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Public Value Governance: Moving Beyond Traditional Public Administration and the New Public Management

John M. Bryson , Barbara C. Crosby , Laura Bloomberg

First published: 12 June 2014

https://doi-org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.1111/puar.12238

Citations: 540

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This article has been updated with minor copy-editing changes after first online publication.

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Abstract

A new public administration movement is emerging to move beyond traditional public administration and New Public Management. The new movement is a response to the challenges of a networked, multisector, no-one-wholly-in-charge world and to the shortcomings of previous public administration approaches. In the new approach, values beyond efficiency and effectiveness—and especially democratic values—are prominent. Government has a special role to play as a guarantor of public values, but citizens as well as businesses and nonprofit organizations are also important as active public problem solvers. The article highlights value-related issues in the new approach and presents an agenda for research and action to be pursued if the new approach is to fulfill its promise.

Creating public value is a hot topic for both public administration practitioners and scholars (Van der Wal, Nabatchi, and de Graaf 2013 ; Williams and Shearer 2011 ). Why is that? What is going on? We believe the answer lies with the continuing evolution of public administration thinking and practice. Just as New Public Management supplanted traditional public administration in the 1980s and 1990s as the dominant view, a new movement is now under way that is likely to eclipse it. The new approach does not have a consensually agreed name, but many authors point to the need for a new approach and to aspects of its emergence in practice and theory (e.g., Alford and Hughes 2008 ; Boyte 2005 ; Bozeman 2007 ; Denhardt and Denhardt 2011 ; Fisher 2014 ; Kalambokidis 2014 ; Kettl 2008 ; Moore 1995 , 2013 , 2014 ; Osborne 2010 ; Stoker 2006 ; Talbot 2010 ). For example, Janet and Robert Denhardt's excellent and widely cited book The New Public Service (2011) captures much of the collaborative and democratic spirit, content, and governance focus of the movement.

While efficiency was the main concern of traditional public administration, and efficiency and effectiveness are the main concerns of New Public Management, values beyond efficiency and effectiveness are pursued, debated, challenged, and evaluated in the emerging approach. In this regard, the emerging approach reemphasizes and brings to the fore value-related concerns of previous eras that were always present but not dominant (Denhardt and Denhardt 2011 ; Rosenbloom and McCurdy 2006 ). This renewed attention to a broader array of values, especially to values associated with democracy, makes it obvious why questions related to the creation of public value, public values more generally, and the public sphere have risen to prominence. This article highlights some of the key value-related issues in the new approach and proposes an agenda for the future.

First, we outline what we believe are the main contours of the emerging approach. Next, we clarify the meaning of value, public value, public values, and the public sphere; discuss how they are operationalized; and summarize important challenges to the concepts. We then discuss how public value and public values are used in practice. Finally, we present an agenda for research and action to be pursued if the new approach is to fulfill its promise. 1

An Emerging View of Public Administration

Public administration thinking and practice have always responded to new challenges and the shortcomings of what came before (Kaufman 1969 ; Peters and Pierre 1998 ). Table 1 , which builds on a similar table in Denhardt and Denhardt ( 2011 , 28–29), presents a summary of traditional public administration, the New Public Management, and the emerging approach. The new approach highlights four important stances that together represent a response to current challenges and old shortcomings. These include an emphasis on public value and public values, a recognition that government has a special role as a guarantor of public values, a belief in the importance of public management broadly conceived and of service to and for the public, and a heightened emphasis on citizenship and democratic and collaborative governance. These concerns, of course, are not new to public administration, but their emerging combination is the latest response to what Dwight Waldo ( 1948 ) called the periodically changing “material and ideological background.” Whether the new approach can live up to its promise—and particularly its democratic promise—is an open question that we explore later.

Table 1. Comparing Perspectives: Traditional Public Administration, New Public Management, and the Emerging Approach to Public Administration

Dimension	Traditional Public Administration	New Public Management	Emerging Approach to Public Administration (e.g., Denhardt and Denhardt's [ 2011 ] New Public Service)
Broad Environmental and Intellectual Context
Material and ideological conditions	Industrialization, urbanization, rise of modern corporation, specialization, faith in science, belief in progress, concern over major market failures, experience with the Great Depression and World War II, high trust in government	Concern with government failures, distrust of big government, belief in the efficacy and efficiency of markets and rationality, devolution and devolution	Concern with market, government, nonprofit and civic failures; concern with so-called wicked problems; deepening inequality; hollowed or thinned state; “downsized” citizenship; networked and collaborative governance; advanced information and communication technologies
Primary theoretical and epistemological foundations	Political theory, scientific management, naive social science, pragmatism	Economic theory, sophisticated positivist social science	Democratic theory, public and nonprofit management theory, plus diverse approaches to knowing
Prevailing view of rationality and model of human behavior	Synoptic rationality, “administrative man”	Technical and economic rationality, “economic man,” self-interested decision makers	Formal rationality, multiple tests of rationality (political, administrative, economic, legal, ethical), belief in public spiritedness beyond narrow self-interest, “reasonable person” open to influence through dialogue and deliberation
The Public Sphere or Realm
Definition of the common good, public value, the public interest	Determined by elected officials or technical experts	Determined by elected officials or by aggregating individual preferences supported by evidence of consumer choice	What is public is seen as going far beyond government, although government has a special role as a guarantor of public values; common good determined by broadly inclusive dialogue and deliberation informed by evidence and democratic and constitutional values
Role of politics	Elect governors, who determine policy objectives	Elect governors, who determine policy objectives; empowered managers; administrative politics around the use of specific tools	“Public work,” including determining policy objectives via dialogue and deliberation; democracy as “a way of life”
Role of citizenship	Voter, client, constituent	Customer	Citizens seen as problem-solvers and co-creators actively engaged in creating what is valued by the public and is good for the public
Government and Public Administration
Role of government agencies	Rowing, seen as designing and implementing policies and programs in response to politically defined objectives	Steering, seen as determining objectives and catalyzing service delivery through tool choice and reliance if possible on markets, businesses, and nonprofit organizations	Government acts as convener, catalyst, collaborator; sometimes steering, sometimes, rowing, sometimes partnering, sometimes staying out of the way
Key objectives	Politically provided goals; implementation managed by public servants; monitoring done through bureaucratic and elected officials’ oversight	Politically provided goals; managers manage inputs and outputs in a way that ensures economy and responsiveness to consumers	Create public value in such a way that what the public most cares about is addressed effectively and what is good for the public is put in place
Key values	Efficiency	Efficiency and effectiveness	Efficiency, effectiveness, and the full range of democratic and constitutional values
Mechanisms for achieving policy objectives	Administer programs through centralized, hierarchically organized public agencies or self-regulating professions	Create mechanisms and incentive structures to achieve policy objectives especially through use of markets	Selection from a menu of alternative delivery mechanisms based on pragmatic criteria; this often means helping build cross-sector collaborations and engaging citizens to achieve agreed objectives
Role of public manager	Ensures that rules and appropriate procedures are followed; responsive to elected officials, constituents, and clients; limited discretion allowed to administrative officials	Helps define and meet agreed upon performance objectives; responsive to elected officials and customers; wide discretion allowed	Plays an active role in helping create and guide networks of deliberation and delivery and help maintain and enhance the overall effectiveness, accountability, and capacity of the system; responsive to elected officials, citizens, and an array of other stakeholders; discretion is needed but is constrained by law, democratic and constitutional values, and a broad approach to accountability
Approach to accountability	Hierarchical, in which administrators are accountable to democratically elected officials	Market driven, in which aggregated self-interests result in outcomes desired by broad groups of citizens seen as customers	Multifaceted, as public servants must attend to law, community values, political norms, professional standards, and citizen interests
Contribution to the democratic process	Delivers politically determined objectives and accountability; competition between elected leaders provides overarching accountability; public sector has a monopoly on public service ethos	Delivers politically determined objectives; managers determine the means; skepticism regarding public service ethos; favors customer service	Delivers dialogue and catalyzes and responds to active citizenship in pursuit of what the public values and what is good for the public; no one sector has a monopoly on public service ethos; maintaining relationships based on shared public values is essential

Sources: Adapted principally from Denhardt and Denhardt ( 2011 , 28–29), with further adaptations from Stoker ( 2006 , 44); Kelly, Mulgan, and Muers ( 2002 ); and Boyte ( 2011 ).

Traditional Public Administration

Traditional public administration (Stoker 2006 ; Waldo 1948 ) arose in the United States in the late 1900s and matured by the mid-twentieth century as a response to a particular set of conditions. These included the challenges of industrialization, urbanization, the rise of the modern corporation, faith in science, belief in progress, and concern over major market failures. Mostly successful experience with government responses to World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II helped solidify support for traditional public administration and built strong trust in government as an agent for the good of all. In its idealized form, politics and administration were quite separate (Wilson 1887 ). Goals were determined in the first instance by elected officials and only secondarily refined by technical experts in response to political direction. Government agencies were the primary deliverers of public value through the way they designed and implemented politically defined objectives (Salamon 2002 ). Efficiency in government operations was the preeminent value. Citizens were viewed primarily as voters, clients, or constituents. Of course, traditional public administration in practice was always more deeply enmeshed in politics than its idealized form would suggest (Denhardt and Denhardt 2011 , 6–7; Waldo 1948 ), and government agencies were themselves prone to failure (Wolf 1979 ).

New Public Management

After a long gestation period, the New Public Management (Hood 1991 ) became the dominant approach to public administration in the 1980s and 1990s. In the United States, the change was marked by Osborne and Gaebler's best-selling book Reinventing Government (1992) and the Bill Clinton administration's National Performance Review (Gore 1993 ). New Public Management arose out of a concern with government failures, a belief in the efficacy and efficiency of markets, a belief in economic rationality, and a push away from large, centralized government agencies toward devolution and privatization.

In New Public Management, public managers are urged to “steer, not row.” They steer by determining objectives, or what should be done, and by catalyzing service delivery, or how it should be done (rowing), through their choice of a particular “tool” or combination of tools (e.g., markets, regulation, taxes, subsidies, insurance, etc.) for achieving the objectives (Salamon 2002 ). Markets and competition—often among actors from different sectors—are the preferred way of delivering government services in the most efficient and effective way to recipients seen as “customers,” not citizens. Public managers should be empowered and freed from constrictions so that they can be “entrepreneurial” and “manage for results.” In practice, of course, managers often face the worst of circumstances in which they are accountable for results but not allowed to manage for results (Moynihan 2006 ).

While the challenges that prompted traditional public administration and New Public Management have not disappeared, new material conditions and challenges have emerged. They center on how to govern, not just manage, in increasingly diverse and complex societies facing increasingly complex problems (Kettl 2002 ; Osborne 2010 ; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011 ). Natural disasters, failures of large parts of the economy, unevenly effective health care and education systems, a stagnant middle class, deepening inequality, and bankrupt communities offer recent examples that have challenged not just governments but also businesses, nonprofits, and civil society generally. In the United States, these challenges are occurring at a time of historic distrust of a broad range of institutions (Gallup 2014 ).

The Emerging Approach

The responses to these new challenges do not yet constitute a coherent whole, but the outlines of a new approach are becoming clear in, for example, Janet and Robert Denhardt's (2011) widely cited framework called the New Public Service, as well as in Gerry Stoker's ( 2006 ) public value management, Barry Bozeman's ( 2007 ) managing publicness, Stephen Osborne's new public governance (2010), and political theorist Harry Boyte and colleagues’ (Boyte 2011 ) new civic politics. These scholars draw on different theoretical and epistemological foundations than traditional public administration or New Public Management. Citizens, citizenship, and democracy are central to the new approach, which harks back to Dwight Waldo's ( 1948 ) abiding interest in a democratic theory of administration. The approach advocates more contingent, pragmatic kinds of rationality, going beyond the formal rationalities of Herbert Simon's ( 1997 ) “administrative man” and the “economic man” of microeconomics. Citizens are seen as quite capable of engaging in deliberative problem solving that allows them to develop a public spiritedness of the type that Tocqueville saw in the American republic of the 1830s when he talked about the prevalence of “self-interest rightly understood” (Tocqueville 1840; see also Mansbridge 1990 ).

Scholars arguing for the new approach see public value emerging from broadly inclusive dialogue and deliberation. The conversation includes community members from multiple sectors because, as Jørgensen and Bozeman note, “public values and public value are not the exclusive province of government, nor is government the only set of institutions having public value obligations, [though clearly] government has a special role as guarantor of public values” (2007, 373–74). This aspect of the approach has many precursors, including, for example, the work of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom 1973 ; Ostrom and Ostrom 1971 ), which also provides important underpinnings for understanding networked and collaborative governance (McGinnis and Ostrom 2012 ; Thomson and Perry 2006 ). The approach encompasses what Boyte terms “public work,” meaning “self-organized, sustained efforts by a mix of people who solve common problems and create things, material or symbolic, of lasting civic value” (2011, 632–33), while developing civic learning and capacity as part of the process. This work can engage many different kinds of people, including public-spirited managers from across sectors and citizens. Citizens thus move beyond their roles as voters, clients, constituents, customers, or poll responders to becoming problem solvers, co-creators, and governors actively engaged in producing what is valued by the public and good for the public (Briggs 2008 ). Budd ( 2014 ) captures the importance of work in general for the creation of public value and the special role that labor unions have often played in its creation.

In the new approach, government agencies can be conveners, catalysts, and collaborators—sometimes steering, sometimes rowing, sometimes partnering, and sometimes staying out of the way. In addition, the way in which government's key objectives are set changes. In traditional public administration, elected officials set goals, and implementation is up to public servants, overseen by elected officials’ and senior administrators. In New Public Management, elected officials still set goals. Managers then manage inputs and outputs in a way that ensures economy and responsiveness to customers. In contrast, in the new approach, both elected officials and public managers are charged with creating public value so that what the public cares about most is addressed effectively and what is good for the public is pursued. This change for public managers raises obvious questions of democratic accountability, an issue to which we will turn later. On the other hand, the change is essentially a recognition that managers have always played an important role in goal setting because of the advice they give to elected officials and the need to act in the face of often ambiguous policy direction.

As noted, in the emerging approach, the full range of democratic and constitutional values are relevant. Policy makers and public managers are also encouraged to consider the full array of alternative delivery mechanisms and choose among them based on pragmatic criteria. This often means helping build cross-sector collaborations and engaging citizens to achieve mutually agreed objectives (Agranoff 2006 ; Fung 2006 ; McGuire 2006 ). Public managers’ role thus goes well beyond that in traditional public administration or New Public Management; they are presumed able to help create and guide networks of deliberation and delivery and help maintain and enhance the overall effectiveness, capacity, and accountability of the system.

The nature of discretion also changes. In traditional public administration, public managers have limited discretion; New Public Management encourages wide discretion in meeting entrepreneurial and performance targets. In the emerging approach, discretion is needed, but it is constrained by law, democratic and constitutional values, and a broad approach to accountability. Accountability becomes multifaceted and not just hierarchical (as in traditional public administration) or more market driven (as in New Public Management), as public servants must attend to law, community values, political norms, professional standards, and citizen interests (Dubnick and Frederickson 2010 ; Mulgan 2000 ; Romzek, LeRoux, and Blackmar 2012 ). In the emerging multisector collaborative environment, no one sector has a monopoly on public service ethos, although government plays a special role; in addition, there is less skepticism about government and a less strong preference for markets and customer service.

Finally, in this emerging approach, public administration's contribution to the democratic process is also different. In both traditional public administration and New Public Management, managers are not very directly involved in the democratic process, viewed mainly as elections and legislative deliberation. In contrast, in the emerging approach, government delivers dialogue and catalyzes and responds to active citizenship in pursuit of what the public values and what is good for the public. The extent to which it is possible for dialogue and deliberation to do so in practice remains unclear, however, in systems that favor elites and are stacked against ordinary citizens (Dahl and Soss 2014 ).

The emerging approach is partly descriptive of current and emerging practices, partly normative in its prescriptions regarding the role of government and public managers, and partly hopeful as a response to the challenges posed by a “changing material and ideological background.” In contrast to traditional public administration and New Public Management, however, the emerging approach often looks ambiguous, unevenly grounded theoretically, relatively untested, and lacking in clear guidance for practice. Yet what else can one expect in a shared-power, multisector, no-one-wholly-in-charge world? (Cleveland 2002 ; Crosby and Bryson 2005 ). Old approaches have their own problems, and the new approach is still emerging. One thing is clear, however, and that is the fundamental importance in the emerging approach of understanding what is meant by public value, public values, and the public sphere. Progress must be made on clarifying, measuring, and assessing these concepts if the new approach is gain added traction.

Value, Public Value, Public Values, and the Public Sphere

The dictionary definition of value as “relative worth, utility, or importance” of something (Merriam-Webster, accessed online April 1, 2014) leaves open a number of questions that have troubled philosophers for centuries and reappear in the current debate over public values, public value, and the public sphere. These questions concern at least the following: (1) whether the objects of value are subjective psychological states or objective states of the world; (2) whether value is intrinsic, extrinsic, or relational; (3) whether something is valuable for its own sake or as a means to something else; (4) whether there are hierarchies of values; (5) who does the valuing; (6) how the valuing is done; and (7) against what criteria the object of value is measured. We return to these questions as we discuss four major contributions to the public value literature and in our conclusions.

The public value literature distinguishes among (1) public values, which are many (e.g., Andersen et al. 2012 ; Bozeman 2002 , 2007 ; Jørgenson and Bozeman 2007 ; Meynhardt 2009 ; Van Wart 1998 ); (2) creating public value, defined as producing what is either valued by the public, is good for the public, including adding to the public sphere, or both, as assessed against various public value criteria (Alford 2008 ; Alford and O'Flynn 2009 ; Benington and Moore 2011 ; Stoker 2006 ); and (3) the public sphere or public realm, within which public values and value are developed and played out (Benington 2011 ).

Barry Bozeman on Public Values

Bozeman, a leading voice in the public value literature, focuses on the policy or societal level. He writes, “A society's public values are those providing normative consensus about: (1) the rights, benefits, and prerogatives to which citizens should (and should not) be entitled; (2) the obligations of citizens to society, the state, and one another; and (3) the principles on which governments and policies should be based” (2007, 17). Although public values in a democracy are typically contested, a relative consensus is discernible from constitutions, legislative mandates, policies, literature reviews, opinion polls, and other formal and informal sources (Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007 ).

What Bozeman terms public value failure occurs when neither the market nor the public sector provides goods and services required to achieve public values, which are operationalized in terms of a set of eight criteria, for example, political processes and social cohesion should be sufficient to ensure effective communication and processing of public values, and sufficient transparency exists to permit citizens to make informed judgments (Bozeman 2002 , 2007 ; see also Kalambokidis 2014 ). Public value creation is the extent to which public values criteria are met, where these are some combination of input, process, output, and outcome measures. Public values for Bozeman thus are measureable, although clearly there can be disagreements about how the values are to be conceptualized and measured. One implication is that analysts, citizens, and policy makers should focus on what public values are and on ways in which institutions and processes are necessary to forge agreement on and to achieve public values in practice (Davis and West 2009 ; Jacobs 2014 ; Kalambokidis 2014 ; Moulton 2009 ).

Note that Bozeman's approach is both positive, when he asks what the normative consensus on values is, and normative, when he argues that public values failures should be corrected. Note, too, that Bozeman ( 2007 ) is silent on the role of the nonprofit sector and, to a lesser extent, on the public sphere more generally; on the rights, responsibilities, or weights to be given to noncitizens; and on the role and importance of power in contests over public values. Regarding the effects of political power, Jacobs ( 2014 ) believes that in the U.S. context, Bozeman severely underestimates the extent of dissensus, the disproportionate influence of affluent citizens and organized interests, and the extent to which governing structures favor inaction and drift.

Mark Moore on Creating Public Value

Whereas Bozeman focuses on the policy or societal level, Mark Moore ( 1995 , 52–55), another important voice in the literature, focuses on public managers. He, too, is concerned about devaluing of government and public managers in an era of economic individualism and market ascendency, and he initially conceived of public value as the public management equivalent of shareholder value. He seeks both a persuasive rhetoric and an approach to discerning, championing, and achieving public value—or what he calls creating public value. Public value primarily results from government performance, so his view of public value creation in this early book is narrower than that in much of the later literature.

Moore believes that citizens want from their governments some combination of the following that together encompass public value: (1) high-performing, service-oriented public bureaucracies, (2) public organizations that are efficient and effective in achieving desired social outcomes, and (3) public organizations that operate justly and fairly and lead to just and fair conditions in the society at large. While Moore's definition of public value is vaguer than Bozeman's, it highlights reasonably specific public values: efficiency, effectiveness, socially and politically sanctioned desired outcomes, procedural justice, and substantive justice. Like Bozeman's, Moore's definition of public value can encompass input, process, output, and outcome measures.

Moore ( 2014 ) develops the philosophical foundations of his approach to public value as a prelude to establishing what he calls “public value accounting.” He makes three assertions: First, a public collectively defined through democratic processes is the appropriate arbiter of public value when collectively owned assets of government are being deployed. Second, collectively owned assets include not only government money but also state authority. Third, assessing the value of government production relies on an aggregation of costs and benefits broadly conceived, as well as on collective determinations concerning the welfare of others, duties to others, and conceptions of a good and just society. Moore ( 2013 , forthcoming ) uses these philosophical premises to develop a public value account. On the benefit side is the achievement of collectively valued outcomes, while on the cost side are the costs of using public authority and collectively owned assets.

Moore argues that public managers should use the strategic triangle (1995, 22–23). Strategy must be (1) aimed at achieving something that is substantively valuable (i.e., must constitute public value), (2) legitimate and politically sustainable, and (3) operationally and administratively feasible (see also Alford and O'Flynn 2009 ). Moore “equates managerial success in the public sector with initiating and reshaping public sector enterprises in ways that increase their value to the public in both the short and the long run” (1995, 10), which requires a “restless, value-seeking imagination” (Benington and Moore 2011 , 3).

Moore is speaking primarily to current and prospective public managers in a democratic society and secondarily to their elected leaders. Like Bozeman, an implication of Moore's work is the need for a healthy democracy with supporting institutions and the processes necessary to forge agreement on and achieve public values in practice.

For Moore, like Bozeman, public value generally refers to objective states of the world that can be measured. Also like Bozeman, Moore sees public value as extrinsic and also intrinsic to the functioning of an effective democratic polity. Again, like Bozeman, something being evaluated may be deemed to hold inherent value or may be seen as a means to something else. Unlike Bozeman, Moore does assume a hierarchy of values in which public organizational effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, justness, and fairness in the context of democratic governance are prime values. For Moore, ultimately, elected officials and the citizenry do the valuing, but public managers also play an important role. The valuing can be shown through the public value account.

Rhodes and Wanna in particular have criticized Moore and his supporters. Not clear, they say, is whether their approach is “a paradigm, a concept, a model, a heuristic device, or even a story . . . [As a result,] it is all things to all people” (2007, 408). They believe Moore downplays the importance of politics and elected officials, overly emphasizes the role of public managers, and trusts too much in public organizations, private sector experience, and the virtues of public servants (409–12).

Alford (2008; see also Alford and O'Flynn 2009 ) mounts a spirited defense of Moore and offers refutations of each of Rhodes and Wanna's points. He emphasizes Moore's strategic triangle, which sees the authorizing environment as placing “a legitimate limit on the public manager's autonomy to shape what is meant by public value” (Alford 2008 , 177). Alford also believes Rhodes and Wanna operate out of an “old” public administration paradigm that draws a sharp distinction between politics and administration and thus ignore the fact that political appointees and civil servants often have considerable leeway to influence policy and decisions.

Dahl and Soss ( 2014 ) also level sharp criticism at Moore's conception of creating public value. In their view, by posing public value as an analogue to shareholder value, seeing democratic engagement in primarily instrumental terms, and viewing public value as something that is produced, Moore and his followers actually mimic the very neoliberal rationality they seek to resist and run the risk of furthering neoliberalism's de-democratizing and market-enhancing consequences. Public managers might unwittingly be agents of “downsizing democracy” (Crenson and Ginsberg 2002 ). The cautions that Dahl and Soss raise are serious and should be addressed by those seeking to advance the public value literature.

In addition, Jacobs ( 2014 ) believes that Moore's hopeful view of public management can be Pollyannaish, at least in the United States, given sharply divided public opinion on many issues, intensely partisan politics, the power of organized interests, and the many veto points built into governance arrangements. Clearly, public managers are constrained in a democratic society—and rightly so—but there are also many examples of enterprising, public value–producing activities that demonstrate that public managers can, in fact, be active agents in creating public value. The public value literature thus will need to explore much further the conceptual, political, organizational, managerial, and other limits on public managers seeking to create public value in particular circumstances.

Timo Meynhardt on Public Value

Timo Meynhardt, in an important but far less well-known approach, believes that public value is constructed out of “values characterizing the relationship between an individual and ‘society,’ defining the quality of the relationship” (2009, 206). The relationship's quality is assessed subjectively by individuals, but when there is intersubjective weight attached to these assessments, they become objective and might reach Bozeman's requirement of a reasonable normative consensus. Meynhardt believes that public value is for the public when it concerns “evaluations about how basic needs of the individuals, groups, and the society as a whole are influenced in relationships involving the public” (212). Public value is also about value from the public, when it is “drawn from the experience of the public.” Public value for Meynhardt, too, can refer to input, process, output, and outcome measures.

Meynhardt posits four basic dimensions (or content categories) of public value closely connected to a widely cited psychological theory of basic needs (Epstein 1989 , 1993 , 2003 ) and related to categories in traditional welfare economics. The categories are moral-ethical, political-social, utilitarian-instrumental, and hedonistic-aesthetical. The “value” that an individual attaches to an experience is based on how well the experience satisfies his or her basic needs as assessed against these dimensions. Note that the assessment is a subjective, emotional-motivational, and valenced reaction to an experience of some sort involving the “public,” such as an encounter with a government program, an election, or visit to a public space. Intersubjectively equivalent assessments are a broad measure of the extent to which public value has been created or diminished. To summarize, Meynhardt ( 2009 , 212) sees public value creation as situated in relationships between the individual and society, founded in individuals, constituted by subjective evaluations against basic needs, activated by and realized in emotional-motivational states, and produced and reproduced in experience-intense practices.

In contrast to Bozeman and Moore's approaches, Meyhnardt's is nonprescriptive; it is far more psychologically based; and it emphasizes more the interpenetration of public and private spheres. Unlike the other two authors, he pays little attention to the institutions and supra-individual processes involved in public value creation. However, like Bozeman and Moore, Meynhardt also sees public value as measurable, in his case against the dimensions he outlines.

John Benington on the Public Sphere

Beyond public values and creating public value, there is the public sphere. John Benington sees the public sphere as “a democratic space” that includes the “web of values, places, organizations, rules, knowledge, and other cultural resources held in common by people through their everyday commitments and behaviors, and held in trust by government and public institutions” (2011, 31). It is “what provides a society with some sense of belonging, meaning, purpose and continuity, and which enables people to thrive and strive amid uncertainty” (43). Like Dewey (1927), Benington believes that the public is not given but must be continuously constructed. Public value is necessarily contested, and it is often established through a continuous process of dialogue. For Benington, the public sphere is thus the space—psychological, social, political, institutional, and physical—within which public values and public value are held, created, or diminished. Public value includes what adds to the public sphere. While Benington himself is committed to democracy, note that his extended definition of the public sphere can apply to other forms of government.

Operationally, for both practitioners and scholars, determining who and what the “public” is can be problematic (Frederickson 1991 ). Nonetheless, Meynhardt sees the “public” is an “indispensable operational fiction necessary for action and orientation in a complex environment” (2009, 205). In other words, as complexity increases the more “the public” becomes a social construct “necessary for acting, but hard to pin down” (204).

In practical terms, the public may already be known, may need to make itself known, or may need to be created. For example, Moore's normative approach requires public managers to look to their “authorizing environments” for direction, although they may conclude that the public can be best served by working to change aspects of the authorizing environment. Moore also asserts that elected officials and the citizens (often through elections) are the arbiters of public value (1995, 38), even when political decision making is deeply problematic on moral grounds. In democratic societies, citizens and managers can challenge these questionable decisions, but not ignore them (Moore 1995 , 54–55). For Dewey (1927), a public is “created” when citizens experience the negative consequences of situations beyond their control (resulting, for example, from market or governmental activities). In other circumstances, public administrators may need to “call a public into being” (Moore 2014 ), for example, when designing and managing a public participation process (Cooper, Bryer, and Meek 2006 ; Fung 2006 ; Nabatchi 2012 ).

Public values scholars look to a variety of sources for evidence of what the “public” is, wants, or is good for it. Sources include, for example, literature reviews, legislation, rules and regulations, and opinion polls (Bozeman 2007 ; Jacobs 2014 ; Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007 ). Meynhardt ( 2009 , forthcoming ), as noted, relies on psychological theory to derive the dimensions against which public values can be assessed; he has developed and published results from the use of psychological questionnaires based on this work. Moulton ( 2009 ) looks to “public values institutions,” which can be of three types, with the three types presumed to differentially affect how public values are realized in practice. Regulatory institutions are legally sanctioned and can establish rules, surveillance mechanisms, and incentives to influence behavior. Normative-associative institutions help create expectations or norms that influence social life through prescriptive, evaluative, or obligatory guidance. Finally, cultural cognitive institutions help create shared conceptions of the nature of social reality and the frames used to create meaning. The three kinds of institutions are analytic constructs and can and do overlap in practice. Andersen et al. ( 2012 ) look to archetypal forms of governance to derive the content of public values; the forms are hierarchy, clans or professions, networks, and markets.

How Public Value Relates to Other Concepts

Part of public value's importance is that it encompasses and goes beyond several other venerable concepts that highlight the proper ends and means of government and broader public action. Among these are the public interest, the common good, public goods, and commonwealth. Public interest originally was associated with the state, not with the public sphere more generally (Gunn 1969 ), and thus it typically refers to the reasons for, or consequences of, government action (Alexander 2002 , 226–27). Beyond that, attempts to operationalize the public interest have proved difficult (Mitnick 1976 ; Sorauf 1957 ), although not necessarily in the case of applying relatively clear public laws and regulations to specific decisions (Alexander 2002 ). Vagueness and difficulties of operationalization also plague related terms such as the common good.

Public goods refers to production of nonrival, nonexcludable goods and services. Public value differs in three ways: First, it includes remedies to market failures beyond inadequate provision of public goods, along with the institutional arrangements that make the remedies possible. This fits clearly with Bozeman's ( 2007 ) view. Public goods are outputs and public value includes the outcomes made possible by public goods. This fits well with Moore's ( 1995 ) view. Finally, public value has value for the valuer, which accords well with Meynhardt's ( 2009 ) approach.

Probably commonwealth comes closest to capturing the meaning of public value, as the term originally meant “common well-being.” In the United States from the colonial era through the World War II era, as Boyte ( 1989 ) points out, commonwealth meant two things. First, it meant a republican or democratic government of equals concerned with the general welfare and an active citizenry throughout the year. Second, the term “brought to mind the touchstone, or common foundations, of public life—the basic resources and public goods of a community over which citizens assumed responsibility and authority” (Boyte 1989 , 4–5). Thus, while similar to public value in meaning, commonwealth is not the same. The identification with a republican or democratic government narrows the definition, while the common foundations of public life are more closely related to the idea of the public sphere.

How the Ideas of Creating Public Value and Policy-Level and Societal Public Values Are Used in Practice and Research

The different strands in the public value literature clearly can be linked. Specifically, Moore's managerially focused idea of creating public value involves producing what the public values or is good for the public, the merits of which can be assessed against a set of more specific public values. These can include Bozeman's and others’ societal or policy-focused public value criteria, Meynhardt's psychologically focused criteria, Benington's idea of enhancing the public sphere, and other important values in the public administration field and literature. All may or should be considered when assessing value creation in specific instances.

Uses of the Creating Public Value Idea in Practice and Research

The idea of creating public value has been used as a paradigm, rhetoric, narrative, and kind of performance (Alford and O'Flynn 2009 , 178–85). Stoker ( 2006 ) proposes “public value management” as a new paradigm that is better suited to networked governance than traditional public administration or the New Public Management. He is thus moving beyond Moore's primary focus on public managers at the top of a public bureaucracy delivering services or obligations to a focus on networked interorganizational and cross-sector relations and governance.

Stoker makes the case that traditional public administration and New Public Management are not up to the job of managing in a networked public environment, but he only vaguely considers how leaders and managers in specific instances would achieve efficiency, accountability, and equity, along with broader democratic values (O'Flynn 2007 ; Williams and Shearer 2011 ). Nor does he explain how leaders and managers should cope with a democracy having problems with low voter turnout, divided government, competing organized interests, and competing conceptions of what public value might be in any situation (Davis and West 2009 ; Jacobs 2014 ).

Critics of public value argue that it has been used as a rhetorical strategy to protect and advance the interests of bureaucrats and their organizations (Roberts 1995 ). The criticism unquestionably has merit in particular cases. As noted earlier, Dahl and Soss ( 2014 ) highlight the potential of public value rhetoric to undermine democratic processes. Smith, however, believes that a “focus on public value enables one to bring together debates about values, institutions, systems, processes and people. It also enables one to link insights from different analytical perspectives, including public policy, policy analysis, management, economics, and political science” (2004, 68–69). Similarly, Fisher ( 2014 ) offers a narrative that contrasts an oppositional approach to public decision making (public/private, black/white, right/wrong, mine/yours) with an “opposable” or integrative approach wherein public managers can link seemingly unrelated, or contradictory, and sometimes paradoxical constructs to achieve a higher level of public value across sectors. The stories that managers create thus can be self-serving rhetoric but also a public-regarding story about what should be, or has been, created.

Finally, as performance, public value can serve as a performance measurement and management framework. A key advantage of the public value idea is that there is no single bottom line (Kalambokidis 2014 ). Moore ( 2013 , 2014 , forthcoming ), for example, proposes that managers look at costs and benefits as well as at less tangible aspects when they assess public value creation. Bozeman ( 2002 , 2007 ) and Talbot ( 2010 ) argue for using a variety of public value criteria to discern how much public value has been created or diminished. A focus on public value also stimulates attention to the long-term viability and reliability of public investments (Fisher 2014 ).

A number of governments have made explicit or implicit use of the public value framework. Kernaghan ( 2003 ), for example, examines the values statements of four Westminster-style governments; each contains a range of values beyond efficiency. The “joined-up government,” “whole-of-government,” and collaborative governance initiatives that developed in many countries in response to the fragmentation caused by New Public Management were about coordination and also about recovery and pursuit of public values beyond narrowly defined results and efficiency (Christensen and Lægreid 2007 ). Unfortunately, some of these efforts have used excessively narrow interpretations of public value. For example, the British government under Tony Blair made explicit use of public value as a way of thinking about performance, but it operationalized Moore's strategic triangle by focusing on services (for operational capability), outcomes (for public value), and trust and legitimacy (for the authorizing environment) (Kelly, Mulgan, and Muers 2002 ). Accenture consultants Cole and Parston ( 2006 ) further diminish the meaning of public value. Their approach just repackages existing approaches to performance measurement and management under a different label (Alford and O'Flynn 2009 , 185). Dahl and Soss's ( 2014 ) cautions about the ease with which the public value approach can be hijacked for purposes not intended by its principal authors are on clear display.

The various approaches to creating public value can be used positively or normatively—and have been. Williams and Shearer observe that “the most striking feature is the relative absence of empirical investigation of either the normative propositions of public value or its efficacy as a framework for understanding public management” (2011, 1374). They do note, however, some exemplary studies. For example, O'Toole, Meier, and Nicholson-Crotty ( 2005 ) found in a large- N study of Texas school superintendents that the superintendents saw the points of Moore's triangle as constitutive of their roles. And Meynhardt and Metelmann ( 2009 ), in a study of the German Federal Labor Agency, also found evidence that middle managers think in much the same way that Moore's public value entrepreneurs would.

Uses of Policy-Level and Societal Public Values in Practice and Research

Policy-level and broader public values have also been used in a variety of ways. For example, public values feature prominently in the approach that Bozeman and his coauthors have developed called “public value mapping.” The approach incorporates a broad range of value considerations into policy decision-making processes by helping (1) identify public values, (2) assess whether public value failures have occurred, (3) map relationships among values, and (4) graphically represent relationships between public value failures and market failures ( Welch, Rimes, and Bozeman, forthcoming ). The approach has been used primarily in the science and technology field (e.g., Bozeman and Sarewitz 2011 ) but also increasingly in other fields (Bozeman and Moulton 2011 , i367).

Meynhardt (forthcoming) has developed a public value assessment instrument called the public value scorecard (not to be confused with Moore's [ 2013 , forthcoming ] public value scorecard). The scorecard is an aggregated summary based on individuals’ rankings of the value of something related to the public along the dimensions mentioned earlier—moral-ethical, hedonistic-aesthetical, utilitarian-instrumental, and political-social—as well as a fifth dimension related to financial performance ( Meynhardt, forthcoming ). The scorecard has been used in a variety of situations for both formative and summative purposes.

Andersen et al. ( 2012 ) have developed a third instrument for assessing public values that relies not on public value criteria or psychological assessments but instead on what they call “organizational design principles” derived from four archetypal modes of governance (hierarchy, clan, network, and market) (717). For each of the four they articulated the role of public organizations, role of citizens, organizational context, control forms, and central values. From these values, they developed an instrument that they tested on Danish public managers by asking them to what extent the values applied to their organizations. After a variety of analyses, seven dimensions of public value emerged: the public at large, rule abidance, budget keeping, professionalism, balancing interests, efficient supply, and user focus. Their work highlights tensions among the values and the complexity of public managers’ values environments (723–24).

Conclusions

Scholars and public professionals are making important theoretical, practical, and operational strides in developing a new approach to public administration as an alternative to approaches that preceded it. They need to do more, however, before the new approach is widely understood, appreciated, and used to advance important public values underplayed by traditional public administration and New Public Management. In this final section, we offer some tentative conclusions about where things stand and then outline an agenda for research and practice.

Where Things Stand

While there clearly is an emerging new approach to public administration, it does not have a consensually agreed name. Among the various possibilities, however, the Denhardts’ ( 2011 ) label “New Public Service” certainly appears to be the leading contender based on citations. Whatever the name, attention to issues of public value, public values, and the public sphere are central to the new approach.

The concept of creating public value is popular within both academic and practice settings (Williams and Shearer 2011 ). Even critics note the broad interest in the idea among practitioners (Rhodes and Wanna 2007 ). Similarly, Van der Wal, Nabatchi, and de Graaf ( 2013 ) assert that the study of public values is gaining in importance in public administration and may well be one of the field's most important current themes. Finally, for several decades, scholars and political commentators have devoted increased attention to the public sphere, including debates about the limits and role of government, the why and how of public engagement and active citizenship, and the need for a strengthened democracy.

This growing interest is partly attributable to the importance, urgency, scope, and scale of public problems facing the world; the pragmatic recognition that governments alone cannot effectively address many of these problems; and a concern that public values have been and will be lost as a result of a powerful antigovernment rhetoric and a host of market-based and performance-based reforms. Following Dewey, the public value literature and the emerging approach to public administration represent the products of a practitioner and scholarly “public called into being” over these concerns.

In the emerging approach, government clearly has a special role to play as a creator of public value and a guarantor of public values and the public sphere, but in a market-based democracy, government is not the owner of all the processes and institutions having public value potential or obligations (Peters and Pierre 1998 ). The literatures on cross-sector collaboration, integrative leadership, and networked governance are all responses to the new context, in which public managers frequently must collaborate with nonprofits, businesses, the media, and citizens to accomplish public purposes. A major contribution of the public value literature is the way it draws attention to questions about (1) the public purposes that are or should be served by organizations in all sectors, by intra- and cross-sector collaborations, by more general governance arrangements, and by public leadership broadly defined, and (2) how public managers and leaders do and should accomplish these purposes. These are important normative and research-related questions needing to be pursued in the new context.

Of course, the concern with purposes and values is hardly new to public administration; what is different are two different parts of the context. The first is that traditional public administration and New Public Management—while they both have strengths—are not up to the tasks of networked governance, leadership, and management when a variety of public values should be served, including, but hardly limited to, efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. The second is the view that terms such as the public interest and commonwealth are too narrow, other related terms such as the common good are too vague, and the language of public value provides a helpful way forward, as Jacobs ( 2014 ) suggests.

A Research and Practice Agenda

Right now, the new approach is enmeshed in often vague definitions, conceptualizations, and measurements of public value and the public sphere. While public administration scholars and practitioners may ultimately agree on these public value-related matters, they are unlikely to reach full consensus (Davis and West 2009 ). That is not necessarily a bad thing. In order to make progress, however, scholars should address the challenges to current formulations, in part through further conceptual refinement, the development of suitable typologies and measures, and rigorous empirical testing. Research should attend to both subjectively held public values and more objective states of the world; whether a specific public value is intrinsic, extrinsic, or relational; whether something is a prime or instrumental public value; whether there are hierarchies of public values; who does the valuing; how the valuing is done; and against what criteria the object of value is measured.

The public value literature does provide a broader sense of public values than typically found in traditional public administration and New Public Management. As the emerging approach to public administration unfolds, the public value literature should be explicitly incorporated, as the issues it addresses are so fundamental. For example, too many performance measurement and management regimes and models focus principally on efficiency and effectiveness directly related to the mission (Moynihan et al. 2011 ; Radin 2006 , 2012 ; Talbot 2010 ) and disregard what Rosenbloom ( 2007 ) terms “non-mission-based values,” such as equity, due process, freedom of information, and citizenship development. As a result, too many performance measurement and management schemes may actually weaken public value creation ( Kroll and Moynihan, forthcoming ). Practitioners thus should work to ensure that performance measurement and management approaches do include non-mission-based values and, at the very least, do not diminish democratic engagement and citizenship behavior. Rosenbloom's ( 2007 ) contribution has been noted. Moore ( 2013 , forthcoming ) has also made a start on some of these concerns with his proposed public value account, as does Meynhardt (forthcoming) with his very different public value account. Bozeman and his colleagues’ public value mapping model also makes a contribution. Similarly, public participation processes can be designed to enhance democratic behavior and citizenship (Bryson et al. 2013 ; Nabatchi 2012 ). Finally, policy analysis as well should include a broad array of values beyond its traditional focus on efficiency, effectiveness, and sometimes equity (Radin 2012 ).

Practitioners and scholars also should follow Australia's lead, for example, and draw attention to the expected and actual public value created by policies, programs, projects, and other efforts (Kernaghan 2003 ). As Jacobs ( 2014 ) demonstrates in the U.S. context, the public is “pragmatically liberal”—that is, the public is quite willing to support particular public undertakings when the value is clear and the cost is reasonable. Moore's public value account offers a way of making the case in specific circumstances. Kalambokidis ( 2014 ) provides practical advice on some of the ways in which this public value–clarifying work can be done in relation to fiscal and spending policy.

Given the complex networked and collaborative arrangements practitioners now often find themselves in, they have a heightened need to cultivate what Moore calls a “restless, value-seeking imagination” in a democratic context. Public affairs scholars and educators should help them in this effort. That imagination should also incorporate attention to government's special role in assuring concern for important values and standing firm against efforts to diminish them (Dahl and Soss 2014 ). Again, the need for imagination is not new to public administration, where creativity, innovation, and strategic thinking and acting have always found a place (Bryson 2011 ; Hartley, forthcoming ; Osborne and Brown 2013 ). Such imagination often involves bridging the politics–administration divide (Appleby 1945 ; Gulick 1933 ), but also knowing when to defer to elected officials ( Alford, Hartley, and Hughes, forthcoming ). In all of these cases, public administrators have a special obligation to turn their imaginations to enhancing democratic governance and citizenship. As noted, policy analysis also can help foster imaginative responses and attention to the array of public values (Radin 2012 ). Clearly, however, the public value literature should explore much further the conceptual, political, organizational, managerial, and other limits on public managers seeking to create public value in particular circumstances.

Institutions and processes matter for the creation of public value, the realization of public values, and the preservation and enhancement of the public sphere (Benington and Moore 2011 ; Budd 2014 ; Dahl and Soss 2014 ; Jacobs 2014 ; Kalambokidis 2014 ; Moore 2014 ; Radin 2012 ; Talbot 2010 ; West and Davis 2011 ). The research on performance management regimes makes this clear. Such regimes and the institutions and processes that produce and sustain them, as well as the consequences for public value, should be the focus of much additional work. The same is true of collaborative, networked governance processes. Work thus should continue on linking managerial behavior attempting to create public value with institutions and processes and policy-level and other important public values related to democratic and collaborative governance (Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007 ).

Another part of that work is to bring in scholarship from other fields to help enrich the conversation at a time when public administration can be viewed as too insular (Wright 2011 ). We look forward to continued research and learning that will determine whether the public value literature will override the challenges and take a permanent place in the ongoing development of the field of public administration scholarship and practice.

Note

 1 This introduction and the symposium articles in this issue stem from an international conference on “Creating Public Value in a Multi-Sector, Shared-Power World,” held at the University of Minnesota on September 20–22, 2012. The conference was co-sponsored by three units of the University of Minnesota: the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Carlson School of Management, and the Center for Integrative Leadership. The Minnesota Humanities Center was a co-sponsor.

Biographies

· John M. Bryson is the McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He wrote Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations and co-wrote, with Barbara C. Crosby, Leadership for the Common Good. He received the 2011 Dwight Waldo Award from the American Society for Public Administration for “outstanding contributions to the professional literature of public administration over an extended scholarly career.” E-mail: [email protected]

· Barbara C. Crosby associate professor in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, has taught and written extensively about leadership and public policy. She is author of Leadership for Global Citizenship and coauthor, with John M. Bryson, of Leadership for the Common Good. As former academic codirector of the University of Minnesota's Center for Integrative Leadership, she conducted training for senior managers of nonprofit, business, and government organizations in the United States and abroad.

References

· Agranoff, Robert. 2006. Inside Collaborative Networks: Ten Lessons for Public Managers. Special issue, Public Administration Review 66: 56– 65.

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· Alexander, Ernest R. 2002. The Public Interest in Planning: From Legitimation to Substantive Plan Evaluation. Planning Theory 1(3): 226– 49.

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· Alford, John. 2008. The Limits to Traditional Public Administration, or Rescuing Public Value from Misrepresentation. Australian Journal of Public Administration 67(3): 357– 66.

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· Alford, John, Jean Hartley, and Owen Hughes. Forthcoming. Political Astuteness as an Aid to Discerning and Creating Public Value. In Valuing Public Value, edited by John M. Bryson, Barbara C. Crosby, and Laura Bloomberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, pre-publication draft.