Public Sector Communication

Closing Gaps Between Citizens and Public Organizations

María José Canel, Vilma Luoma-aho

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119135623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

A comprehensive guide to future-proofing public sector communication and increasing citizen satisfaction

How to communicate with the citizens of the future? Why does public sector communication often fail? Public Sector Communication combines practical examples from around the world with the latest theoretical insights to show how communication can help bridge gaps that exist between public sector organizations and the individual citizens they serve. The authors—two experts in the field with experience from the public sector—explain how public entities, be they cities, governments, foundations, agencies, authorities, municipalities, regulators, military, or government monopolies and state owned businesses can build their intangible assets to future-proof themselves in a volatile environment.

The book examines how the recent digitalization has increased citizen expectations and why one-way communication leaves public sector organizations fragile. To explain how to make public sector communication antifragile, the authors map contributions from a wide variety of fields combined with illustrative examples from around the world. The authors propose a research-based framework of different intangible assets that can directly improve communication in the public sector.

This important resource:

• Helps explain the sector-specific conditions and why communication is often challenging in the public sector
• Summarizes all relevant literature on the topic across disciplines and includes the most popular management ideals of the recent decades
• Explores how public sector organizations can increase citizen satisfaction with effective communication
• Presents new approaches to both the study and practice of communication in the public sector
• Provides international examples of successful public sector communication
• Offers realistic guides to building intangible assets in practice

Written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as public managers and leaders, Public Sector Communication offers an illustrative, research-based guide to improving communication and engaging citizens of today and the future.

Part I

1
What Is Changing in Public Sector Communication?

Budgets are cut, lines get longer and citizens voice their dissatisfaction real time

(A civil servant describing the change)

Public sector organizations have traditionally been blamed for bureaucracy, slowness, inefficiency, and corruption. These apparent failings have resulted in poor relationships between the public sector and citizens. Furthermore, many efforts aimed at improving the public sector seem to fail due to reasons that include a lack of understanding of citizens' changing expectations and an absence of strategic and planned communication. In response to a context of global economic and financial crisis and of the rise of new and social media, this book focuses on how communication can help to bridge the gap that exists between public sector organizations and the individual citizens whom they serve.

Recognizing that public sector communication cannot operate outside a political environment, this volume focuses on the apolitical function of communication undertaken by different public sector organizations, including governments, public foundations, agencies, authorities, regulators, and entities involved in joint public–private sector operations such as state monopolies and businesses.

The first part of this introductory chapter describes the changing context in which the public sector operates today, and it pays special attention to the transformations, problems, and challenges that require new approaches to both the study and practice of communication. The second part sets out the framework for the book. After exploring different contributions from research disciplines and areas that we judge to be of use in the study of public sector communication, the book's underlying rationale and structure are presented.

1.1 The Change: Identifying the Gaps with Citizens

1.1.1 What Is Changing?

1.1.1.1 Change in Everyday Practice

On a global level, change appears to be the new normal for public sector organizations today. Although not every change is radical in nature or overturns all established processes, incremental change has become a daily practice for public sector employees. Reforms as intentional changes on a smaller scale are typical (Pollit and Bouckaert, 2011) as the speed of societal change is understood to be accelerating, and public sector organizations are being reconceived and reorganized to serve citizens better. Public sector managers and employees are learning to deal not only with changes in citizens' needs but also with the continuous pressure being placed on them to develop, measure, and improve their services and organizations. The complex setting in which public sector organizations exist today requires public sector organizations to be connected, departments to be influential, and authorities to be ambitious in their work (Tench et al., 2017).

As recent decades of public sector reform have focused mostly on savings and efficiency (Kuipers et al., 2014), more value-based ideals to guide change have been called for (White, 2000; Andrews, 2012). If one takes into account the finding that almost 70% of change initiatives in organizations fail (Higgs and Rowland, 2005, p. 121), a top priority is to better understand the actual needs and values behind change processes. Doing so is especially vital for efficiency, which remains one of the central mantras of the public sector globally.

Much of the research on public sector change has focused on the need for and the organization and processes of change, but there remains a lack of contextual consideration and understanding of the microlevel processes of change for individuals (Kuipers et al., 2014). In their review of change management in public organizations, Kuipers et al. noted that most public sector change remains “top-down, planned change, i.e. changes that are ‘made to’ organizations rather than changes made by and within organizations” (Kuipers et al., 2014, p. 15). These practices appear to ignore the vital role of employees' and citizens' engagement in making change successful. In fact, engagement is understood as a “vehicle for co-production, co-creation and co-innovation of public goods” (Bourgon, 2009, p. 230).

1.1.1.2 Answering the Most Important Question

In line with the central idea of this book, it is generally agreed that there is an increasing need for public managers “to know how to interact with the public” (Thomas, 2013, p. 786). Reasons for public sector change that have been voiced recently include citizens' needs evolving as a result of private sector standards of service (Thijs and Staes, 2008). There has been an overall change from what Mary P. Follett describes as holding power over citizens to what she views as holding power with citizens (Thomas, 2013). This new focus on relationships is urgently needed because recent decades of focusing on productivity have made public sector organizations increasingly dependent on the scientific management paradigm. Public sector organizations will remain fragile as long as the illusion persists that their operating environment is predictable, that change can be controlled, and that ex post adaptations are sufficient (Bourgon, 2009, 2011).

As citizens have begun to receive services and goods almost instantly elsewhere, their expectations of public sector organizations have also risen. These expectations are also empowered by new technological developments and the rise of mass self-communication (Castells, 2009), through which individual citizens are equipped to voice their opinions and experiences in real time to mass audiences without the traditional journalism processes of fact checking, editing, or gatekeeping.

Whether change takes the form of wholesale transformations to structures or governments or merely involves reorganizing or introducing new procedures or tools, the once-stable environment of public sector organizations appears to remain only in myths put forward in public sector literature. Communication plays a key role in times of change, as public sector employees and citizens alike want an answer to the most important question that arises when change occurs: What will happen to me? The only way to ensure successful change is to answer this question, which requires the ability to communicate effectively with citizens.

Recent research suggests that there is no single event alone that is the cause of changes in the public sector. Instead, changes occur on all the societal, governmental, organizational, and individual levels simultaneously. In fact, most of the external drivers for change are complexly intertwined within larger contextual developments that affect not just a few but many organizations at once (Kuipers et al., 2014).

1.1.1.3 Changing Values?

When it comes to change in the public sector, several factors are considered important by both researchers and practitioners. First, while the context of change matters, so too does the content of what is changing. Second, it is agreed that the process through which change occurs is highly significant, as is the leadership of the change process. Perhaps too much emphasis is often placed on the outcomes of change, even though these may change over the course of the process (in a manner similar to the ways in which budgets have to be revised), and they might sometimes be difficult to grasp directly.

Change and organizational functions are guided by societal values, as values reflect what citizens want. Along with the introduction of new principles borrowed from management literature, the traditional values of public sector organizations are slowly changing (Pollit and Bouckaert, 2011). “Equity” is being replaced by “efficiency of services,” as legitimacy – the license to exist – is now more dependent on the effectiveness of services (Kuipers et al., 2014). Moreover, there is an increasing emphasis on the utility and value that citizens receive from services, and even “fairness” as a value is being replaced by “transparency.” Furthermore, the traditional value of “reliability” is partly being replaced by “frugality” as financial factors gain increasing importance. Only the core values of “safety” and “due process,” the key elements for trust within democratic societies, seem to be holding their ground (Rothstein, 2001).

We will next look at public sector change from two complementary levels that in practice often overlap: (i) changes in individual citizens and their communication patterns and habits (including those of public sector employees) and (ii) chang...