Query: public value

title: Leadership for public value: Political astuteness as a conceptual link
abstract: Both leadership and public value are increasingly seen as concepts highly relevant to public administration, not only because of complex societal challenges but also as ways to address pluralistic interests in society. This article explores in detail the varied conceptualizations of public value and of public leadership. Furthermore, we argue that political astuteness provides an important conceptual linkage between leadership and public value, enabling actors to read, understand and foster coalitions around diverse and sometimes competing interests. In this introduction to the symposium, we analyse the different conceptualizations of public value, of leadership, and also show how the six articles explicitly or implicitly draw on the linking concept of political astuteness. The article assesses how the six articles of the symposium contribute to each of these three concepts.

title: From marketing to public value: towards a theory of public service ecosystems
abstract: This paper applies a service ecosystems perspective on the public service logic to evaluate the benefits and challenges this view brings to the management of public services. First, the article clarifies the concepts of private and public value, as well as co production and co creation. Second, the article presents an overview of the service dominant logic, public service dominant logic, and public service logic. Third, the paper analyses the potential of merging public service logic with a service ecosystems framework in a technology based context, cross fertilising public management and marketing research. This can lead to the development of a theory of public service ecosystems.

title: Supreme Audit Institutions and Public Value: Demonstrating Relevance
abstract: Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) have an important role in ensuring public sector accountability; their main activities being managing the audit of public sector entities' financial statements and assessing probity/compliance, providing advice to parliamentary committees, and undertaking performance audits. Standards issued by the International Organisation of SAIs encourage SAIs to recognise the value they deliver through their activities and to demonstrate that to citizens, Parliament and other stakeholders. The recognition of the need to be democratically accountable for efficiency and effectiveness is one aspect of public value, which is also concerned with the just use of authority (Moore, 2013) The purpose of this paper is to develop the components of a SAI's public value and, through a comparative international study, to analyse how SAIs report on the public value they deliver. Analysing reporting against the model developed in this paper indicates that SAIs' reporting prioritises critiques to increase public sector efficiency and effectiveness, rather than government policy. In addition, it finds SAIs generally fail to discuss any negative consequences of their work. SAIs are encouraged to develop new ways to demonstrate their ongoing relevance.

title: Leading and recognizing public value
abstract: This article examines the relationship between leadership and public value, which is particularly challenging in a context of explicit contest and conflict. The theoretical framework is illustrated through a case study of policing rural crime. The study reveals that the police worked with multiple and competing publics rather than a single homogeneous public, and that part of their leadership role was to create and convene a public space in which different voices and divergent views could be expressed. The study notes that research needs to pay attention to the loss and displacement of public value, not solely its creation and recognition. The need to convene multiple publics required the police to lead, as part of a leadership constellation, and with political astuteness. The findings have wider relevance for other public services, and for studies of leadership and public value at the intersection between the state and civil society.

title: Public Value Capture

title: Neoliberal governing through social enterprise: Exploring the neglected roles of deviance and ignorance in public value creation
abstract: This article makes a case for paying greater attention to how informal relationships between government officials and civil society practitioners impact processes of public value creation. Drawing on data from a five year qualitative longitudinal study, we illuminate how civil society practitioners deviate from the formal objectives of social enterprise policies in order to create what they see as having public value. Through a process of theory elaboration, we demonstrate how government officials' wilful ignorance of, or informal collaboration in, such deviance, precipitates forms of public value that are consistent with wider political objectives. Our analysis adds nuance and granularity to the debate on public value by drawing attention to the arcane ways it may be informally negotiated and created outside of the public sphere. This opens up new empirical and theoretical opportunities for understanding how deviance and ignorance might be symbiotically related in processes of public value creation.

title: Government as a platform, orchestration, and public value creation: The Italian case
abstract: E Government literature has discussed how the adoption of the Government as a Platform (GaaP) can help public administration to produce more efficient public services. However, since little attention has been given to the impact of GaaP on public value creation more research is needed to analyse whether the GaaP is effective to help the government to deliver public services that fulfil social expectations and, hence, public value. Indeed, efficiency does not guarantee public value. Besides efficiency, public value incorporates citizens' variegated expectations and needs that change over time and that are sometimes rival. For these reasons, the delivery of public value is often challenging for public agencies. The aim of this paper is to explain how the GaaP configuration can help public administration to deliver public value better. The paper finds that the modularity of the platform configuration and different ecosystems that support public agencies need to be orchestrated to support the effective creation of public value. The authors analyse the case of the Italian GaaP initiative to discuss the importance of the orchestration of the GaaP characteristics to improve the coordination among public agencies and enable the co production of services with external actors, in order to deliver public value better. The findings show that the orchestration of the GaaP configuration characteristics can enable Italian public administration to deliver public value, but also that, if the GaaP is not properly orchestrated, it can constrain the creation of public value.

title: Navigating tensions in co production: A missing link in leadership for public value
abstract: New forms of public leadership are needed to design and implement co production of public value. We draw on narrative analysis to explore the barriers to developing the capacity for co production of public value in disadvantaged and vulnerable Indigenous communities and find that existing norms not only crowd out efforts at reform, but can work against them. In particular, we find that upward accountability and a focus on expert knowledge are the most problematic for co production of public value. We focus on how more traditional practices of public administration mediated the achievements of public leaders in their co production efforts when Australian governments introduced strategies for partnership with Indigenous communities for services design and delivery. The analysis suggests that creating a broader enabling environment of supportive logics would allow public leaders to engage more productively with inherent tensions between old and new ways of working.

title: Sustainable public value reporting of electric utilities
abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the status quo of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) based sustainable public value (SPV) reporting by electric utilities. Furthermore, the study attempts to find out whether a stock exchange listing and/or a public ownership are positively associated with electric utilities' reporting regarding their contributions to a sustainable development (SD) or not.  An empirical analysis of sustainability reports published by electric utilities from 28 different countries all over the world is carried out. The investigation is based on a documentary analysis of 83 GRI G4 reports.  The findings show that electric utilities' coverage of GRI indicators of the electric utilities sector disclosures varies between, as well as within, the different categories of the GRI guidelines and that the coverage of sector specific indicators is often lacking behind the general coverage rates. Furthermore, the study reveals that a stock exchange listing is positively associated with electric utilities' GRI based SPV reporting. In contrast, public ownership does not show a significant association.  Electric utilities have a significant influence on SD. They operate in a regulated environment that is targeted at utilizing electric utilities for economic and environmental public policy objectives. Against that background, the study discusses which issues of SPV creation are reported by electric utilities that use the GRI guidelines and therefore brings together the public value (PV) and the sustainability community.

title: Towards a multi actor theory of public value co creation
abstract: This essay suggests changes to the theory of public value and, in particular, the strategic triangle framework, in order to adapt it to an emerging world where policy makers and managers in the public, private, voluntary and informal community sectors have to somehow separately and jointly create public value. One set of possible changes concerns what might be in the centre of the strategic triangle besides the public manager. Additional suggestions are made concerning how multiple actors, levels, arenas and/or spheres of action, and logics might be accommodated. Finally, possibilities are outlined for how the strategic triangle might be adapted to complex policy fields in which there are multiple, often conflicting organizations, interests and agendas. In other words, how might politics be more explicitly accommodated. The essay concludes with a number of research suggestions.