Public Services Co-Production: Exploring the role of Citizen Orientation

Purpose Since the introduction of “New Public Management” in the 80s, public officials have focused on developing tools to increase citizen participation in services planning and provision. Many studies have underlined the benefits of involving citizens in policy-making in order to improve services quality, for example through the use of citizen surveys. Anyway despite recent advancements in co-production literature, the public sector is still lacking behind. A few studies have recently tried to investigate factors leading to public officials’ resistance in adopting this new practices and tools. Nonetheless these analyses tend to underline structural and objective antecedents (such as population size or the form of government) while largely ignoring the decision maker’s perspective. This has led to unconvincing results. This article aims to give two contributions to the debate mentioned above: 1) broaden the perspective of analysis by adopting public officials’ point of view and explore the role of attitudes and behaviors instead of external objective factors alone; 2) investigate the explanatory power of “citizen orientation”, which is constructed as a transposition of the well known customer orientation concept. This will allow to identify and analyze the role of internal and cultural factors, as well. Methodology/Approach A mail survey was conducted among a sample of Italian town mayors. 46 questionnaires were returned. Research limitation Results could have been influenced by the degree of New Public Management development within the specific research setting (Italian local government). Therefore attention should be paid when generalizing the results to different contexts. Originality and Value of the paper This paper analyzes the role of citizen orientation as a transposition of the customer orientation construct in order to explain public officials’ attitude toward co-production implementation within local government. This perspective complements the more common approaches based only on objective antecedents