‘Nudging’ has been introduced as a policy and management tool as a way to influence behaviour without limiting choice. Nudging is mainly used to influence citizens’ behaviour but can also be used to influence the behavior of healthcare professionals. Examples include posters used to improve hand-hygiene compliance, or ‘default’ options in systems to reduce excessive prescriptions of specific medication. However, using nudges raises major worries and ethical issues, also in relation to the independence of healthcare professionals. While the scientific discussion about the desirability of nudges is extensive, the voices of healthcare professionals, who are the subjects of nudges, remain unheard. In this qualitative research we explore the perceptions of nudging held by various healthcare professionals. The interviews reveal that healthcare professionals are generally unfamiliar with the concept of nudging, but they do recognize nudges in their own field of practice. Furthermore, while they are predominantly positive about nudging, they also express concerns about the pressure on their autonomy. These concerns are related to changing professionalism and regulatory pressures in healthcare.

Participatory and responsive approaches to research strive to be democratic, inclusive and impactful. Participatory researchers share a commitment to epistemic justice and actively engage citizens and users as well as other stakeholders in the co-creation of knowledge for social change. While more and more researchers and policymakers feel attracted to these approaches in practice, the normative ideals of social inclusion and justice are sometimes hard to realize, because of established interests, power relations and system requirements. In this article I argue that participatory researchers and evaluators have a moral responsibility to do ‘ethics work’. This is more than just following ethical principles and codes of conduct. ‘Ethics work’ entails the labour and effort one puts into recognizing ethically salient aspects of situations, developing oneself as a reflexive practitioner, paying attention to emotions and relationships, collaboratively working out the right course of action and reflecting in the company of critical friends. In this article I present the theory and ethics of participatory approaches, illustrate ethical issues and ethics work related to collaboration, politics and power, and share lessons based on ten years of practice in the field of health and social well-being.

This article assesses the size and diversity of Belgium’s interest group population by triangulating four data sources. Combining various sources allows us to describe which societal interests get mobilised, which interest organisations become politically active and who gains access to the policy process and obtains news media attention. Unique about the project is the systematic data collection, enabling us to compare interest representation at the national, Flemish and Francophone-Walloon government levels. We find that: (1) the national government level remains an important venue for interest groups, despite the continuous transfer of competences to the subnational and European levels, (2) neo-corporatist mobilisation patterns are a persistent feature of interest representation, despite substantial interest group diversity and (3) interest mobilisation substantially varies across government levels and political-administrative arenas.

Childcare centers are organizations that differ in structural and cultural characteristics. The present comparative case study examined how Dutch childcare centers match different organization types and related the identified organization types to the implementation of diversity and inclusion policy. Diversity and inclusion in organizations concerns climate-dimensions, such as providing equal opportunities, allowing influence on decision-making and stimulating professional development for all staff. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 managers and 24 pedagogical practitioners in 13 childcare centers. Content-analysis of the interviews showed that employees in all centers experience equal opportunities, however the content and form of these opportunities differed according to the type of organization. Employees in childcare centers with a comparatively strong orientation on professional performance reported positive experiences with group-collaboration, team-professionalization and collective decision-making. Employees in childcare centers with a comparatively strong market orientation reported positive experiences with possibilities for individual development and autonomy in their daily work. The experiences of the employees match the differences in organizational climate as reported by the location managers, emphasizing either collaboration in teams or employees’ individual responsibility, depending on the type of organization.

Regulation and markets have become central steering mechanisms in modern states, but have received relatively little attention in public administration. This contribution argues that questions around regulation, monitoring and enforcement deserve more attention in public administration scholarship. It sketches the development of ‘Regulatory Governance’ as a scholarly field, and discusses the added value of a criminological perspective on relations between state and market. A research agenda on ‘naming and shaming’ brings these perspectives together.

Taking Lijphart’s work on consensus democracies as our point of departure, we signal a major shortcoming in Lijphart’s focus being almost exclusively on the political hardware of the state structure, leaving little attention for the administrative and bureaucratic characteristics of governance systems. We propose to expand the Lijphart’s model which overviews structural aspects of the executive and the state with seven additional features of the bureaucratic system. We argue that these features are critical for understanding the processes of policymaking and service delivery. Next, in order to better understand the functioning of the Netherlands and Belgium as consensus democracies, we provide a short analysis of the historical context and current characteristics of the political-administrative systems in both countries.

Belgium has long been described as a typical case of a consociational or consensus democracy. This article aims at identifying whether political parties in Belgium share the internal characteristics of parties in consensus democracies: passive mass memberships, the importance of purposive and material incentives for joining, and representation of a clear subculture in the social and attitudinal profiles of their members and via overlapping memberships with related organizations. We mobilize longitudinal party membership data and party member surveys conducted in three different time periods. We show that pillar parties still exercise their role of mobilization and representation of societal segments, but these segments tend to become smaller over time. New parties offer alternative options of mobilization and representation, although not always in line with the specific institutional arrangements of consociational democracy.

This text wants to draw attention to the question: How do peer specialists build a bridge between the modus operandi of health care professionals and the lifeworld problems of clients receiving mental health care? The Dutch mental healthcare system has recently been host to a range of new developments. Two new trends can be distinguished, going by the name of ‘Recovery-oriented healthcare’ and the introduction of ‘Peer Specialists’. These coincide with changes in budget and organization of treatment. There is an increased awareness of the need for efficiency and cost reduction in the organization of care. The meaning and use of recovery-centered approaches and working with peer specialists remain fairly marginal enterprises due to ever increasing pressure emanating from execution of regulations and administrative procedures, and an accompanying decrease of professional autonomy. In the light of Habermas’ theoretical framework, it is an emphasis on a system-oriented organization of care that cause new approaches to barely be able to find a considerable place in the contemporary practice of mental healthcare in the Netherlands. Trust is identified as an essential foundation on the basis of which future principles of organization should be developed.

Various Dutch municipalities hire municipal law enforcement officers from private security companies. This process of outsourcing sometimes meets political resistance, because safety and security are central tasks of government that should not be carried out by commercial parties. At the same time, little is known about the actual pros and cons of private law enforcement officers in relation to their public colleagues. From the literature we expect differences in cost, flexibility, local knowledge, professional autonomy, job satisfaction and cooperation with the police. Our empirical research shows that these differences are smaller than initially assumed. Private law enforcement officers work longer hours under more or less the same working conditions (salary) as public law enforcement officers. Their turnover rate is also higher compared to public law enforcement officers, because of their lower career expectations. Overhead costs, including the costs of outsourcing processes, remain unknown.

Municipal amalgamations form a red thread through the history of local government in the Netherlands. With varying intensity, this country was continuously confronted with adjustments of the municipal scale. Where once the focus was rather one-sided on the minimum number of inhabitants of a municipality, we see that since the nineties questions were asked about the amalgamation policy. From now on a lack of administrative power had to be demonstrated before an amalgamation would be carried through. These critical remarks however didn’t lead to a downfall in the number of municipal amalgamations. Amalgamation and merger will always continue in the Netherlands. The Flemish policy on amalgamation appears to be quite different. Since the large-scale merger operation in 1976 Flanders was no more confronted with municipal amalgamations. The former Flemish government however, announced at its appointment in 2009 that it would encourage voluntary mergers of municipalities with financial and administrative incentives. The present Flemish government treads the same path. The incentives put in place by the former Flemish legislature are even increased. They even appear to bear fruit. In the provinces Limburg and East-Flanders several municipalities have indicated to investigate a merger. Some of them even have taken the principal decision to merger in the municipal councils involved. This article describes and compares the municipal amalgamation policies of the Netherlands and Flanders. The authors also investigate what both can learn from each other.

This article is about how education administrators value complex issues or dilemmas they are confronted with in their governance practices, and which strategies they adopt to cope with them. Professional governance of school organisations was introduced gradually over the past fifteen years, and at the same time governance in education has gained in complexity and raises considerable risks, requiring more time, knowledge and expertise of education administrators. We draw on the theoretical perspective of coping to investigate the potential of education administrators to deal with the complexity, impediments and social and regulatory pressure in their daily practice. Our study consists of a comparative case study of six education administrators in secondary education. Their agency has been researched qualitatively with the help of the hierarchical model of coping strategies of Skinner and colleagues. The results show that the issues and dilemmas education administrators find most complex are about educational innovation and numbers of students enrolled. Education administrators value these issues or dilemmas hardly as threatening, and they adopt various proactive coping strategies to deal with them, such as information seeking or bargaining.

Do energy cooperatives work together with municipalities in the area of energy and, if this is so, how can this cooperative relationship be interpreted from a public administration perspective? That is the central question of this article. The experiences with cooperation of four frontrunners amongst the energy cooperatives show that in many areas a fruitful cooperative relationship has been developed. In other areas cooperation is lacking because the municipality stands aloof as soon as the energy cooperative provides services to citizens and/or companies or because the purchase of green energy by the municipality from their own energy cooperative cannot simply be carried out. In the development of renewable energy projects it also suits municipalities to be reluctant because they not only promote local renewable energy but are also responsible for the spatial quality. From the perspective of public administration it is striking that the variety of municipal roles increases the complexity of cooperative relationship with energy cooperatives. For energy cooperatives it is difficult to understand that the municipality sometimes behaves like an ally, but can also be reluctant. The variety of the bond between both parties is first of all apparent from the need of an own identity and autonomy in the energy cooperatives. Secondly, two of the four energy cooperatives that were analysed needed support in a financial emergency.

A profession can be defined as a group of workers with shared knowledge, skills and quality standards. To maintain its professional status, the professional community needs to be relatively autonomous. However, while performing their tasks, many pressures jeopardize the professional worker’s autonomous position. Here, the professional community can make a difference.
Subordination to the political principal characterizes the position of the civil servant. What margin of professional independence do political leaders allow their civil servants? Recent academic empirical reports in the Netherlands show conflicting outcomes.
This essay describes how civil servants from a Dutch ministry deal with their professional standards and argues that, in the process of professionalization, more clarity is required with regard to how autonomy and independence for civil servants are safeguarded. This is especially relevant in a contemporary context where new ways to account for the professional behavior of civil servants need to be sought.

Dutch Ministries differ in the manner in which they design and manage their steering relations with independent governing bodies. Based on six cases at four Dutch ministries the authors show these differences. They use two theoretical models (the principal-agent approach and the principal-steward approach) to clarify the kind of relationship. Ministries not only differ in their approach, they also differ in how far they have advanced in the development of their steering relations with independent governing bodies. Because there is no coordination or exchange of knowledge between ministries, ministries that are ‘lagging behind’ cannot learn from the experiences of ministries that have more experience. The authors do not propose one form of central coordination or one model, but they do propose more exchange of knowledge within and between Dutch ministries.

There are many practical and academic concerns about public professionals and the pressures and burdens they experience. Professional autonomies and skills are reduced, it is argued, as a result of businesslike new public management, in order to control service results. The solution is clear: organizational logics must be weakened, professional autonomies must be enlarged and professional ways of working must be ‘rescued’. In this paper we re-interpret this presumed problem by analyzing: the interaction between organizational and professional logics, by relating these to a broader institutional logic and by tracing the contribution of individual professional motivations. Professionals, it is shown, can be motivated by broader ambitions to serve society. Such public service motivation consists of three types of motives: rational/instrumental, affective and normative. Our results show that employees in different public professional services show different patterns of motives, which we mainly explain by relating their motivations to the nature of the services they render – whether they render people-changing or people-processing services. These institutional dimensions imply that professional work can be managed, not so much by businesslike ‘market logic’ but by strengthening the meaning of the work professionals do. Professional pressures against organizations do not have to be suppressed – they can be productively used.

Professionals often have problems with governmental policies they have to implement. This can lead to diminished legitimacy and lower policy performance. The goal of this article is to identify the main reasons why professionals resist implementing new policies. An interdisciplinary approach is taken. From public administration literature, I use the policy alienation model, which consists of five dimensions: strategic, tactical and operational powerlessness, societal meaninglessness and client meaninglessness. These are possible reasons why professionals resist public policies (‘resistance to change’, a concept drawn from change management literature). I test these assumptions using a survey among 1,317 healthcare professionals. The results show that when professionals experience that a policy is meaningless for society or for their own clients, they show strong resistance. A lack of perceived influence is much less important in explaining resistance, although this is partly dependent on the particular profession someone belong to. The policy alienation model can help policy makers and managers to develop policies which are accepted by professionals. The article ends with practical recommendations for policy makers, managers and professionals.

In the 1980s, the organizational autonomy of primary schools in the Netherlands was increased to improve the quality of education. Today, new restrictions are being imposed on this autonomy, again as a means to improve educational quality. This article discusses whether this change can be seen as a systemic change or rather a further streamlining of the policies started in the 1980s.