ability of the service to achieve a social aim with limited resources not simply on their ability to utilise less resources. Since at least the 1970s and almost certainly before that there has been a
widespread belief that the public sector would be improved by the implementation of private sector management techniques. To this end a host of new public management initiatives have been implemented each designed to meet perceived challenges to the public sector and each based on the concept that market orientated management of the public sector will lead to greater cost efficiency for governments (Ferlie et al., 1996; Hood, 1991). This has been done, mainly through introducing practices and programs, which
have been developed within industrial organisations.As a result the practices taken on by the public sector have had almost as an a priori assumption the traditional ‘goods logic’whereby an organisation’s economic model can be seen as the monetisation of an exchange of goods. Recently however academics have begun to view the creation of public services
through a service dominant logic perspective. Service dominant logic is predominantly a marketing theory which challenges the ‘goods logic’ by stressing exchange of intangible resources such as relationships and service value (Vargo and Lusch, 2008). More recently this argument has been applied to the provision of public services.Authors here understand citizens not simply as end-users of services but also as the creators of value. In this sense the role of the public sector is to facilitate resources and/or through interaction to collaboratively co-create value (Radnor et al., 2014;Virtanen and Stenvall, 2014; Osborne and Strokosch, 2013; Kaluza and Skålén, 2013).
