IMPROVEMENT AND PUBLIC SERVICE RELATIONSHIPS: CULTURAL THEORY AND INSTITUTIONAL WORK
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12257 |
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| Author | RICHARD SIMMONS |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12257
IMPROVEMENT AND PUBLIC SERVICE
RELATIONSHIPS: CULTURAL THEORY
AND INSTITUTIONAL WORK
RICHARD SIMMONS
This article examines the inuence of cultural-institutional factors on user–provider relationships
in public services. Using Grid-Group Cultural Theory (CT) as a way to structure the complexity of
public service relationships, the article considers the extent to which public services are attuned to
users’ relational concerns. This analysis shows particular tensions between how users think the ser-
vice ‘should be’ compared with how they think the service ‘actually is’. Additional study evidence
is used to assess these ndings; in particular,the effects of different patterns of compatibility on both
the perceived quality of public service relationships and the value added by this. Finally, relation-
ships between ‘good opportunities’ for user voice and the above results are discussed. In response,
opportunities for improvement are identied (within the institutional work done by public service
organizations), and the implications for the relative value of CT analysis are discussed.
INTRODUCTION
This article considers how more positive and productive relationships might be con-
structed between the users and providers of public services. It argues that such
relationships are an important, but currently under-emphasized, feature of public admin-
istration. Using Grid-Group Cultural Theory (CT) as a way to structure the complexity
of public service relationships, the article examines whether the cultural-institutional
arrangements in different empirical settings are congruent or dissonant with the patterns
of social relations that matter most to service users.
While there have been indications of a sense of disconnection and disengagement for
some time in the broader public sphere (e.g. Marquand 2004; Power Inquiry 2006; Lee and
Young 2013), this article focuses on how similar issues are experienced in the organiza-
tional domain. There remain tensions here in public service relationships. Factors such
as bureaucratic paternalism (in which agencies are closed toward the views of users);
target cultures (in which relational concerns are rarely prioritized or measured); and a
focus on managerialism and public relations (in which relational concerns are technicized
and/or massaged away) have often left users feeling depersonalized and disempowered
(e.g. Skelcher 1993; Power Inquiry 2006). Even trends towards the ‘personalization’ of pub-
lic services have, in practice, focused more on the transfer of risk than on the quality of
user–provider interactions (Needham 2011). This is despite long-standing pressures on
UK public service leaders to engage more effectively with users (Stoker 1997; Newman
2001).
Recently,this has led to calls for a more ‘relational state’ that prioritizes ‘deeper’ service
relationships rather than ‘shallow transactions’ (Clark et al. 2014; Muir and Parker 2014).
This resonates with the increasing pursuit, particularly but not exclusively in health and
social care, of a more ‘person-centred’ approach to public services (e.g. Entwistle and Watt
2013; Murphy et al. 2013), with concomitant prescriptions for practice (e.g. Francis 2013;
Kings Fund 2013). This leaves an important question of how more positive and productive
relationships might be constructed between service users and providers (Simmons 2011).
Richard Simmons is at the School of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (933–952)
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
934 RICHARD SIMMONS
Patterns of social relations
This article examines the extent to which public services are attuned to the users of the
service, and whether the patterns of social relations that matter most to service users are
supported in the public service cultures they encounter. In this, the article acknowledges
the importance of exchanges at the intersection of ideas and institutions. Institutional the-
ories can help explain why public service organizations act as they do, and why these
organizations are more or less susceptible to user voice. However, they are less helpful
in determining the substantive nature of service users’ demands, or the projects that con-
nect these demands with their particular preferred solutions (Lieberman 2002). Ideational
perspectives provide a way to frame these issues and distil the key ideas of concern to
different actors (Suddaby 2010).
The article seeks to establish the extent of compatibility between users’ perspectives
about what patterns of social relations are present within public service elds of relation-
ships, and what patterns are desired. It asks what happens when these patterns settle in
ways that create relational conditions of relative consent and congruence, rather than those
of relative dissent and dissonance (Simmons 2011). Aremore positive and productive con-
texts created, for example?
Relational concerns, institutional work and cultural innovation
Notions of a more ‘relational state’ link with others, such as relational justice, relational
satisfaction and relational morality.Relational justice refers to the quality of interpersonal
treatment associated with decision-making (e.g. Bies and Shapiro 1988; Greenberg 1990):
People expect to be listened to, to be respected, to be taken seriously and to have the opportunity to correct
relational injustices when they occur …[Their] experiences of relational satisfaction are constructed in part
from conformity with these informal agreements …[while] accounts of relational betrayal are typically related
using language that is colourful and bitter. (Waldron 2000, p. 71; emphasis added)
This prompts consideration of normative considerations of relational morality, whereby
such factors as close proximity, forced interdependence and vulnerability to abuses of
power may require users to develop with providers an unwritten code of relational ethics
to supplement formal rules (Waldron 2000). This has particular resonance for public ser-
vices with relatively frequent human interactions and inter-dependencies, such as those
examined in this article.
Incompatibilities can frustrate users’ ‘projects’ as they work against the grain of dom-
inant norms, beliefs and practices (Archer 2000). Yet where users’ perspectives offer a
successful challenge to these phenomena, they may also help rejuvenate and increase the
viability of the system (Albury 2005; Bason 2010). Hence, rather than eliminating conict
altogether, it may be that a key task for the governance and delivery of public services is
to successfully ‘manage these contradictions and incongruences’ (Cameron and Freeman
1991, p. 53).
In doing so, notions of ‘institutional work’ are important. Institutional work has been
dened as ‘the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, main-
taining and disrupting institutions’ (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006, p. 215). Cloutier et al.
(2016) develop these ideas for public service organizations, dening ‘structural’, ‘concep-
tual’, ‘operational’ and ‘relational’ components of institutional work. Specically, they
identify an important role for relational work in ‘gluing together’ the other three forms,
and helping public service organizations navigate pluralism and contradiction between
stakeholder groups (Cloutier et al. 2016, p. 270). This may involve notions of cultural
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (933–952)
© 2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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