Making Good Use of Partners: Differential Effects of Managerial Networking in the Social Care Domain
研究了荷兰地方政府管理者与不同外部伙伴的网络关系对社会关怀绩效的影响，发现与客户利益团体的双边网络比专业网络更能提升客户的社会参与度。
Public managers engage in networking relationships with a wide variety of external actors and organizations from which they can draw different types of support and resources. Most empirical studies on managerial networking merely present different intensities of external networking in general, as if it were a unidimensional concept. In practice, however, public managers strategically differentiate between functional or task-related groups of external partners, based on the specific policy context. Moreover, such differentiation in networking behavior can be expected to systematically impact agency and public program performance outcomes. This article derives contextualized hypotheses on how managerial networking affects the performance of Dutch local governments in the social care domain. Multilevel structural equation analyses of 3,257 social care clients in 71 local governments provide evidence that bilateral client-interest networking is more beneficial to the Social Support Act's overall goal of improving the level of social participation of clients than professional networking. Moreover, the effect is indirect: managerial networking with client interest groups improves the physical self-reliance of clients, enabling them to engage in social activities.