Network and interactivity : making sense of front-line governance in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia
- Jeremy Richardson, February 2003
Network arise when actors become engaged in ongoing interaction. Networks describe the architecture of this interactivity and networking defines the style and intensity of actor-to-actor engagement. Applied to public policy, networking arises from the ongoing interactions of officials in different agencies who use professional contacts to resolve problems, trade information, get resources and help clients. We hypothesized that national differences in patterns of networking would reflect one of three regimes - the market type, the managed partnership type and the standard bureaucratic type. Using structured interviews and questionnaires we examined the level and intensity of engagement between officials, and identified three distinct networking types - basic, public and civic. These reflect different patterns of engagement among government, for-profit and non-profit agencies occupying the same policy field, producing the same type of public service. The different repertoires help to explain the different forms of networking in the three countries, but there are also important differences between agency types within countries