Session Information
26 SES 03 B, School Leadership and Inclusive Education: Future Perspectives
Paper Session
Contribution
Co-creation is increasingly applied across European welfare states as a strategy to involve citizens as participants in active collaboration with public service-organizations, to facilitate public innovation, and thereby to improve the effectiveness and quality of public services, (Ansell & Torfing, 2021; Osborne, 2006; Osborne et al., 2021). Co-creation strategies are also adopted to address the policy issues of inclusive education (Heimburg & Ness, 2020). Inclusive education is here viewed as a multidimensional concept (Qvortrup & Qvortrup, 2018). Child well-being is unequally distributed, and research demonstrate the failure of public services to address the needs of children experiencing compound social problems (Casas & Frønes, 2020). The adaption of co-creation strategies to realize inclusive education thus illustrate what Wermke (2020) with reference to Prøitz, calls the policy-practices-nexus in the translation of inclusion from policy to practices. Educational leaders are under pressure to improve the quality and co-ordination of seamless childhood service, and co-creation becomes a new governance strategy through which to organize child-welfare services. Thus educational leaders face new expectations to co-operate, across hierarchical lines and service organizations, to manage such processes of co-creation. There is thus a need to strengthen the research on how educational leaders at different levels experience and handle such new emerging local governance contexts (Prøitz, 2021).
There is no common definition of co-creation, and the literature frequently refers to it as a buzz-word or ‘magic concept’, implying it represents a normatively loaded management strategy with near universal applicability to solve social problems (Voorberg et al., 2015). This leaves great leverage for local agents regarding how co-creation is implemented as a strategy in organizations. There is an emerging research field documenting divergent results from the adoption of co-creation models for local welfare service production (Brandsen et al., 2018; Bussu & Tullia Galanti, 2018). Organisational and institutional barriers to success are frequently interpreted to result from tensions between institutional logics or multiple stakeholder interests (Steen et al., 2018). Studies also demonstrate challenges to professional identities, autonomy, responsibility, and power relations within organizations (Aschhoff & Vogel, 2019; Mik-Meyer, 2017; Prøitz, 2021). There are though few studies investigating how educational leaders experience the adaption of co-creation strategies in the work for inclusive education.
The research question addressed it the paper are: How do municipal educational leaders interpret and manage their leadership roles under new local governance strategies of co-creation for inclusive education?
Theoretically the paper is informed by theories of institutional logics (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Ocasio et al., 2017), sensemaking in organizations (Weick, 1995) and institutionalized selves (Gubrium et al., 2001). The analyses explore the potential tensions and conflicts between different institutional logics as recognised and specified at the meso- and micro level of organisations. This theoretical frame is extended with interpretive theories of sensemaking (Weick, 1995), and the concept of institutionalized selves (Gubrium et al., 2001), developed from Goffman’s symbolic interactionism. Mik-Meyers (2017) shows the need to investigate how changes in the institutionalised expectations of public managers, as related to new governance regimes, may influence their perception of professional roles and identities. She argues that agency of professional welfare workers profoundly “reflect the ways in which the work is organized, their respective professional approaches, the legislation of the particular welfare area, and other structural aspects of work” (Mik-Meyer, 2017, p. 45). Institutional changes and new demands may further influence power relations, altering the hierarchies of professional groups in the organisation; and how professionals make sense of their leverage, autonomy, and responsibilities under the adaptation of a new governance regime.
Method
The analyses are based on qualitative data from two different projects. The first is a case study of the organisation of schools and welfare services in a medium-large Norwegian municipality. The case represents a highly progressive example of the adaption of co-creation for inclusive education and childhood services. A new local governance strategy for the educational sector was launched as an explicit attempt to advance a new governing model of co-creation for an inclusive education. The analyses draw on a total of 22 qualitative interviews with employees in the case municipality in the period 2019 – 2020, where they reflect upon their leadership roles and expectations. The educational leaders represent different leadership roles at various levels of the municipal administration and within schools, including the strategic level, superintendent, school principals, and managers of special needs education services. In addition, the paper draws on four group interviews conducted as part of an action-research project following one concrete case of the application of co-creation within the same municipality. These group interviews were conducted with employees working as project managers, consultants, and co-workers at different levels and in different departments of the municipal administration related to educational governance, special needs education services, child welfare services, and school health services. The analyses of interviews are supplemented by analyses of selected strategic documents from the case municipality, as a backdrop to understand the ideals and policy goals for the new local governance strategy. Qualitative thematic analyses were carried out using NVivo. The analytical strategy was one of abduction, as I moved between more inductive empirical, interpretive analyses of interview transcripts, and theoretically developed codes.
Expected Outcomes
Preliminary findings: The application of co-creation models in the public service organisations demonstrate the potential to strengthen a child-centred perspective in childhood services to promote inclusion and well-being among vulnerable children. The strategies aim to build organisational flexibility and leverage to co-ordinate services to meet the need of children with complex multifaceted challenges. If co-creation strategies are to generate lasting effects in terms of how to organise inclusive education, it requires efforts to institutionalise horizontal co-operation between the relevant organisational units. There is uncertainty as to how the strategy may be implemented and aligned with existing bureaucratic routines and institutionalized requirements. There is a also risk that existing front-line professional work and bottom-up processes which analytically can be recognized as co-creation, are not recognised as such, as they are not explicitly connected to the official strategical plans of co-creation. Loose coupling between the strategic level and the front line in the organisation thus generates a risk of not recognising the potential of co-creation in day-to-day practices and routines. Successful co-creation thus requires the careful management of education leaders of such iterative processes of professional front line work, to align these with the strategic plans and aims. The aim to re-define existing structures of accountability in line with new governance ideals, also increase uncertainty among educational leaders, in terms unclear goals, and uncertainties in how to prioritise between different actions and decisions demanded by an increasingly complex structure of organisational goals. The strategy presumes great flexibility and leverage in the organisation, but exists in organisational tension with bureaucratic control routines, divisions of labour, and routine work to ensure compliance with rule-based regulations. This tension is intensified as professional groups feel their status threatened by professional dilution and new organizational roles, changing the expectations of educational leaders at different levels.
References
Ansell, C., & Torfing, J. (2021). Public Governance as Co-creation: A Strategy for Revitalizing the Public Sector and Rejuvenating Democracy. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108765381 Aschhoff, N., & Vogel, R. (2019). Something old, something new, something borrowed: Explaining varieties of professionalism in citizen collaboration through identity theory. Public Administration, 97(3), 703–720. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12589 Brandsen, T., Steen, T., & Verschuere, B. (2018). Co-Creation and Co-Production in Public Services: Urgent Issues in Practice and Research. In T. Brandsen, et.al (Eds.), Co-production and co-creation: Engaging citizens in public services (pp. 3–8). Routledge; Scopus. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315204956 Bussu, S., & Tullia Galanti, M. (2018). Facilitating coproduction: The role of leadership in coproduction initiatives in the UK. Policy and Society, 37(3), 347–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2018.1414355 Casas, F., & Frønes, I. (2020). From snapshots to complex continuity: Making sense of the multifaceted concept of child well-being. Childhood, 27(2), 188–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219895809 Friedland, R., & Alford, R. R. (1991). Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions. In W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (Eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (pp. 232–267). University of Chicago Press. Gubrium, J. F., et al. (2001). Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World. Oxford University Press. Heimburg, D., & Ness, O. (2020). Relational Welfare: A socially just response to co-creating health and well-being for all. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1177/1403494820970815 Mik-Meyer, N. (2017). The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters: The influence of bureaucracy, market and psychology (1st ed.). University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18b5fh1 Ocasio, W., Thornton, P. H., & Lounsbury, M. (2017). Advances to the Institutional Logics Perspective. In The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 509–531). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526415066 Osborne, S. P. (2006). The New Public Governance? Public Management Review, 8(3), 377–387. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030600853022 Prøitz, T. (2021). Styring og støtte i moderne governance – samverkan för bästa skola. Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, 26(1), 126–132. https://doi.org/10.15626/pfs26.01.06 Steen, T., Brandsen, T., & Verschuere, B. (2018). The Dark Side of Co-Creation and Co-Production: Seven Evils. In Co-Production and Co-Creation. Routledge. Voorberg, W. H., et.al. (2015). A Systematic Review of Co-Creation and Co-Production: Embarking on the social innovation journey. Public Management Review, 17(9), 1333–1357. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2014.930505 Wermke, W., et.al (2020). ‘A school for all’ in the policy and practice nexus: Comparing ‘doing inclusion’ in different contexts. Introduction to the special issue. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 6(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2020.1743105
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