23 research outputs found
Conceptualising Risk Assessment and Management across the Public Sector: From Theory to Practice
No full textRisk assessment and risk management are essential across the public sector to improve processes and outcomes. However, there is little clarity over what this actually means. This lack of understanding leads to a wide variation in risk assessment and management practice and to miscommunications of risk across professions, creating further barriers to interprofessional practice and co-creation of value across the public sector. Despite these challenges, there is a concurrent expectation that risk assessment and risk management be carried out across the sector to the highest standard, which inevitably becomes problematic. Conceptualising Risk Assessment and Management across the Public Sector explores concepts and applications of risk across the public sector to aid risk professionals in establishing a clearer understanding of what risk assessment and management is, how they might be unified across the sector, and how and where deviations across professions are needed. This book addresses these issues through providing a theory-informed discussion on the conceptualisations of risk, risk assessment, and risk management across the public sector, and through identifying where shared values and where differences exist across professions. Guidance on interprofessional risk practice and risk communication to overcome barriers is offered using a combination of theoretically underpinned approaches and exemplars from practice, presented to have broad applicability across the public sector rather than being siloed within a specific professional grouping or theoretical paradigm
Risk Management and Public Service Reform:Changing Governance and Funding Structures within School Education Services
No full textSchool education reform is a dynamic process. It takes place in the context of changing institutional structures including society, economy, politics, legislation, and technology. Yet, there can be poor awareness of risk, particularly social risk, and its management during this process and more widely, during public service reform (PSR). This book aims to promote new PSR understanding about social risk management. It utilizes in-depth case studies comprising two anonymous Scottish councils responsible for providing and reforming school education services.Drawing mainly on risk management and structuration theories with elements of complexity leadership and institutional theories, the book explains contextual issues around the reform of Scottish school education services (SSES). It illustrates that social risks associated with reform can be used to explain emerging threats. Furthermore, it demonstrates that agent-structure duality may be instrumental to the production and management of social risks. The book also shows how the concept of social risk can be used to improve policy making and implementation. Targeted at practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and students, this book will be of interest to those in the fields of public administration, public service management, and risk management more generally
Guest editorial: resilience in a post-pandemic world – has anything changed?
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Exploring implementation affordances and constraints in street-level managerial practice across two policy domains:Learning from the implementation of Scottish Government policy initiatives in School Education, and Health and Social Care Integration.
No full textDespite unremitting policy initiatives and implementation efforts in Scotland aimed at tackling inequalities, there remain ‘thin’ insights into how they are enacted. Beyond broad descriptions of the contexts within which practitioners apply their judgements, and the processes and structures that seem to assist, granular insights into the daily work of implementing these kinds of policies can better illuminate the situated effects when policy meets practice. Based on two studies undertaken in 2016-17, this paper explores the situated implementation of two policies, the Scottish Attainment Challenge (SAC) for school education and Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI). The first study, based on interviews and document analysis, considers how the implementation of the SAC, a policy underpinned by managerial reform, aimed to reduce the enduring poverty-related school education attainment gap (Audit Scotland 2021). Educationalists from two Scottish Councils, identified stakeholder engagement, leadership, and risk management as key to enabling and/or constraining street-level managerial reforms associated with the SAC. Overall, the findings indicated social risks may inadvertently be amplified due to exclusions, inequality, or poor learning outcomes or have no notable impact on attainment levels.The second ethnographic study focuses on the efforts of NHS and Local Council managers as they implemented HSCI according to the precepts of the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014; working to reconfigure and hold things together in everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance and operations. It shows how policy implementation by managers was imbricated and enacted through everyday practices. It introduces the concept of repair - the repetitive actions and relational manoeuvring working to both generate change and stability. It highlights that despite legislation and manager’s efforts, there was resistance to limit the breadth and depth of HSCI, hindering the re-organising of organisational borders despite a care system under considerable stress.Informed by street-level bureaucracy, as the effects of policy implementation found in how front-line practitioners in public services enact policy in their routine work (Hupe and Hill 2007), ‘shaped during … daily encounters’ (Lipsky 1983: XII), we contrast these two policy interventions to share how policies were enacted in particular places and times. We consider what it might tell us about how situated implementation is practiced, as historically contingent, mediated by discourse and material conditions. We show what it entailed, revealing what enables street-level managers to maintain what might be considered inconsistent modes of action as they manoeuvre daily, implementing Scottish Government legislative and policy direction. Lastly, we assess the implications this has for understanding the effects of public management on street-level managers in Scotland
Integrative leadership in complex adaptive systems:a multi-modal analysis of strategic decision-making processes
Get PDFThis study examines the relationship between integrative leadership and strategic outcomes in complex adaptive systems. We aim to develop a theoretical framework that explains how leadership practices influence organizational adaptability in turbulent environments and provide practical guidance for organizational leaders. We employed a multi-modal methodology combining systematic meta-analysis of 87 empirical studies (2010-2025) with multi-level network analysis of six multinational organizations. This approach enabled triangulation across different data sources and analytical techniques to comprehensively map leadership-strategy dynamics across diverse organizational contexts. We identified six mechanisms through which leadership and strategy co-evolve: collective sensemaking, adaptive tension management, network reconfiguration, paradoxical integration, distributed cognition, and temporal synchronization. Network analysis revealed three distinct leadership-strategy configurations, with distributed-integrated networks demonstrating superior adaptive capacity. Organizations with moderate centralization, high cross-level connectivity, and dense middle management clusters exhibited 37% higher adaptive performance. Our sample focused on large multinational organizations, potentially limiting generalizability to smaller entities or different cultural contexts. Future research should examine leadership-strategy dynamics in diverse organizational types, entrepreneurial ventures, and ecosystem contexts. For practitioners, we provide actionable guidance for developing leadership systems that enhance strategic adaptability, including recommendations for leadership development, organizational design, and strategic decision-making processes that enable simultaneous exploration and exploitation in complex environments. In enhancing organizational adaptability, our framework contributes to organizational sustainability and resilience, potentially enabling more effective responses to societal challenges and promoting stable employment during periods of disruption and change. This study transcends traditional dichotomies between leadership and strategy by empirically mapping their co-evolution within complex adaptive systems, offering the novel concept of "network fluidity" as a critical capability for strategic adaptation in volatile environments
Defining and assessing vulnerability within law enforcement and public health organisations: a scoping review
Get PDFAbstract Background Historically, police departments focused solely on criminal justice issues. Recently, there has been a dynamic shift in focus, with Law Enforcement professional groups assuming more responsibility for tackling mental health and distress-related issues (that may arise because of mental health related problems and learning disabilities) alongside Public Health departments. While Law Enforcement has become a ‘last line of support’ and an increasing partner in mental health support, there is partnership working between law enforcement, psychology, and health professions in training and mental health service delivery. The term vulnerability is frequently used across Law Enforcement and Public Health (LEPH) to identify those in need of these services. Effective vulnerability assessment is therefore expected to prevent unintentional harmful health and criminal justice consequences and manage the negative impact of such in cases where prevention is not possible. This scoping review aimed to identify how vulnerability is defined and assessed across LEPH organisations. Results Vulnerability is context-specific from a Law Enforcement perspective, and person-specific from a Public Health perspective. Definitions of vulnerability are at best fragmented, while models for assessing vulnerability lack uniformity across LEPH. The implications are two-fold. For “vulnerable groups”, the lack of an evidence-based definition and assessment model could prevent access to relevant LEPH services, exacerbating issues of multiple vulnerabilities, co-morbidity, and/or dual diagnosis. All could inadvertently enable social exclusion of vulnerable groups from political discourse and policy interventions. The lack of consistency regarding vulnerability may result in reactive crisis responses as opposed to proactive preventative measures. Conclusions This scoping review exposes the complexities associated with defining and assessing vulnerability from a LEPH perspective, which are perceived and prioritised differently across the organizations. Future research must bridge this gap. Building on the establishment of a definition of vulnerability within the empirical literature, researchers ought to engage with service users, LEPH staff, and those engaged in policy making to craft effective vulnerability definitions and assessment models. Only through evidence based, co-produced definitions and assessment models for vulnerability can we ensure that best-practice, but also meaningful and feasible practice, in vulnerability assessment can be achieved
Implementing New Funding and Governance Structures in Scottish Schools: Associated Social Risks
Get PDFIMPACT: This article assesses possible unintended consequences of a targeted funding model for school education by analysing a Scottish Government policy operationalized via the Pupil Equity Fund (PEF) allocated directly to Scottish schools. Analysis herein reveals implementation of new funding and governance structures within school education may introduce social risks and, in particular, that a targeted policy approach can frustrate a holistic approach and thereby constrain achievement of intended policy objectives. This analysis utilizes a unique read-across between disciplines and contributes to the study of policy-making in public services by exploring contextual risk management frameworks with that of school improvement. ABSTRACT: This article examines the implementation of new school funding governance structures and their interaction with social risks, especially reductionism. It extends ongoing discussion in Public Money & Management on risk governance during public service change. It finds case study evidence of reductionism and recommends its management and mitigation through contextually customized policy implementation—holistic in approach and incorporating stakeholders’ input. In so doing, school education services can function as complex adaptive systems proactively responding to social risks.</p
Identifying influencing factors of sustainable public service transformation: a systematic literature review
Get PDFThis article continues the conversation on public service innovation and transformation in the International Review of Administrative Sciences. Political, socio-economic and technological changes drive public service transformation in rendering current service delivery models increasingly ineffective. However, public service transformation introduces risks. This article finds a paucity of academic research into those risks, highlighting need for their management. The key conclusion is that risk management, leadership and public participation can facilitate or hinder public service transformation
