The Implementation Issues of Service Coproduction in Public Service

Service has for a long time been viewed as an interactive process during which the customer and service provider co-produce a service. Viewing citizens as co-producers of public service has also been accepted in some literatures. Although coproduction in business service and in public service has different features, the fundamental issues are almost the same when implementing the concept respectively in these two services. The purpose of this paper is from an implementation perspective to discuss the theoretical and practical implementation of the concept of coproduction in public service. A holistic viewpoint of coproduction is introduced and more building blocks for coproduction are borrowed from studies made in business service. Besides the theoretical analysis, the current research also introduces some phenomena and practices that have occurred in China in order to illustrate the issues to be discussed and to support the research.