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Introduction and research aims
Lean (Womack et al. , 1990) principles and tools have been applied for many years in a variety of industries and contexts. Following their original applications in the automotive industry, Lean principles were subsequently implemented in the manufacturing industry (e.g. Shah and Ward, 2003; Melton, 2005; Taj, 2008; Karim and Arif-Uz-Zaman, 2013), in companies both large (e.g. Bhasin, 2012) and small (e.g. Achanga et al. , 2006; Lande et al. , 2016), in service-based organizations (e.g. George, 2003; Liker and Morgan, 2006; Bicheno, 2008; Taylor, 2008; Suárez-Barraza et al. , 2012), and, more recently, in the public sector (e.g. Radnor and Bucci, 2008; Radnor and Boaden, 2008; Taylor, 2008; Radnor and Osborne, 2013).
The fundamental Lean principle seeks to increase the efficiency of a given process through the identification and elimination of wasteful activities, described with the Japanese term of muda . This approach helps organizations to increase value-added activities (hereafter VA) - i.e., those that in the eyes of the final customer make a product or a service more valuable - and reduce non-value-added activities (NVA), decrease operational costs, increase quality, and facilitate business process reengineering and improvement initiatives (Hines and Taylor, 2000; Pettersen, 2009; Horne, 2014).
In the public sector context, Lean provides a powerful approach for assisting organizations in increasing the efficiency and quality of their services while simultaneously reducing wasteful activities, saving costs, and generating greater value for their customers and, more generally, all of their stakeholders (Radnor and Walley, 2008). This coincides with the current debate involving change management processes within public administrations, which have been under scrutiny across the globe for more than two decades (Radnor, 2010; Radnor and Osborne, 2013). In particular, strong rhetoric about the so-called "3 Es" (efficiency, effectiveness, and economy) first emerged within the aforementioned scenario (Barzelay, 1992; Hood, 1995; Van Dooren et al. , 2010) and later became part of the even stronger debate on the necessity of adopting strategic management and strategic planning tools (Bryson and Roering, 1987; Bryson, 1988, 2011; Moore, 1995; Poister and Streib, 1999) in order to manage the interdependencies between internal and external processes and services (Radnor and Johnston, 2013).
In this scenario, Lean is not to be regarded just as an operations management...