Search results

New Public Management (NPM) has increased fragmentation in municipal health and social care organizations. In response, post-NPM reforms aim to enhance integration through service integration. Integration of municipal services is important for people with complex health and social challenges, such as concurrent substance abuse and mental health problems. This article explores the conditions for service integration in municipal health and social services by studying how public management values influence organizational and financial structures and professional practices.

This is a case study with three Norwegian municipalities as case organizations. The study draws on observations of interprofessional and interagency meetings and in-depth interviews with professionals and managers. The empirical field is municipal services for people with concurrent substance abuse and mental health challenges. The data were analyzed both inductively and deductively.

The study reveals that opportunities to assess, allocate and deliver integrated services were limited due to organizational and financial structures as the most important aim was to meet the financial goals. The authors also find that economic and frugal values in NPM doctrines impede service integration. Municipalities with integrative values in organizational and financial structures and in professional approaches have greater opportunities to succeed in integrating services.

Applying a public management value perspective, this study finds that the values on which organizational and financial structures and professional practices are based are decisive in enabling and constraining service integration.

Marit Kristine Ådland is a Ph.D. student at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science. Her research interests and activity is within knowledge organization, information behavior, information retrieval, and information architecture. Her current research explores users’ tags and tagging behavior in the field of cancer information. She teaches classification and indexing to students training in librarianship.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore whether and how social tagging can be useful in an information web site for cancer patients and their relatives.

Methodology/approach – Three studies have been carried out in order to investigate the research questions. First, we reviewed and analyzed literature about cancer patients’ information needs and seeking behavior, and about social tagging and patient terminology. Second, we analyzed tags applied to blog postings at Blogomkraeft.dk, a blog site at the Danish information web site Cancer.dk. The tags were compared with the formal browsing structure of Cancer.dk. Results from the two studies were used to develop a prototype for social tagging at Cancer.dk. Thus third, we evaluated the prototype in a usability study.

Findings – We found that tags have the potential to describe and provide access to web site content from the users’ perspective and language use. Social tags may be a means to bridge between scientific viewpoints and terminology and everyday problems and vocabulary. Tags at Blogomkraeft.dk are mainly factual, often detailed, and do not cover as many functions as tags in more general bookmarking systems. An important finding is that some tags seemed to add to and supplement the content instead of factually describing the content of a blog posting. The usability test showed that our test persons liked the tagging feature.

Social implications – Tagging features give the public an opportunity to apply their own terms to documents, reflecting their own model of the current topic. Tags may furthermore function as colloquial lead-in terms from users’ search formulations at search engines such as Google to the domain-specific, tailored cancer web site.

Originality/value – Unlike most research on social tagging so far, we investigate tagging in a domain-specific setting, how tags can improve the interaction and communication between layman users and domain experts in an information web site within health care.

Based on a case study of Norway, the purpose of this paper is twofold: to present recent trends in the development of the multi‐level governance of the care services for the elderly and people with mental illness towards what we call the cooperative turn; and to discuss the implications of this trend for universalism in service provision.

The paper is a study of documents and the recent research literature.

A shift towards the cooperative turn can be identified as a change from command‐and‐control instruments to soft regulation mechanisms. Regulations and economic means are increasingly complemented by informational means. Soft versions of the steering instruments are used to target the results and processes of local policies. Hard instruments do not disappear, and a mixture of all the abovementioned instruments governs the two policy fields. This has implications for universalism defined as territorial uniformity, accessibility and coverage as user groups are competing for scarce resources, professionals are gaining autonomy in decision making and users are involved in service provision.

The originality of this paper is the discussion of the development of multi‐level governance towards a cooperative turn and the implications of this for universalism in service provision.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the papers included in this special issue and discuss the theme – shifts in Nordic welfare governance.

The paper discusses the major themes and sets out the structure of the special issue.

The picture emerging is mixed and there is evidence for strong decentralisation where policy instruments allow for considerable local room to manoeuvre. Organisational arrangements for governance are also highly localised, but (over time) oscillate between decentralisation and centralisation. As for the consequences for universalism, the contributions point to three contrasting scenarios. The first, relatively optimistic assessment suggests that while decentralisation challenges territorial equality, in some Nordic countries there seems to be inbuilt self‐correcting mechanisms pulling in the opposite direction. The second scenario is more critical and here it is argued that shifts in welfare governance, such as decentralisation and the introduction of elements of self and market governance, challenge universalism; universalism has become highly contingent on local circumstances and the practice of welfare delivery mixes different types of justice. The final scenario is rather pessimistic about the prospects of universalism and suggests that the shifts in welfare governance challenge universalism on all counts and lead to a wide range of new inequalities among citizens. This echoes the analysis of non‐Nordic countries in Europe where the scope for universalism remains limited.

The contribution of this special issue is twofold. First, using elderly care as a case study, the special issue analyses the complexity of welfare governance by looking at changes in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of governing. Second, focusing on Nordic countries, it assesses the substantive implications of shifts in welfare governance, notably in terms of universalism.

The purpose of this book is to collect current research representing different aspects of social information with emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior. To begin with, we need to define what we mean by social information in general and in the area of information science in particular. It is interesting to notice that social information is a concept used and researched in many different disciplines. Besides information science, the concept of social information has been studied in biology, psychology, and sociology among other disciplines.