McMullin, C. (2023). Non-profit Organizations and Co-production: The Logics Shaping Professional and Citizen Collaboration

The notion of co-production has been theoretically well-developed in public administration and policy to explore new ways of engaging citizens in providing public services (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012;Lusch and Vargo 2006;Torfing, Sørensen, and Røiseland 2019).Little is known, however, about the beliefs, values, rules, and shared assumptionsinstitutional logicsthat shape co-production in nonprofits.In Non-Profit Organizations and Co-production: The Logics Shaping Professional and Citizen Collaboration, Caitlin McMullin (2023) addresses this gap, providing insightful empirical and theoretical elements by combining institutional logic and coproduction to explain the relationship between nonprofit professionals and citizens in designing, implementing, and delivering services from a comparative perspective.Leveraging three case studies in Sheffield (England), Lyon (France), and Montreal (Canada), the author argues that co-production in nonprofits varies and, thereby, results from complex and multiple interactions between actors, institutional pressures, and context specificities.In this argument, nonprofits are complex organizations that provide more than just a last resort for delivering those goods and services that neither the market nor the state offers.In Chapter Two, the author narrowly defines co-production "as the provision of services through regular, long-term relationships between professionalized service providers and service users or other members of the community" (p.21).Under co-production, professionals and citizens should cooperate to co-produce, design, and implement services.Seeking an operationalizable definition integrating co-production, the author defines nonprofits as the group of "professionalized service providers…who engage citizens/service users in co-production" (p.32).One novelty under this definition is that it moves away from studying the market-state-nonprofit organizational relationship, placing instead "the dynamics between individuals at the delivery level" (p.32) as a unit of analysis.As such, the embraced definition of co-production focuses on the services people needlike caring, entertainment, education, or healthinstead of adopting a broad definition encompassing other collective goods, such as advocacy and channeling social discontent.Similarly, this co-production concept emphasizes nonprofit professionals' role as "equivalent to public servants" (p.32) in co-producing services,