The study of Public Service Motivation (PSM) has achieved considerable academic momentum with increasingly subtle research appearing each year. It is now opportune to look back at decades of work to see whether the concerns that initiated this area of study have been addressed. This article uses seminal articles that have shaped the field to find three main topics of interest: a concern about the way that theories of public choice characterized human nature, an ambition to crystallize and measure long-held understandings about a public service ethos, and a wish to promote a practical basis for incentivizing staff in the public sector. The application of PSM to these goals is examined, with the conclusion that PSM studies have made little progress in addressing any of those concerns. The implications of that conclusion are briefly considered.
Since publication two decades ago, Moore's theory of public value has become a significant concept in public administration, especially for teaching public managers. A feature of the theory is that public value is assessed by arbiters. These arbiters include a "public as a whole," which is a disembodied singular entity that is different from the sum of its parts. The idea of arbitration by a public as a whole is critically examined by considering its possible sources, comparison with individualistic bases for arbitration (especially democratic discourse), and exploring the implications of arbitration by the public as a whole. The conclusion is that the public as a whole is an unsuccessful concept which does not assist the theory of public value and which creates significant practical problems for practitioners by understating the degree of ambiguity that is inherent in the pursuit of public value.
Public value theory has had its supporters and critics, with debate about the use of strategic management by public managers and confusion about the meaning of public value. This paper formalises Moore (1995) into a simple theory. That theory introduces the concept of an 'ideal state.' The ideal state is a simple means of describing and analysing public value, using a graphical presentation. In an ideal state roles are clear and public value is optimised. Insights from that ideal state are then applied to a more real world to clarify the nature of public value and to consider the appropriate use of strategic management by public servants. The conclusion is that public value theory provides some justification for strategic management, but the paper also demonstrates the limits to strategic management by officials.
Knowability is the ability to identify a preferable course of action with sufficient confidence to justify adopting that course. This article shows it is not possible to judge the value of a public value proposition with sufficient confidence to justify the use of public authority. The indeterminacy of public value is shown by demonstrating that the necessary conditions to justify a public value proposition include that the evidence sustaining it is not impossible, circular, or unsubstantiated opinion. Those criteria are applied to an exhaustive set of possible concepts of public value, all of which fail at least one of those conditions so public value is unknowable. The implication is not that government is impossible, but that it requires humility, discourse, and compromise.
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