
Merlijn van HulstTilburg University | UVT · Public Law and Governance
Merlijn van Hulst
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84
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (84)
Public administration scholars and practitioners need to know how state‐of‐the‐art research is conducted. This article aims to contribute to the dialogue on qualitative analysis. Focusing on abductive analysis, it further unpacks and explicates the process and practices through which theoretical insight can be created from qualitative data. We offe...
This article addresses a critical gap in extant theorizing of urban transformations by focusing on the political and temporal dimensions of how innovations emerge, develop and become institutionalized into alternative systems of the everyday such as social centres, community gardens or urban commons. Going beyond current approaches, we offer a new...
In this paper we introduce the Urban Drama Lab as a new manifestation of Urban Living Labs. We expand current debates concerning Urban Living Labs by contrasting and comparing them with knowledge and practices developed in the field of theatre and performance. This enables us to scrutinise the ways in which stakeholders, issues and interests are re...
Deliberation is ubiquitous in street-level work. Scholars and practitioners increasingly promote it, as it has the potential to improve existing practices and procedures and provide customized, yet consistent, services. Little is known, however, about the situated performance of deliberation in street-level work. Drawing on Routine Dynamics Theory...
This article places those working for change in urban neighbourhoods at the centre of debates on urban transformation, directing attention to the importance of human agency in the work of assembling urban transformation. Drawing on cross-national qualitative fieldwork undertaken over 30 months shadowing 40 urban practitioners in neighbourhoods acro...
Extended narrative sensemaking consists of (a) agents generating actionable stories when faced with unexpected situations to which they need to respond in real time, and (b) emplotting actions that were undertaken and events that occurred during their response, in order to make deeper sense of them afterwards. When sensemakers revisit critical inci...
Civil servants in local government are increasingly expected to engage and collaborate with citizens and stakeholders. This article takes a practice approach to develop a generic picture of everyday work at the front lines of public engagement, highlighting the relational and improvisational aspects of that work that, to date, have remained underst...
Civil servants in local governments across the globe are increasingly expected to engage the public. Engagement processes lead to tensions between the rising expectation to engage the public on the one hand, and the bureaucratic and managerial expectations, which still largely characterise municipal organisations, on the other. Based on focus group...
Stories in interviews – Critical review of narrative criminology
Narrative criminology focuses on stories. It initially contrasted itself with standard approaches to interviewing. The founders of narrative criminology proposed that we understand that what the persons we investigate are telling us, as acting discursively and not as factual descripti...
The increased importance of democratic innovation reshapes the role of government and politics, including that of civil servants. Although public servants play an important role in making democratic innovations work in practice, a comprehensive overview of their roles and practices in democratic innovation is missing. This chapter develops such an...
Over ambtelijk vakmanschap op het raakvlak van gemeente en gemeenschap
This paper explores the topic of police storytelling from an ethnographic perspective. Ethnographies have always been full of stories, but it took a while for storytelling as such to draw attention to it within the broader study of police culture. Lately, we have seen increased attention for storytelling in policing. Recent studies cover new ground...
Extant literature on organizational storytelling assumes storytelling to be context-bound, but does not empirically detail or theorize how storytelling might differ across organizational settings. In the context of members’ everyday work lives, organizational storytelling research tends to focus on the content of stories and not on the actual telli...
The registrar in the municipality
The introduction of dualistic administration in the municipal government in the Netherlands in 2002 created the profession of the registrar. This article contains a description of the way Dutch municipal registrars fill in their office nowadays. The research shows that registrars deal with a wide range of tasks, th...
The backstage context of the police canteen has been identified as an important setting for officers to collectively give meaning to police work. This context is therefore of value to officers, police organizations, and their management. This article explores police storytelling during canteen breaks and the way frontline managers might position th...
The digital demos
E-democracy incorporates digital tools, the internet and social media to enhance democracy. There are many of these tools available to improve governmental responsiveness, transparency, and accountability, but also to support the inclusiveness, representativeness and influence of citizens’ participation. Examples are online petiti...
The ‘interpretive turn’ has gained traction as a research approach in recent decades in the empirical social sciences. While the contributions of interpretive research and interpretive research methods are clear, we wonder: Does an interpretive perspective lend itself to – or even demand – a particular style of teaching? This question was at the he...
The police is one of the most prominent organizations in the frontline of public administration. In order to deal with high external expectations, the organization has been said to develop and nurture multiple police cultures. Applying Grid Group Cultural Theory, or GGCT, we address the following questions: what sets of values, beliefs and practice...
This article responds to and develops the fragmented literature exploring intermediation in public administration and urban governance. It uses Q-methodology to provide a systematic comparative empirical analysis of practitioners who are perceived as making a difference in urban neighborhoods. Through this analysis, an original set of five profiles...
This entry outlines three aspects of ethnographic research. First, we describe in what way ethnographic research implies a distinct way of knowing. Second, we discuss the use of qualitative methods in ethnographic research. Third, we take up the role of writing, which is both a way of documenting research as well as an analytical tool in the resear...
This chapter begins by explicating the character of interpretive policy analysis and then looks at the history and present state of the field in the Netherlands. That history is narrated by looking at the actors (an ever-expanding group), places or settings and events who and which have made it at home in this state. We will also engage the specifi...
Introduction
What is interpretive policy analysis? How did it become part of the landscape of policy analysis in the Netherlands? What do Dutch interpretive policy analysts do? Given that interpretive policy analysis has flourished in the Netherlands – by contrast, for example, with the US – one might wonder whether there is a particularly ‘Dutch S...
The concept of frames or framing, especially cast as “frame analysis,” has an established history in public policy. Taking off from the work of Donald Schön and Martin Rein, we develop the idea of policy analytic framing, the more dynamic of the two terms, in ways that strengthen what we see as its promise for a more process-oriented and politicall...
Participation in neighbourhoods is a highly valued phenomenon. Participation is the basis of a shared social life, but it also makes everyday life, and the lived experience of people participating in it, political. From a public administration perspective, governance and formal policy-making are increasingly reaching out to citizens, instead of dra...
This article looks at the ways newspaper articles, through their stories, frame social
disorder in urban areas. The article compares reporting on four cases – two Dutch,
two Belgian – of violent confrontations between societal groups and between societal
groups and the police. News articles on the riots through time widen in terms of their
geograph...
Police storytelling is an understudied aspect of police culture(s). In the literature, two views can be found. One view is
that storytelling helps officers to learn the craft of policing. Another view is that storytelling is merely part of a ‘canteen
culture’ that deals with the lack of excitement in real police work. On the basis of a two-year eth...
From research subject to case; a matter of reasoning!?
From research subject to case; a matter of reasoning!?
Many researchers have a cognitive problem in connecting an abstract research theme to concrete cases. The authors demonstrate a scheme of stepwise reasoning to overcome this gap. This scheme may be helpful in choosing cases for empirical re...
In de reacties van Boeije en Tijmstra en Groenland is het mogelijk om minstens drie discussiepunten te ontwaren, waar wij in deze repliek graag op ingaan: het onderscheid tussen onderwerpkeuze en casusselectie, de basis waarop onderzoekers keuzes maken om tot een empirisch geval te komen, en het verschil tussen ‘zuiver’ wetenschappelijk onderzoek e...
In order to understand how exemplary work is done in the complex urban environment of disadvantaged neighborhoods, we studied a group of 43 individuals – civil servants, professionals and active citizens – who make a difference. Various so-called ‘exemplary practitioners’ were found in the literature and in the neighborhoods of five cities. The wor...
Interest in storytelling in planning has grown over the last two decades. In this article two strands of research are identified: research that looks at storytelling as a model of the way planning is done and research that looks at storytelling as a model for the way planning could or should be done. Recently, the second strand has received the mos...
Some actors in the public sphere are excellent at what they do. Even if they could hardly do their work alone, they make a difference. This article presents a search for what are called exemplary practitioners. It describes and compares a group of six practitioners found in the literature: the reflective practitioner, the deliberative practitioner,...
This article argues that in order to take into account changes in the governance era, performance assessment at the local level may well have to be refocused. Researchers will have to reconsider their strategies. They should consider the governance character of public administration and pay attention to co-operative settings and democratic aspects....
In order for co-production to become a viable way of working in public sector management and policy-making, practitioners need to be more reflective and researchers need to be more action oriented. This article discusses reflective practice, action research and the idea of a community of inquiry in which both practice and science work together. The...
Ethnographic fieldwork brings something special to the study of sense‐making in local governance: the ethnographer's access to the experiences lived by the people under study. In addition, ethnographers not only look for the experiences of the people in and around local government, they also draw on their own experiences. Because the experiences of...
Sinds het begin van het nieuwe millennium is de cultuur van het openbaar bestuur onderwerp
van discussie. Door de rampen in Enschede en Volendam, maar ook als gevolg
van politieke crises zoals in Den Helder en Delfzijl en naar aanleiding van de dualisering
van gemeentebesturen, is het concept bestuurscultuur in de discussie over het
lokaal bestuur...
Starting from the idea that individuals can make a difference in solving problems in present-day neighbourhoods, this paper presents a search for what are called exemplary practitioners. The paper describes and compares a group of six practitioners found in the literature: the street-level bureaucrat, the frontline worker, the reflective practition...