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The purpose of this paper is to determine head and neck cancer patients' perspective of their follow‐up regime and to suggest ways in which these perspectives can be incorporated into current practice.

This is a prospective survey‐based study. A total of 263 patients consecutively attending a head and neck cancer clinic completed a survey about their experience of the follow‐up process in the post‐treatment period between January 2009 and October 2009.

The paper finds that, of the patients, 67 per cent (n=176) felt that the clinic met the goals they hoped would be achieved during their visit; 84 per cent (n=221) felt that their follow‐up visits were too frequent. In total 60 per cent (n=159) were booked to see both an allied health professional and the attending clinician. Of these, 84 per cent (n=134/159) felt that issues addressed at follow‐up with the clinician duplicated those addressed by the allied healthcare professionals. When asked about their opinion of a less intensive follow‐up system based on patients reporting problems and requesting appointments, 73 per cent (n=192) favoured it. When asked who they would like to contact first in such a system, most patients (n=118, 45 per cent) stated a clinical nurse specialist.

Current follow‐up regimes may be too prescriptive in their approach without taking patient perspective into consideration. Patients felt that being seen intensively for the first year, then having visits tapered off over the next two years and finally being seen according to symptoms thereafter to be appropriate and felt that this represented an overall better system.

These data suggest the need for a more patient‐focused, individualised approach to follow‐up in head and neck cancer.

This qualitative interview study compares public value prioritizations of ministers, members of parliament and senior public managers in the Netherlands. This article aims to answer the following central research question: how do Dutch political elites and administrative elites differ in their interpretation and prioritization of public values?

Based on coding and categorization of 65 interviews this article shows how government elites in advanced western democracies interpret and assess four crucial public values: responsiveness, expertise, lawfulness and transparency.

Political elites and administrative elites in the Netherlands are more similar than different in their prioritization and perceptions of public values. Differences are strongly related to role conceptions and institutional responsibilities, which are more traditional than most recent literature on politico-administrative dynamics would suggest.

Our qualitative findings are hard to generalize to larger populations of politicians and public managers in the Netherlands, let alone beyond the Netherlands. However, the testable research hypotheses we derive from our explorative study merit future testing among larger populations of respondents in different countries through survey research.

Experienced values differences between both groups are smaller than their mutual perceptions would suggest.

Most research on public values is quantitative in nature and focuses exclusively on public managers. By adding the politician to the equation we improve our understanding of how public values are enacted in real life and set the tone for a more inclusive research agenda on public values.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop the idea of enhancing collaboration within a public context. It does so by exploring the challenge of working with others across organisational boundaries, when addressing complex issues. It discusses research findings from a Scotland based public service study concerned with collaborative practice and presents an empirical analysis of what it means to work in a relational way. The existing literature is reviewed alongside the study findings, connecting with contemporary theories and debates in the fields of collaboration, leadership and public administration.

The empirical work detailed in this chapter drew from collective and relational leadership theories which influenced the study design and methodological approach. The data collection method took the form of semi-structured interviews and data were analysed using thematic analysis supported by data mapping exercises. Data were obtained through interviews of 20 participants from multiple public service roles and organisations who were involved in similar activities linked to collaboration.

This chapter promotes an approach where disrupting traditional collaborative practice offers new insights in terms of (1) understanding the group process and (2) recognising what processual and behavioural adjustments can be made to enrich collaborative work. This approach was found to offer a number of benefits linked to building trust, promoting meaningful dialogue and altered the conversations that people chose to have.

The reconceptualisation of collaboration specifically illustrates what it means to ‘work in a more relational way’ and how it is understood by those attempting to build collaborative capacity, sustain public services and improve outcomes for citizens and communities. As such, it is this focus on relationships that is considered innovative and important to creating the open collaborative culture required for addressing complex issues and working across organisational boundaries.

The discussion about public sector performance is still present today, despite the profound research that has already tried to address this subject. Furthermore, theory links negative effects on organizational performance with increased levels of organizational complexity. However, literature thus far did not succeed to put forward a successful theory that explains why and how public organizations became increasingly complex. To answer this question, we argue that increased organizational complexity can be explained by viewing public organizations as the hybrid result of different institutional logics, which are shaped by various management views. However, former research mainly concentrated on the separate study of management views such as traditional public management (TPM), NPM, and post-NPM. Although appealing, research that approaches hybridity from this perspective is fairly limited.

We conducted a literature review in which we studied 80 articles about traditional public management, NPM, and post-NPM.

We found that these management views essentially differ on the base of three fault lines, depending on the level of the organizational culture. These fault lines, according to the management view, together result in nine dimensions. By combing dimensions of the different management views, we argue that a public organization becomes hybrid. Furthermore, in line with findings of contingency theory, we explain the level of hybridity might depend on the level of tight coupling for a given organization. Finally, we developed propositions that explain hybridity as the result of isomorphic forces, organizational change, and organizational resistance to change and that link hybridization with processes of selective coupling.

The value of this chapter lies in its real-life applicability.

To reflects upon gender, research relationships and ‘elite’ participants and highlight how traditional use of labels for gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as other aspects of identity, often serve to restrict a fuller picture as well as some more fluid queer realities.

This chapter uses queer and feminist theories to explore the relationships when the researcher and participants belong to a shared peer group of sex education professionals. It examines the choice to avoid pronoun usage or collection of demographic data, gendered or otherwise, and reflexively contemplates the impact and practicalities of friendship relationships within the research context.

I suggest that tensions often exist between feminist and queer methodologies and this chapter offers reflections for navigating and reconciling these tensions, opening up new possibilities for respectful and nuanced participant representation within research findings.

This chapter serves to further develop what it might mean to have a queer and feminist methodological approach to research, and specifically explores the application of such a framework when considering practices of collecting participant demographic data, classifying participants as ‘elites’ and reflecting upon friendships with participants.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role and impact of accounting within the fragmented field of public value theory literature.

The work develops a structured literature review (SLR) and seeks to shed light on the state of public value research, with particular emphasis on the role of accounting scholarship.

The lack of empirical research and the limited number of accounting papers reveal how accounting scholars need to achieve a deeper understanding of the public value conceptualization, creation and measurement process.

The paper develops the first wide-ranging SLR on public value accounting. It is a starting point to develop new research avenues, both in the fields of accountability/external reporting, and management accounting and performance management.

The demand for including enterprise in the education system, at all levels and for all pupils is now a global phenomenon. Within this context, the use of competitions and competitive learning activities is presented as a popular and effective vehicle for learning. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how a realist method of enquiry – which utilises theory as the unit of analysis – can shed new light on the assumed and unintended outcomes of enterprise education competitions. The case developed here is that there are inherent flaws in assuming that competitions will ‘work’ in the ways set out in policy and guidance. Some of the most prevalent stated outcomes – that competitions will motivate and reward young people, that they will enable the development of entrepreneurial skills, and that learners will be inspired by their peers – are challenged by theory from psychology and education. The issue at stake is that the expansion of enterprise education policy into primary and secondary education increases the likelihood that more learners will be sheep dipped in competitions, and competitive activities, without a clear recognition of the potential unintended effects. In this chapter, we employ a realist-informed approach to critically evaluate the theoretical basis that underpins the use of competitions and competitive learning activities in school-based enterprise education. We believe that our findings and subsequent recommendations will provide those who promote and practice the use of competitions with a richer, more sophisticated picture of the potential flaws within such activities.

This article focuses on the role of accounting performance measurement in the creation of public value in the context of the network associated with the justice portfolio within the Australian Commonwealth.

We use concepts of bonding and bridging social capital to theorize the use of performance measurement in government networks.

We find that there is relatively little use of performance measures that reported network level performance and the primary emphasis was on building social capital with funders rather than across network partner agencies. We therefore conclude that existing Australian public sector performance measurement practices are not supportive of intra-governmental networks and therefore the notion that improvement in performance measurement will deliver public value needs further reflection.

The research scope is restricted to governmental network performance measures from a justice portfolio budget perspective. Despite the focused attention of the research, the application of the findings has relevance across all government portfolios and broader public management more generally.

Despite calls for accountability and governance innovation where public value is delivered across organizational boundaries through dependency and collaboration, the case environment offers little evidence that forms of performance measurement over the period examined recognize this practicality. The research primarily adds considerable weight to the argument that the delivery of public value by networks requires an evolution in accountability and performance reporting away from traditional institutional forms of performance representation.

The research is highly novel in its unveiling and examination of contemporary performance measurement reporting from a network perspective.

This study aims at rereading public governance (PG) and public value management (PVM) in the light of viable systems approach (VSA). Starting from the common points and the dissimilarities between the two theories, an integrated framework for pinpointing the key drivers leading to the emersion of public value co-creation in a public system conception of governance is elaborated. An overview on the emersion of PVM and PG is conducted in order to identify the main features of the new mindset. Then, VSA’s assumptions also are analyzed (with particular focus on their managerial implications) and then subdivided into four macro-areas.

The combination of the two theories allows recognition of four levers (with relative postulates) for fostering public value co-creation: (1) strategic selection of actors; (2) establishment of system and relational boundaries; (3) pursuit of the fit strategy-tactics; (4) system governance diffusion. From a theoretical point of view, the study provides suggestions for the creation of a public system theory of governance. Regarding managerial standpoint, revealing the drivers for public value co-creation can aid managers to better elaborate strategies for stimulating actor’s engagement in order to challenge complexity and user’s demands variability.