Crisis management requires health care managers to simultaneously innovate, i.e. to adjust – and to consolidate, i.e. to provide stability. COVID-19 was no exception in this respect. In this study, we ask to what extent multi-actor and multi-level health care networks stimulate or hinder balancing innovation and consolidation. We present the results of a qualitative case study, drawing upon 29 interviews with health care managers in one region in the Netherlands. Our analysis chronologically follows the crisis management response and differentiates between ‘the hammer’ phase (the ‘lockdown’) and the ‘dance’ phase (learning to live with the virus). We show that, especially in the hammer phase, formal networks can contribute to consolidation, yet innovation comes mostly from informal and personal networks. While the hammer phase should help organizations prepare to live and dance with the virus, we show that multi-actor and multi-level networks focus more on idiosyncratic organizational interests, although some of these are in fact productive. We conclude with recommendations for practice.

Increasing demands and competing values force public organizations to introduce new organizational forms that veer away from rigid bureaucratic structures while remaining in control. How do public managers and their employees deal with the dilemmas that these decentralized and organic ways of organizing entail? On the one hand it must be prevented that public managers fall back too quickly on structures that rely on control and formalization, while, on the other hand, they themselves as managers are still primarily held accountable based on those bureaucratic principles. New organizational forms also assume that leadership is shared and distributed. This not only asks for a higher degree of self-management of employees, but also requires from formal leaders that such behavior is supported and encouraged. In our research and teaching on these changes in public organizations, we work closely with practice. That too is a matter of balancing, this time of public engagement with scientific independence.

This article examines whether there is a trade-off between publishing articles in international peer reviewed journals vis-à-vis national and professional work among scholars in the administrative and political sciences. A cluster analysis on their publications results in three publishing profiles: a professional profile, an international profile and a traditional profile. The professional profile author publishes a relatively high number of professional publications. The international profile author publishes a relatively high number of international peer-reviewed papers. The traditional author profile is characterized by a lower number of publications and a more balanced distribution of publications in both international and national categories. The profiles showcase that indeed there is a trade-off between publishing international scientific articles and publishing for practitioners, but only to some extent. Furthermore, the profiles are associated with the university where authors are employed and whether they got their Ph.D. at a Dutch university or abroad.