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Institutional, economic, social and technological advancements enable openness to cope with wicked public management issues. Although open innovation (OI) is becoming a new normality for public sector entities, scholarly knowledge on this topic is not fully systematized. The article fills this gap, providing a thick and integrative account of OI to inspire public management decisions.

Following the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, a domain-based literature review has been accomplished. Consistently with the study purpose, a hybrid methodology has been designed. Bibliographic coupling permitted us to discover the research streams populating the scientific debate. The core arguments addressed within and across the streams were reported through an interpretive approach.

Starting from an intellectual core of 94 contributions, 5 research streams were spotted. OI in the public sector unfolds through an evolutionary path. Public sector entities conventionally acted as “senior partners” of privately-owned companies, providing funding (yellow cluster) and data (purple cluster) to nurture OI. An advanced perspective envisages OI as a public management model purposefully enacted by public sector entities to co-create value with relevant stakeholders (red cluster). Fitting architectures (green cluster) and mechanisms (blue cluster) should be arranged to release the potential of OI in the public sector.

The role of public sector entities in enacting OI should be revised embracing a value co-creation perspective. Tailored organizational interventions and management decisions are required to make OI a reliable and dependable public value generation model.

The article originally systematizes the scholarly knowledge about OI, presenting it as a new normality for public value generation.

Place-based community events fulfil important functions, internally and externally. They provide opportunities for people from diverse communities and cultures to encounter each other, to participate in pleasurable activities in convivial settings and to develop mutual understanding. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the value of such events as a means of resisting or challenging the deleterious effects of territorial stigmatisation.

The authors explore two place-based community events in areas that have been subject to territorial stigmatisation: Govanhill in Glasgow, Scotland, and South Dunedin, New Zealand. They draw on in-depth case study methods including observation and interviews with key local actors and employ inductive analysis to identify themes across the datasets.

The demonstrate how neighbourhood events in both Glasgow and Dunedin actively seek to address some of the deleterious outcomes of territorial stigmatisation by emphasising strength and asset-based discourses about the areas they reflect and represent. In their planning and organisation, both events play an important mediating role in building and empowering community, fostering intercultural encounters with difference and strengthening mutuality within their defined places. They make use of public and semi-public spaces to attract diverse groups while also increasing the visibility of marginalised populations through larger showcase events.

The empirical element focuses only on two events, one in Glasgow, Scotland (UK), and the other in South Dunedin (New Zealand). Data generated were wholly qualitative and do not provide quantitative evidence of “change” to material circumstances in either case study community.

Helps organisers think about how they need to better understand their communities if they are to attract diverse participation, including how they programme public and semi-public spaces.

Place-based community events have significant value to neighbourhoods, and they need to be resourced effectively if they are to sustain the benefits they produce. These events provide an opportunity for diverse communities to encounter each other and celebrate what they share rather than what divides them.

This paper is the first to examine how place-based community events help resist narratives of territorial stigmatisation, which produce negative representations about people and their environments. The paper draws on ethnographic insights generated over time rather than a one-off snapshot which undermines some events research.

Informal knowledge sharing interactions (IKSI) are of particular value for innovation projects. This is especially true for unplanned IKSI, because they are even more likely to provide non-redundant knowledge and new perspectives than planned IKSI. Seminal studies have shown that the formation of unplanned IKSI can be explained on the basis of spatial structures. Strictly speaking, however, these studies only explain unplanned encounters. Whether unplanned IKSI result from these unplanned encounters, though, cannot be satisfactorily explained on the basis of spatial configurations alone. The purpose of this paper is to tackle this explanatory gap by unraveling the fundamental social processes by application of the symbolic interaction theory.

For this purpose, the formation of 132 IKSI on innovation projects from three research and development departments of large companies was recorded in detail using a combination of diaries and interviews. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The analysis reveals that IKSI cause symbolic costs (image damages), and that these costs vary between types of social situations. Because actors anticipate situation-specific costs, their propensity to initiate IKSI can be explained in terms of the situations in which they encounter one another. Furthermore, the analysis reveals six particularly relevant characteristics of situations and further elaborates the basic argument by analyzing their functioning.

The paper complements previous explanations of unplanned IKSI by opening up the social processes underlying their formation.

Within public services there is a widely recognised role for workers who operate across organisational and professional boundaries. Much of this literature focusses on the organisational implications rather than on how boundary spanners engage with citizens. An increased number of public service roles require boundary spanning to support citizens with cross-cutting issues. The purpose of this paper is to explicate the emotional labour within the interactions that boundary spanners have with citizens, requiring adherence to display rules and building trust.

This is a conceptual paper which draws on illustrative examples to draw out the emotional labour within two types of boundary spanning: explicit and emergent.

Emotional labour theory offers a way to classify these interactions as requiring high, medium or low degrees of emotional labour. Boundary spanning theory contributes an understanding of how emotional labour is likely to be differently experienced depending on whether the boundary spanning is an explicit part of the job, or an emergent property.

Drawing on examples from public service work in a range of advanced democracies, the authors make a theoretical argument, suggesting that a more complete view of boundary spanning must account for individual-level affect and demands upon workers. Such a focus captures the “how” of the boundary spanning public encounter, and not just the institutional, political and organisational dimensions examined in most boundary spanning literatures.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the current pandemic situation of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Bangladesh, how the Government is managing this unprecedented condition and encountering these increasing public health challenges.

This paper is a viewpoint of the current COVID-19 pandemic situation in Bangladesh.

As one of the most densely populated countries, Bangladesh is vulnerable to COVID-19. Currently, the infection of COVID-19 is spreading fast and started to capture all the parts of Bangladesh. The Government of Bangladesh has already taken several preventive measures to overcome the pandemic such as declaring hotspots of COVID-19 and setting lockdowns, increasing mass awareness through social media and satellite TV channels. They are also encouraging private and community healthcare initiatives to increase hospital beds and COVID-19 treatment facilities. Besides, the Government has deployed defence force and additional health workers and increased public holidays to reduce the number of coronavirus infections. However, both the number of infected people and the death toll is rising, and there are growing challenges that the Government and public healthcare professions need to overcome.

This paper delivers information about the present developing situation of COVID-19 in Bangladesh, how the Government is handling and public health challenges that have raised. This paper can be helpful for the policymakers and Government officials for effective public health interventions.

This paper examines the contested value of healthy life and wellbeing in a context of severe austerity, exploring how the value of “Public Health” is constructed through and with material-discursive practices and accounting representations. It seeks to explore the political and ethical implications of constructing the valuable through a shared consensus over the “facts” when addressing complex, multi-agency problems with long time horizons and outcomes that are not always easily quantifiable.

The theorisation, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) scholars and Karen Barad's (2007) agential realism, opens up the analysis to the performativity of both material and discursive practices in the period following a major re-organisation of activity. The study investigates two case authorities in England and the national regulator through interviews, observations and documentary analysis.

The paper demonstrates the deeply ethical and political entanglements of accounting representations as objectivity, consensus and collective action are constructed and resisted in practice. It goes on to demonstrate the practical challenges of constructing “alternative accounts” and “intelligent accountabilities” through times of austerity towards a shared sense of public value and suggests austerity measures make such aims both more challenging and all the more essential.

Few studies in the accounting literature have explored the full complexity of valuation practices in non-market settings, particularly in a public sector context; this paper, therefore, extends familiar conceptual vocabulary of STS inspired research to further explore how value(s), ethics and identity all play a crucial role in making things valuable.

This paper aims to highlight problems and opportunities for introducing digital automation in public administration (PA) and to propose implications for public value creation of robotic process automation (RPA) through the perspective of good bureaucracy as a guiding framework.

This conceptual paper addresses the purpose by applying three normative ideal types: Weber’s ideal type for a bureaucracy, new public management and public value management. This paper synthesizes an analytical framework in conducting case studies of the implementation of RPA systems in municipal administration.

This paper contributes to new insights into public value creation and digital automation. The following four implications are proposed: the deployment of RPA in municipal administration should emphasize that organizing administrative tasks is essentially a political issue; include considerations based on a well-grounded analysis in which policy areas that are suitable for RPA; to pay attention to issues on legal certainty, personal integrity, transparency and opportunities to influence automated decisions; and that the introduction of RPA indicates a need to develop resources concerning learning and knowledge in the municipal administration.

This paper is innovative, as it relates normative, descriptive and prescriptive issues on the developing of digital automation in PA. The conceptual approach is unusual in studies of digitalization in public activities.

This paper analyzes how public servants who work with young people discursively cope with competing demands on their agency, defined as their orientation toward and capabilities to influence their clients. Previous studies revealed how public servants treat their clients when facing competing demands but paid less attention to how public servants define their agency.

Micro-level discourse analysis is applied to analyze how public servants represent their agency in client relationships, drawing on interviews with nine individuals in a Finnish city who work with young people lacking jobs or school placements.

Instead of describing their agency coherently, the interviewees applied several discourses to represent their agency differently in relation to different demands. This ability to navigate contradictory discourses is discussed as reflexive discursive coping strategy, which enables public servants to maintain a positive image of their agency despite tensions at work.

Although the method does not allow direct generalizations, it reveals discursive strategies likely to be found in many contemporary public organizations.

The study indicates a need to better acknowledge and nurture the multifaceted nature of agency to improve service quality.

The findings deepen the view on tensions in public servants' work and show that diverse discourses not only create anxiety but also help individuals dealing with contradictory work.

This study aims to investigate the role of relational asymmetries in influencing the coping strategies adopted by frontline workers to deal with the policy–client role conflict.

A comparative analysis of three different services highlights the role of the service relationships characteristics in explaining similarities and differences in the strategies adopted by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). The research is based on the secondary analysis of three case studies conducted in Italy: the reception system for homeless people, the job brokerage service in the public employment service and the dispute settlement procedure in the labour inspectorate.

The results underline the interaction between the characteristics of the service relationship and the different coping strategies adopted to deal with the policy–client conflict.

The contribution of this study is threefold. Firstly, the authors focus on the influence of the characteristics of the service relationship in terms of agency resources over SLBs’ strategies to face with users’ expectations. Secondly, the authors intend to discuss these issues analysing SLBs not only as agents with individual preferences. Thirdly, the research design allows the authors to return to the street-level bureaucracy theory its comparative essence, proposing a comparative strategy with an explorative intent.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public sector organisations produced thousands of social media messages weekly answering citizens questions and informing the public on safety related matters. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the pandemic shaped social media listening in Finland's public sector organisations and how these organisations aligned their listening and strategic communication to address emerging questions, news (real and fake) and rumours during the pandemic.

Building on a theoretical background from strategic communication, organisational listening, digital marketing and public sector communication, qualitative interview data included communicators (N = 14) from all central Finnish public sector organisations in charge of COVID-19 communication. Findings were themed and analysed qualitatively to understand the level of alignment of strategic communication on social media.

The findings revealed that the pandemic had strained public sector organisations' communication capabilities, forcing them to align their processes and resources reactively to enable useful content and limit false/misleading content. The results confirmed that organisational listening remained somewhat unaligned. A dual role of public sector communication as speakers but increasingly as listeners was highlighted.

The study’s findings point to organisational listening on social media being a central requisite for public sector organisations overcoming a crisis.