Focusing on Co-production: An Important Concept for Understanding Social Service Delivery

Abstract

This study is aiming to understand two simple questions of ‘Co-production'―what is this concept means and how it take the collaboration behavior in social service delivery. The discussion started with several issues left by prior studies, we took a literature review on the conceptualization of co-production and trying to find its theoretical implications to the practice. The answerers to the questions can be summarized as follows. First, taking service users as stakeholders in service production and delivery could be considered as a very essential characteristic of co-production. However, co-production is not a normative good like ‘Partnership'. By considering co-production as an unavoidable property to the service delivery, the concept is changing the perception of collaboration behavior and interaction mechanism in service production and delivery process. Second, as an essential characteristic with service delivery process, Co-production contains all kind of stakeholder relationships, whether it is constrained by formal contract and separated with role-sharing in project. To the practice, the most important thing can be speculate as 3 perspectives―equality of execution, purpose co-existence, and the value co-creation in both individual service and service system.