The use of student opinion in a co-production perspective

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to investigate value co-creation through university performance assessment by student opinion and to verify how Italian state universities account for this process.   Over last decades... [ view full abstract ]

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to investigate value co-creation through university performance assessment by student opinion and to verify how Italian state universities account for this process.  

Over last decades universities have been faced to radical transformations due to the need to become more effective and efficient and able to keep up with changes and requests coming from the external environment. These transformations are part of the wider process of modernizing the public sector driven by the New Public Management movement, characterized by the idea that the introduction of market and private sector mechanisms would have ensured better performance and then New Public Governance based on the idea of a shared and interactive leadership to improve public sector. Universities are not anymore “ivory towers” but stakeholders’ engagement and co-production services are key crucial aspects of their running.  

The research wants to examine in what extend and how Italian state universities are able to account for this co-creation process. The aim is to give a contribution to the literature on accountability, focusing on accountability performance topic and its interaction with service co-production literature.  

The main research question is:  

In what extent universities are held to account for this process? 

Sub-questions:  

• Which are the actors involved?  
• Which kind of information are diffused and how?  
• Which are the effects of this diffusion in the value creation?  

Methodology: The sample of the paper refers to the sixty-six Italian state universities. We analyze the last published students’ opinion report on their website, written by the independent valuation organism (Nucleo di Valutazione). Through the MAXQDA software, we carry out a content analysis of the information reported. Every sentence is studied referring to the accountability variables chosen to analyze the documents: diffusion of the students’ opinion among the actors; type of data reported and use of the data to have a system’s improvement. The software is useful to quantify each variable able to answer research questions, to show the sensitivity of the Italian state universities context towards the co-creation accountability perspective, focusing on the students opinion. 

Findings: The results of the analysis show what type of information is reported in the documents analyzed. We want to underline which aspect is more frequently developed of the accountability variables in the Italian state universities, if these reflect the theories of the field and the interaction with value creation. The results reflect also what type of actors and how they are involved in the process of the use of students’ opinion report in Italian state universities.  

Relevance and implications for research and policy/practice: The study wants to contribute to the field giving an analysis of the state of the art about the value co-creation accountability in Italian state universities, referring to the students’ opinion report process. The findings could be an input of improvement for the future policies of the universities. It is a first step of a future research, which will analyze other dimensions of co-creation accountability