Co-creating capacity? Empowerment and learning for front-line workers and organisations

This chapter offers new perspectives on front-line managers and workers as potential social innovators, detailing how co-creation transforms their identities, roles and relationships. Taking its point of departure in the metaphor of a sandcastle the chapter illustrates how in different national contexts achieving readiness for co-creation, rather than building sandcastles, requires new approaches to governing the collaborations across professional and organisational boundaries and managing cultural change. The chapter also highlights how service professionals and firstline managers work with reconceptualising their roles and relationships in welfare services to achieve greater social justice for the targeted individuals. It argues how co-creating meaningful service value may take much more in terms of efforts and time than pure organisational, administrative or technical changes which are rather seen as the outcomes of an (ongoing) shift in the approaches and mindsets about service delivery and management.