A Service Perspective on Work with Vulnerable Children: Frontline Staff’s Perceptions of how Management Affects Value Creation

Authors

  • Ulrika Westrup Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden
  • Pernilla Danielsson Social Service Department Helsingborg City, Sweden

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v23i3/4.8629

Keywords:

welfare services, vulnerable children, value-creation, management, service dominant logic

Abstract

This article investigates frontline staff’s perceptions of how management affects theirview of value creation during day-to-day work with vulnerable children. The empirical data is based on dialogues during 15 meetings with 8 welfare professionals fromeducation, social services, and children’s and adolescent psychiatry. The analyticalapproach used in this article makes use of the service dominant logic (SDL) as a conceptual framework for studying frontline staff’s perceptions. The findings indicate that perceptions of management affect the staff’s view of value creation in orientationssuch as: (1) the delivery of ready-made expert solutions, (2) the simplification of value- creation processes, and (3) disconnected service systems. Overall, one conclusion drawn is that the SDL can be used as an analytical approach to understanding and exploring value creation in welfare services, thus contributing towards developing managerial applications for supporting frontline staff to a greater extent from a service perspective; however, there are some definite limitations.

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Author Biographies

Ulrika Westrup, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden

Ulrika Westrup is PhD of Business Administration and an associate Professor of Service Studies. Her research interests include service management, public management and administration, human service organizations, public service management; cross-boundary management, inter and intra organizational networking, and intrapreneurship/-entrepreneurship. She has studied public organizations since 1998.

Pernilla Danielsson, Social Service Department Helsingborg City, Sweden

Pernilla Danielsson has a Ph.D. in computational linguistics and was previously a researcher and the Academic Director at the Centre for Corpus Research, University of Birmingham. When moving back home to Sweden she began to work with innovation and development of collaborative methods for working with vulnerable children. Dr Danielsson is now the Manager of a collaborative department, PART, working over municipal and regional boundaries with education, social service and health care sectors.

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Published

2019-12-13

How to Cite

Westrup, U., & Danielsson, P. (2019). A Service Perspective on Work with Vulnerable Children: Frontline Staff’s Perceptions of how Management Affects Value Creation. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 23(3/4), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v23i3/4.8629

Issue

Section

Original Articles

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