Avoiding Theoretical Stagnation: A Systematic Review and Framework for Measuring Public Value

Abstract

Public value theory has become a hot topic in public administration research, but its proponents have long recognised difficulties in empirically testing the theory's central propositions. There has been a lack of clarity about how to measure the extent to which organisations are generating public value, which has rendered researchers unable to quantitatively study the causes, consequences and correlates of public value. The current study systematically reviews the growing literature on public value measurement to identify, evaluate, and synthesise available measures. Through a qualitative synthesis of the themes present in published measures, we identify four key components for measuring public value that appear to be important across a range of policy and national contexts. Our review identifies a promising framework that could be used to structure a comprehensive measure of public value and, in doing so, provides a means to progress theoretical development and testing of the public value approach.

Public value and public sector accounting research: a structured literature review

“…Spano (2014) adopts a similar approach investigating how managerial control systems can be used to understand if an organization has been able to achieve the planned outcomes and how this translated into the creation of PV. Moreover, studies have also called for further theoretical and empirical contributions on PV measurement (Faulkner & Kaufman, 2018;Hartley et al, 2017). In order to answer the third research question, we now focus on papers adopting an accounting perspective.…”

Blockchain in the Amazon: creating public value and promoting sustainability

“…When AGT achieves scalability, we may continue our investigation with a quantitative data collection (such as a survey). One of the opportunities is to measure the public value among citizens, for instance, concerning the trust, legitimacy, service delivery quality, and efficiency of the blockchain application, as proposed by Faulkner and Kaufman (2018). The second-order effects are a hot topic around blockchain technology and sustainability.…”

Sustainable Development, Governance and Performance Measurement in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs): A Methodological Proposal

“…A further and recent study by Faulkner and Kaufman [164] highlighted the different dimensions of Public Value measurement through an accurate and systematic analysis of the literature. Through a qualitative synthesis of the topics analyzed in literature, the authors have identified four dimensions of Public Value measurement that can be adapted to any context.…”