Sharing services, saving money? Five risks to cost saving when organizations share administrative services

Shared services are a popular reform for governments under financial pressure. The hope is to reduce overheads and increase efficiency by providing support services like HR, finance and procurement once to multiple agencies. Drawing on insights from organization theory and political science, we identify five risks that shared services won’t live up to current expectations. We illustrate each with empirical evidence from the UK, Ireland and further afield, and conclude with suggestions on how to manage these risks.

Institutional Hybridity in Public Sector Reform: Replacement, Blending, or Layering of Administrative Paradigms

Despite an abundance of studies on hybridization and hybrid forms of organizing, scholarly work has failed to distinguish consistently between specific types of hybridity. As a consequence, the analytical category has become blurred and lacks conceptual clarity. Our paper discusses hybridity as the simultaneous appearance of institutional logics in organizational contexts, and differentiates the parallel co-existence of logics from transitional combinations (eventually leading to the replacement of a logic) and more robust combinations in the form of layering and blending. While blending refers to hybridity as an ‘amalgamate’ with original components that are no longer discernible, the notion of layering conceptualizes hybridity in a way that the various elements, or clusters thereof, are added on top of, or alongside, each other, similar to sediment layers in geology. We illustrate and substantiate such conceptual differentiation with an empirical study of the dynamics of public sector reform. In more detail, we examine the parliamentary discourse around two major reforms of the Austrian Federal Budget Law in 1986 and in 2007/2009 in order to trace administrative (reform) paradigms. Each of the three identified paradigms manifests a specific field-level logic with implications for the state and its administration: bureaucracy in Weberian-style Public Administration, market-capitalism in New Public Management, and democracy in New Public Governance. We find no indication of a parallel co-existence or transitional combination of logics, but hybridity in the form of robust combinations. We explore how new ideas fundamentally build on – and are made resonant with – the central bureaucratic logic in a way that suggests layering rather than blending. The conceptual findings presented in our article have implications for the literature on institutional analysis and institutional hybridity.

People and places: Understanding geographical accuracy in administrative data from the census and healthcare systems

Administrative systems such as health care registration are of increasing importance in providing information for statistical, research, and policy purposes. There is thus a pressing need to understand better the detailed relationship between population characteristics as recorded in such systems and conventional censuses. This paper explores these issues using the unique Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study (NILS). It takes the 2001 Census enumeration as a benchmark and analyses the social, demographic and spatial patterns of mismatch with the health register at individual level. Descriptive comparison is followed by multivariate and multilevel analyses which show that approximately 25% of individuals are reported to be in different addresses and that age, rurality, education, and housing type are all important factors. This level of mismatch appears to be maintained over time, as earlier migrants who update their address details are replaced by others who have not yet done so. In some cases, apparent mismatches seem likely to reflect complex multi-address living arrangements rather than data error.

Using administrative data to understand mental health in Northern Ireland:Results from two exemplar projects

Mental health is unevenly distributed in the Northern Ireland population. Administrative data on psychotropic medication prescribing is increasingly being used in research into population mental health. This paper illustrates how these data indicate concentrations of poor mental health in Northern Ireland, e.g. within deprived neighbourhoods, at interfaces, among older persons admitted to care homes and among persons bereaved through sudden death or suicide. This briefing also aims to widen the debate about mental health from a disorder/service paradigm to a whole population approach.