In recent years, the public sector has been the subject of a thorough reassessment in a
significant number of countries. During this process of modernization, issues such as interorganizational
collaboration and managerial innovation have been progressively placed at
the forefront of practice and research. In particular, a number of countries have recently
re-organized their public sectors around more or less formalized networks or hybrid
inter-organizational forms, which are often led by a regulatory body and governed by a
cooperation agreement. The literature on inter-organizational relationships in the public
sector has evolved alongside the development of such cooperation agreements and innovative
forms of organizing. Nevertheless, despite the fact that networks formed by public
organizations, not-for-profit organizations, and private firms provide important services to
their relevant communities, limited attention has been dedicated to studying the role of
management control practices within inter-organizational relationships in public organizations.
This is an important gap in the existing literature that this Special Issue intends
to address. For this reason, and most importantly because public sector forms of interorganizational
collaborations are likely to differ significantly from those observed in the
private sector, in the first part of this Editorial we draw attention to some of the themes that
characterize the management and control of inter-organizational relations in the domain
of public administration. Next, we introduce the six papers which comprise this Special
Issue, and we briefly illustrate how each of them enhances our understanding of the role
of control systems within public sector networks. Building on the empirical evidence and
theoretical arguments offered by these studies, and after a brief review on the possible
alternative ways of conceptualizing the process of adopting new management practices,
we point to the further research that needs to be done if we are to understand the role that
management control practices play in public sector networks. In particular, we suggest that
there is a need to look inside management control practices, to explore what these practices
are and, how and why they enable the cooperative “ideal” to become real, as well as to stimulate
or hinder opportunities for public sector managerial innovation. It is concluded that
there are a number of issues yet to be explored if we are to deepen our understanding of the
formal and informal mechanisms of control which are the active elements of the so-called
“regulatory hybrids” in the public sector.