Therefore, the public value researcher Timo Meynhardt from the University of St. Gallen and HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management uses the term to generally raise the question about organizations' contribution to the common good.
The concept has been taken up initially by academics, think tanks and NGOs, and later by a number of public sector organisations in the United Kingdom and other countries.
[9] Greg Parston, co-founder and former Chief Executive of the Office for Public Management, and a collaborator with Professor Moore, was appointed Director.
[22] Moore created the strategic triangle as an analytical framework to help turn abstract possibilities into the concrete circumstances managers are facing.
[22] This authorising environment is made up of all the people who can call the organisation to account, to evaluate its performance and value, and has control over the resources it needs to deliver.
[23] Operational capacity refers to whether the public manager has enough people and time to use government assets along a value chain to create the desired outcomes.
[25] The study found that through standardising management control practices, there was a misalignment between the authorising environment and operational capacity, as it increased the administrative burden.
[25] It was shown through the study that the interaction with politicians meant there was a greater focus on short-term goals and measurable outputs and that there were issues with political micromanagement.
[30] Public managers can utilize performance measurement for: (1) evaluating; (2) controlling; (3) budgeting; (4) motivating; (5) promoting; (6) celebrating; (7) learning; and (8) improving.
[28] This includes: (1) achievement of desired societal outcomes; (2) citizen satisfaction; (3) trust in institutions; and (4) intangible elements contributing to public welfare.
[27] Willingness-to-Pay (WTP), Willingness-to-Accept (WTA), and Travel Cost Methods are numerical models that aim to quantify the monetary worth that individuals assign to public goods and services.
One significant problem is the "delivery paradox" (Spano, 2014, p. 4),[27] where improvements in quantitative measurement metrics may not correspond with how citizens perceive service quality.
[27] An influential framework within public management theory, the concept has also been criticized on a number of grounds for the implications it holds for democracy, lack of conceptual clarity and its utility in practice.
But it is hard to define what public value might actually mean: objectives could easily include anything from satisfaction of community needs to making people happy.
Public value is a notoriously nebulous concept (although Moore, 1995 provides an encompassing definition as the result of socially beneficent government actions).
This potential is particularly problematic because public managers and officials might define value differently than citizens, which may help drive a divergence between the priorities of government and the expectations of the people.
Rhodes and Wanna argue that this leads to a paternalistic style in which decision-makers believe they know what is best for the people without adequate input (2007, p. Another significant problem is measuring public value.
Existing evaluation tools are unable to measure long-term or morally significant outcomes such as social justice or environmental sustainability.
Rhodes and Wanna (2009) make the point that this is a top-down tendency which has implications for corporatist forms of governance as it places managerial expertise above elected representatives and public opinion thus risking de-differentiation in weakening the voice of citizens within policymaking.
Engaging citizens and stakeholders in decision-making processes are difficult, as power imbalances, trust deficits, and varied interests between the different actors make reaching solutions challenging.
Alford and O’Flynn (2009) note that while coproduction holds out promise of better inclusion, it is often problematic in practice, especially when the government institutions are unwilling to change or unable to execute collaboration effectively.
First, scholars are within the public domain, aiming to enhance the concept through improved definitions, deeper propositional theories, and efficient practical objectives.
This involves separating public value into measurable parts, analysing its different aspects thoroughly, and investigating its interpretation and implementation in diverse settings.
This includes continued discussions on its strength as a concept, justifications for its role as a comprehensive idea, and attempts to broaden or modify the theory.