practices to explore how and why public sector networks
adopt particular control mechanisms. Since innovation
requires an ability to see things differently, future studies
could benefit from a deeper look “inside” management
control practices; i.e., by exploring What these practices
are and, How and Why they enable the cooperative “ideal”
to become realized, as well as whether they stimulate (or
hinder) opportunities for public sector innovation.
We believe it would be interesting to address the following
research questions, among others: what institutional,
political and contextual factors affect the deployment of
management control systems in public sector networks?
What happens when a lack of regulations or “holes” in government
reforms provide opportunities for the members
of the network to innovate with mechanisms of governance,
management and control? What are the interplays
between control and social mechanisms, such as trust,
when a lack of regulation creates a certain amount of
ambiguity? Additionally, since performance measurement
is critical to accountability, but is not easy to implement
in practice, we believe that further research should
address issues concerning both performance and performance
measurement in public sector networks; i.e. for
instance, what do we mean by public network performance?
What is the role of management control practices
in defining and measuring the concept of network performance?
Finally, even if a significant number of public sector
networks are created by mandate, what are the opportunities
for public managers, private contractors, and the users
of public services to embrace innovation and to promote
new management and control mechanisms which could
improve cooperation? We hope that future research will
shed light on, at least, some of these questions.