This paper is set against the backdrop of a comprehensive nationwide reform encompassing all social and health services in Finland. Since the beginning of 2023, these services have been organized by well-being services counties (WSC). The reform encompasses both structural and functional aspects, which underscores its ambitious aim to transform the underlying framework of the nation’s welfare services. While there are high expectations for the integration of services, less attention has been paid to the flip side of integration, specifically the gaps the reform might give rise to. The WSCs have broad responsibilities, but municipalities will continue to bear responsibilities in the future that require cross-organizational and administrative collaboration.

In this paper, student welfare is used as an illustrative example. Student welfare is work conducted in schools and educational institutions that promotes, maintains, and creates conditions for the student’s learning, mental and physical health, and social well-being. In the reform, student welfare remains under the jurisdiction of municipalities, but some of its professionals have transferred to WSCs. Consequently, there is a risk that instead of providing broader support, the administrative reform may create new chasms or deepen existing ones, hindering collaboration between professionals in the fields of education and social and health services. The reform could thus disrupt informal collaboration among street-level bureaucrats.

Using mixed methods and empirical data from documents, a survey and a Delphi expert panel, the paper answers the following question: How do various forms of tension manifest in the professional collaboration of street-level bureaucrats in student welfare, and how do those tensions influence the alignment or divergence of student welfare from their intended outcomes as outlined in the reform legislation?

The paper contributes to research in several ways. Firstly, it deepens the understanding of the implementation of reforms by framing professional collaboration in student welfare as a tension-laden activity. This perspective increases understanding of the realities of implementing reforms, moving beyond the simplistic view of top-down and bottom-up processes. Instead, it focuses on the everyday tensions that arise in practice. The paper demonstrates how implementation is not merely the execution of policy but its continuation through different means. Secondly, the paper enriches research on street-level bureaucracy by exploring it from the viewpoint of professional collaboration. Encounters with children, adolescents, and their guardians in the context of student welfare inevitably involve multiple professions. This approach highlights the complexities and challenges faced by street-level bureaucrats in providing holistic and effective services, emphasizing the importance of professional collaboration dynamics in shaping these encounters. Third, the majority of studies on the implementation of reforms have been conducted retrospectively. While understandable, this approach could create issues around losing sight of the dynamics during implementation. This study utilizes data from the preparation phase of the reform legislation and materials shedding light on its preparation. Finally, the paper provides insights into the managerial implications of balancing various forms of tension. Drawing on the literature, it discusses the both-and and more-than approaches.

Relevance

Service dominant mindset views service users as active participants in service co-creation (e.g. Eriksson et al. 2022). More importantly, it emphasises the value of the service being the value service users gain in the process. From this perspective, the value of public services is created in the life of the service user, both enabled by the process of using the services and as a desired result (Osborne et al. 2022). Thus, public services are not perceived as standalone value creators; instead, they provide an opportunity for value co-creation among various stakeholders (Grönroos & Voima 2013; Rossi & Tuurnas 2021).

Professionals bear the responsibility of translating abstract operational approaches into tangible services and outcomes. By direct collaboration to meet service user needs and demands, this everyday interaction shapes the quality, efficiency and legitimacy of public services. Therefore, service professionals have a significant impact on the lives of service users they interact and co-create both personal and public value with.

Significance

Value creation for individuals, stakeholders, and organisations is believed to primarily stem from service interactions. However, the scholarly understanding of the roles played by service professionals, civil servants, and other street-level bureaucrats in value co-creation remains limited. For example, public service logic (PSL) sees the value experienced by individuals as central, but it has been criticized for taking too little interest in the importance of the roles of service professionals (Kinder & Stenvall 2023). Professionals utilise different roles (Maijala et. al. 2024, unpublished), skills and motives in the value co-creation process (Knox & Arshed 2023) to meet the challenges in public service provision. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how these professionals implement and develop public policies and services (Hupe 2022). To uncover this understanding this paper poses the question: How do public service organisations, stakeholders, and professionals perceive the roles of public service professionals in value co-creation?

Method

This paper reviews the empirical data collected with thematic interviews (n=56) from Finnish public service organisations Kela (The Social Insurance Institution of Finland) and three Wellbeing Services Counties. The interviews aimed to reveal the current state and the future steps needed to make public services more service-oriented and valuable for service users. The data is reviewed qualitatively with abductive content analysis and aims to find both similarities and differences in the roles of public service professionals formed in the previous literature review -article by the authors (Maijala et. al. 2024, unpublished).

Contribution

This paper contributes to the existing knowledge on the roles of public service professionals in value co-creation. For example, in wellbeing services the boundary spanning operations of professionals are seen to ensure value co-creation on multiple levels of the public service ecosystem, whereas in scientific literature collaborative efforts with the service users are more emphasised. In public services, value is not solely defined by service users' preferences but also incorporates considerations of social fairness and equity. The comprehension of tensions, and power-balance between service users and professionals, has the potential to develop service encounters and their assessment methods, but also to recognise and identify power relation issues in cross-boundary value co-creation within public services. As a continuum, one of the interests throughout the paper is the notion of whether it is possible to create public value through the value co-creation processes in service encounters.

In a context where public services are often managed in a complex mix of hierarchy, market-based and network-like services, this paper examines the role that public professionals and their leaders play in co-creation projects in European countries. Co-creation can be defined as ‘a process through which two or more public and private actors attempt to solve a shared problem, challenge, or task through a constructive exchange of different kinds of knowledge, resources, competencies, and ideas’ (Torfing et al . al. 2019, p. 802). An important feature of co-creation is the direct involvement of 'users' in formulating policy and/or delivering services (Pollitt, 2003).

Public professionals, especially those in direct contact with citizens and other stakeholders, are crucial actors in co-creation given their traditional position in balancing policy with the needs of the communities they serve (Dent et al. 2016; Lipsky 1980 ). Yet literature highlights the differences between what is required of officials at street level, and what is offered to them in terms of conditions in the meso and macro context (Hupe and Buffat 2014) and public leaders are crucial at the organizational – and policy levels in making decisions about the regulatory, financial and operational conditions. This paper discusses what is needed from public professionals and their leaders to create the conditions for co-creation in street-level public services.

The paper builds on a work package as part of the EU H2020 COGOV project (2018-2022). Our study included three parts:

- A large literature review was conducted into models for public management and related roles of street-level professionals. It showed that successive reforms have resulted in hybrid role requirements for street-level professionals, beyond the often discussed dichotomy between professionals and management, and to new requirements for professional skills in co-creation.

- We also investigated fourteen selected cases of co-creation in six countries in Europe, together with our partners in the project. The data is based on 15 group interviews with 107 professionals and interviews with 26 public managers. We found, among other things, that despite the many differences between cases and countries, professionals often encounter remarkably similar barriers in co-creation, related to public leadership and vertical organizational structures.

- This led to suggestions for public leaders in four key areas to improve the conditions for co-creation: building legitimacy, promoting co-creation design, organizing accountability and anchoring innovation.

In this paper we bring together our research results and contribute to the literature and practice of public services and street-level professionals. First, we increase the still limited knowledge of co-creation attempts through a comparative analysis in different legal systems and policy areas. Second, although co-creation and collaborative networks are seen in our research as useful and influential in addressing public problems, we also point out the problematic aspects, such as the tensions with formal democracy and traditional public organization and the focus on processes ('input legitimacy') instead of outcomes ('output legitimacy'). A third contribution concerns insight into what is needed to condition the implementation of co-creation in practice.

In recent decades, third-sector organizations (TSOs) have increasingly contributed to public service delivery. Emerging relational contracting arrangements reflect partnerships where state-TSO contracts are open-ended and adaptive, based on joint deliberation, shared commitment, and trust. This study explores relational contracting from a street-level perspective, focusing on the daily decisions and practices involved in direct service delivery, termed street-level partnerships. Analyzing eight social services for at-risk families in Croatia, with data from over 100 stakeholders through focus groups, interviews, and workshops, reveals that state-third sector partnerships are largely shaped by the actions of street-level managers and workers. Findings show that government agencies often leave many aspects of service provision to be calibrated at the direct-delivery level.

Our analysis identifies four core components in the calibration of street-level partnerships: Design and Evaluation, which involve periodic activities at the start or end of the collaboration cycle, and Direct Delivery and Partnership Infrastructure, which represent ongoing activities. Design involves selecting partners and calibrating relational contracts, alongside specifying service details. Street-level managers from both state and third-sector organizations engage in structuring implementation, which includes designing and signing collaboration protocols, appointing coordinators, and establishing decision-making bodies. Direct Delivery includes referring users while co-designing service plans, coordinating day-to-day decisions through established channels, and sharing documentation. In the course of Direct Delivery, the spirit of partnership is further strengthened by informal practices, such as taking immediate action and formalizing it later or going the extra mile for users.

Evaluation and quality control are driven by both structured and informal activities. Formally, this includes defining evaluation tools, exchanging reports, licensing services, and ensuring commitments are met. Informally, street-level managers and workers share insights from past collaborations and conduct performance checks to foster continuous improvement. Finally, the infrastructure in street-level partnerships is sustained through informal practices and attitudes that build trust and reciprocity. These attitudes include appreciating each other’s contributions, fostering a shared professional identity, and understanding each other’s organizational logics. Additionally, key practices involve cultivating friendly, informal connections between professionals from both state and third-sector organizations and mutually providing free employee development and resources.

The calibration of relational contracts through street-level partnerships thus involves a dynamic interplay of formality and informality, requiring effective collaboration between both managers and workers from state agencies and TSOs.

Despite increased political interest in the whole-of-society approach to security, few defense studies have identified total defense, including the so-called will to defend, as their primary research focus. This leaves the complicated nature of resilience underexplored. Academic literature often fails to address the complexities of mobilizing a vast range of public- and private-sector individuals to perform emergency services during crises and wars – an issue that is of significant concern to security planners and policymakers. This article seeks to fill that gap through a qualitative thematic analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews with leaders in public and private organizations that form a governance network for crisis management. The interview analysis highlights coordination and cooperation challenges in total defense, potentially affecting the effective delivery of public services by public and private organizations during extreme crises. In this paper, I explore how joint public-private service delivery can effectively address these challenges by adopting a Promethean approach.