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This paper aims to investigate actor roles and public–private interactions in networks. Role dynamics are explored in two settings: the current development network and the future implementation network to which actors are transitioning.

The paper builds on the industrial marketing and purchasing approach to business markets and uses a qualitative methodology. A case study of a network developing geofencing applications in the context of sustainable transport was used. The main source of data was interviews with 26 respondents from public and private organizations.

Roles in development and implementation of geofencing are identified, where private and public actors may take on one or several roles in the developing setting. When transitioning to the implementation setting, the expectations of public actors vary and there is ambiguity over their roles, which range from active to inactive. This detailed empirical case study shows the complexity of multi-actor involvement when developing digital technology for the transport system.

The study highlights the transition from firm-centric innovation to network-centric innovation and its implications on actor roles.

Organizations participating in public–private innovation networks need to be aware of the multiple roles public organizations play and the complexities they face.

The paper explores role dynamics within and between the development and implementation settings of geofencing. Within the current development setting, roles are identified at different organizational levels with limited change in role dynamics. When transitioning to a new setting, actors’ role dynamics may range from “limited” to “path-breaking.” In future settings, actors enter and exit networks and their roles may change dramatically.

Public-private innovation (PPI) is often claimed to contribute to societal welfare, to bring positive effects to the public sector and to open new markets to private firms. Engaging in public-private relationships for innovation is, however, also recognised as challenging and problematic. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the managerial and strategic challenges faced by private firms when engaging in public-private relationships for innovation.

This qualitative study presents ten firms’ engagement in public-private relationships. Half of them are experienced in innovation in public-private relationship, the other half are engaging in public-private relationships for the first time. Cross-case analysis brings insight into how these different types of firms strategize for handling relationships with public partners.

Contrary to non-experienced firms, experienced firms deliberately build a long-term strategy for engaging in PPI in expectation of outcome from more than a single project. They not only engage in building an understanding of the public using setting, but also seek to bridge with the public developing and producing setting to a greater extent than less experienced firms. The experienced firms utilise relationships with actors in the wider public network as a device and an asset for overcoming challenges and for reaping benefits from their engagement.

The study outlines the characteristics of strategizing among the most experienced firms and their special ability to embrace the complexity of the public sector network while working simultaneously on developing innovation for specific public counterparts.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the findings of this special issue and discusses the future challenges for policy, research and society. The findings suggest that challenges emerge as a result of legitimacy deficits of both consensus and contestatory modes of public involvement in health priority setting.

The paper draws on the discussions and findings presented in this special issue. It seeks to bring the country experiences and case studies together to draw conclusions for policy, research and society.

At least two recurring themes emerge. An underlying theme is the importance, but also the challenge, of establishing legitimacy in health priority setting. The country experiences suggest that we understand very little about the conditions under which representative, or authentic, participation generates legitimacy and under which it will be regarded as insufficient. A second observation is that public participation takes a variety of forms that depend on the opportunity structures in a given national context. Given this variety the conceptualization of public participation needs to be expanded to account for the many forms of public participation.

The paper concludes that the challenges of public involvement are closely linked to the question of how legitimate processes and decisions can be generated in priority setting. This suggests that future research must focus more narrowly on conditions under which legitimacy are generated in order to expand the understanding of public involvement in health prioritization.

One of the most salient contemporary societal trends is the increasing amount of public–private collaborations. In spite of the increasing awareness of the need to scrutinise the promises of public–private partnership (PPP), there is an important but seldom-asked question: How does the assumed interaction pattern behind PPP correspond with the interaction pattern appearing in empirical studies of the content of business exchange? The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the discrepancy between the expected and actual pattern of interactions in PPPs.

The paper presents a specific PPP concerning the construction of a Nya Karolinska (NKS) hospital building, which ended up as an economic and functional disaster. With an interactive approach as point of departure (Håkansson et al. 2009; Waluszewski, Håkansson, Snehota, 2017), this paper investigates a) the interaction pattern of the business landscape expected by policy/politicians in the NKS construction case and b) how the assumed interaction pattern appears in relation to the interaction pattern of the business landscape outlined in empirical studies of exchange, in the business landscape in general and of the construction setting in particular.

Given that the public side is neglecting the interactivity and interdependency of the private business setting, the disappointment with the NKS PPP project does not appear as an odd deviation. Rather, as a natural consequence of a public side expecting autonomous actors able to deliver innovation, quality and cost control just because they are exposed to competitive forces – but in reality interfacing with private actors which interests are directed to interdependent investments in place; own and related suppliers’.

The investigation of the political expectations behind the NKS PPP case was concentrated on two types of data. Original reports expressing the political view of the interaction pattern of the private setting have been used. Four published studies focussing on different aspects of the NKS process, which discuss the political view of the private setting, was also used.

Be it private–private or public–private, to be beneficial for both sides of the exchange interface, both sides have to engage in the exchange – with representatives with knowledge and experiences of all direct and indirect related social and material resources that will be affected. The need to mobilise and involve representatives with extensive experiences of specific resource combinations of both sides of the exchange interface; the public as well as the private, does not disappear simply because it is assumed away.

The competitive forces of the private setting are by politicians and policy assumed to function in an automatic way; breeding cost efficiency, quality and innovation. Furthermore, there is also an assumption of speed and ease of change. With the trust in these characteristic sof the private setting at hand, politicians have a “cart blanche” to withdraw from direct involvement in the creation of producer-user interfaces.

The paper underlines that as soon as the public-private exchange concerns goods that cannot be transformed to or treated as homogeneous ‘commodities’, as most often is the case of in this type of processes, there are reasons to be extremely careful in the design of the interaction interface. There are differences both in resource and activity structures between the two sides of the exchange interface and these differences have to be actively dealt with.

This paper aims to investigate how recommendations from close- versus distant-others influence consumer preferences. This paper explores how the consumption setting (public vs private) differentially affects the relative weight given to recommendations from these two sources.

Through five scenario-based experiments and an internal meta-analysis, this paper examines whether consumers are more likely to follow recommendations from distant- (vs close-) others in public consumption settings. As a test of the underlying process, this study also investigates the mediating role of distinctiveness-signaling motivation in why consumers overweight recommendations from distant others in public settings, and the moderating role of atypical product design.

The findings of this study support the hypothesis that recommendations from distant-others have a greater impact on consumer preferences in public consumption contexts, as opposed to recommendations from close-others. This result can be attributed to the heightened salience of consumers’ distinctiveness-signaling motives in public consumption contexts, leading them to prioritize exhibiting uniqueness over conforming to close-others’ recommendations. However, this study also reveals that the presence of alternative sources of distinctiveness, such as atypically designed products, can mitigate this effect, leading consumers to seek conformity to close-others’ recommendations even in public consumption contexts.

This research did not look into the possible culture impact on the nonconforming consumption behavior. Previous research indicates that in collectivist cultures, nonconformity and distinctiveness are valued less (Kim and Drolet, 2003). This may imply that even with provoked signaling motives, collectivist consumers may not exhibit divergence from close-others. In fact, they may do the exact opposite and possibly become even more conforming to recommendations from close-others.

This research shed light on the business practice regarding word-of-mouth (WOM). Specifically, this research results suggest that for publicly consumed product, companies may need to seek a nontraditional WOM and use less WOM from consumer’s close-others.

Marketers often use referrals and recommendations from close-others to shape consumers’ preferences. In contrast, this study shows that for publicly consumed products, consumers may diverge from conforming to their close-others.

Placemaking is an established practice and research field. It takes on a spatial dimension created through a socio-political process where value and meaning are assigned to settings. An emerging concept, sustainability citizenship relies on social actors creating sustainable urban settings by working, sometimes, “outside” formal planning; offering an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places. The purpose of this paper is twofold: examine one of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements to explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, and use this exploration as a means to argue the appropriateness of sustainability citizenship when investigating/realising settings in Bogotá’s informal settlements.

To address the paper’s aim, books, journal articles and monographs related to citizen/community participation, placemaking, citizenship (in Latin America and conceptually) and sustainability citizenship were collected and critically reviewed. Identification of these documents was achieved through a literature review of the library database at Deakin University and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the co-authors of this paper contributing to and reviewing submissions to the 2016 Routledge publication, Sustainability Citizenship. Field observation and engagement with the citizenry living in the informal settlements of Bogotá, Colombia were conducted at various times in 2013, 2014 and 2017.

Sustainability citizenship and placemaking are linked through their “process-driven” approach to realising places and use of the citizenry to enact change. In Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlement of Caracoli, public spaces are created outside formal planning processes through alternative path dependencies and the resourcefulness of its citizens. Sustainability citizenship, rather than placemaking, can work outside formal planning and manoeuvre around established path dependencies, which offers an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places in the global south.

This paper provides insight into the use of placemaking when explaining the realisation process of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements. The paper’s contents also explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, which in terms of the latter is a new citizenry dimension that can be used to provide new insight into the realisation process of public spaces in Bogotá’s informal settlements.

Faced with an ageing population and newspaper warnings that escalating costs are leading to a health crisis, debate has intensified in Australia and elsewhere on the allocation of limited health resources. But whose values should inform decision‐making in the health area, and should the influence of different groups vary with the level of decision‐making? These questions were put to 54 members of the public and health professionals in eight focus groups. Unlike previous studies, participants were not asked if particular groups should be involved in decisions but rather through deliberation and discussion nominated their own potential decision‐makers. This delivered a clear message that participants saw a legitimate role for a broad range of stakeholders in priority‐setting decisions. The results suggest that qualitative methods of investigation have the potential to improve the legitimacy and accountability of policy decisions by contributing to a better understanding of the values of the public and health professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to improve Kingdon’s (1984, 2011) concept of policy entrepreneurs (PE) with regard to the theoretical development of the definition and identification and level of agency by supplementing it with elements of Schmidt’s (2008, 2010, 2011, 2012) sentient agents. The improved concept of discursive policy entrepreneurs (DPEs) is then applied in an in-depth case study about the agenda setting process of micro and macro whole-of-government accounting in Australia in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Based on the concept of DPEs, a series of operationalised characteristics and proxies are developed to identify them and describe their behaviour. These are then applied in the case study. The two main data sources are semi-structured in-depth interviews and archival documents.

The findings show that the focus on DPEs’ discursive and coordination activities is critical for identifying and investigating the key actors of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)/Government Finance Statistics (GFS) harmonisation agenda setting process. The study also finds that the two relevant decision-making bodies, the Financial Reporting Council and the Australian Accounting Standards Board, lost control over their agendas due to the actions of DPEs.

The improved concepts of DPEs will allow researchers to better identify the main agents of policy change and differentiate them from other supporters of policy ideas. Due to the qualitative nature of the study, the findings are not necessarily generalisable.

The findings from this study can help participants of agenda setting processes to gain a better understanding of the actions and behaviours of DPEs. This might allow standard setting bodies to mitigate against undue influences by DPEs.

This study is the first study that uses Schmidt’s concept of the sentient agent to address the limitations of Kingdon’s concept of PE and develops and applies characteristics to identify PEs and their actions. It is also the only study to date that investigates the GAAP/GFS harmonisation agenda setting process.

The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the interrelationships that exist between politicians' Twitter agendas, news websites agendas and public agendas at the first level during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections for the two front-runners of the elections, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Alexis Tsipras. Three researches were conducted to assess the issues agendas of candidates' tweets, news websites coverage as well as the issue importance of the public for an 18-day period prior to the elections. At the issue level, although Twitter and media agendas align more, they are distinct from public agenda. Overall, Twitter proved to be an ineffective tool for influencing the news websites and public agendas during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections with online media agendas being slightly more powerful. Moreover, the public agenda did play a role in shaping Twitter as well as media content but in a counterbalancing manner. In addition, this study confirmed that agenda building and setting dynamics at both levels vary based on the issue and candidate being analysed.