Public Value and Public Administration (Public Management and Change series) by Bryson

Author:Bryson
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2015-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSIONS

Despite its considerable limitations, PVM has one overriding advantage: it at least seeks to identify and track the course of public value attainment (and failure) where “public value” is not coterminous with marginal economic benefit, economic productivity, or economic development. It recognizes that there are factors, ones important to citizens in democratic systems, that are not captured in any extant economic approach to impact assessment. To date, the factors that have largely been considered in PVM applications are those related to technology, innovation, and research outcomes, but there is nothing inherent in the design of PVM that limits its scope to the science and technology policy realm. For example, components of PVM could be applied to address a number of questions within the field of public administration:

• Are managers’ knowledge of and commitment to public values related to their public service motivation?

• Do linkages among public values (hierarchical ordering, for example) affect managerial and stakeholder power relationships?

• How do broad public values inform managerial ethics?

• What social outcome measures should be included in agency, policy, and program evaluations?

• Are agencies that underperform based on market criteria also underperforming in their achievement of public values?

• What does a public values approach suggest for accountability measures?

• Are agencies in pursuit of similar constellations of public values more likely to have similar organizational structures?

• How is organizational capacity tied to public value failure?

• How do public value chains develop in and among networked actors?

As mentioned previously, many PVM applications are derived from public failure theory, but this does not mean that PVM applications cannot also be informed by Moore’s approach to creating public values. In fact, part of Moore’s strategic triangle suggests that managers should ensure that their actions are delivering public value to the citizenry. To aid in this process, managers might employ the PVM tool as a means of strategically planning or analyzing their own decision making processes or policies.

Still, PVM remains in an early stage of development. The fact that applications vary from one to another to such a high degree is symptomatic of this early stage development but at the same time show that the approach is robust and flexible. PVM may seem to be going in several directions at once, but another view is that it is rapidly evolving and it seems likely that those interested in public values in science and technology, as well as those simply interested in identifying approaches that do not rely entirely on traditional neoclassical economic thinking, will play a role in shaping PVM evolution, retaining promising adaptations, and discarding maladaptations.

In PVM’s focus on public values it is easy to overlook the “M”: mapping. The mapping aspect of PVM is an important attribute, however, because it implies that analyses must necessarily be dynamic and longitudinal, not just short case studies or cross-sectional data analyses. From the standpoint of technical progress, most has been in the nature of the mapping, ranging from carefully concatenated case studies to large-scale analyses of legislative maps and their correspondence to outcomes.

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