Relational Service Design and New Public Management: Navigating a Paradox?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Relational public services require a relational service design approach, yet the complexity of this approach is rarely acknowledged, and examples of its application in public administration literature are few and far between. This issue challenges the design of relational public services: designing with the status quo leads to designs for and of the status quo. To bridge the gap, this book chapter develops a new typology and practice of relational public service design. The typology distinguishes between designing for relational services and service designing as relating. The former emphasizes the role of relationships in the service outcome of public service design processes while the latter focuses on the role of relating in the role and practices of designers who are service designing. An auto-ethnographic case study from British Columbia (Canada – Turtle Island) illustrates this typology and depicts the challenge of designing relationally in a complex, non-relational public administration context, in this case a dominant New Public Management (NPM) paradigm. We demonstrate that public relational service design practice cannot take hold as long as designers and public managers are not aware of NPM’s dominance, precisely because NPM promotes and requires ‘unrelationality’, creating a paradox. To transcend this paradox, we propose expanding the concept of relationality in public service design in multiple dimensions: within the mindset of the public service designer and their practice. This involves integrating systemic design to address contextual complexity and reflexive relational design to counteract non-relational tendencies in their work environment. We conclude by suggesting future research directions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".