The performance of public corporate actors: Essays on effects of institutional and network embeddedness in supranational, national, and local collaborative contexts

Abstract

Public corporate actors – governments, government bureaucracies, and nongovernmental organizations strongly involved in the delivery of public services – address key social problems in society. They permeate many dimensions of our personal lives. They impact our health care, education, and social security. Yet, instances of policy failure and organizational mismanagement are numerous, and the global economic and financial crisis places pressure on public corporate actors to deliver services more efficiently and effectively. Under what conditions, then, do public corporate actors perform well? This book argues that public corporate actors do not operate in a vacuum: they are dependent on other actors in their environment to achieve their goals. The central question is whether differences in the performance of public corporate actors can be attributed to their particular embeddedness in institutional environments and inter-organizational networks. The book comprises four empirical essays that address the relationship between embeddedness and performance at three different levels of collaboration: supranational (EU member states), national (Dutch colleges), and local (Dutch local governments and non-governmental service providers). Performance is evaluated in terms of the degree to which public corporate actors are able to achieve their public goals. Where possible, these public goals are operationalized at the level of individual clients (e.g. students of Dutch colleges). The questions are analyzed with large-n comparative data, and using statistical methods such as multilevel analyses and network regression techniques for analyzing network data. The results show, first of all, that institutional embeddedness affects performance. This is most clear in the case of EU member states, which are better able to achieve nationally preferred decision outcomes when they hold the presidency of the Council, which provides them with specific procedural and informational advantages. Second, in terms of network embeddedness, the results show that maintaining a limited number of strong relations is best for performance. For example, Dutch colleges perform better when they are embedded in small, maximally connected subgroups of colleges that are characterized by strong interorganizational relations. Third, the modest but significant effect sizes show that network embeddedness is indeed an important driver of performance at the level of individual clients, but at the same time, that we should not overestimate its impact