Organizations, Policies, and the Roots of Public Value Failure: The Case of For‐Profit Higher Education

Abstract

While public value theory has emerged to offer important insights into the evaluation of social enterprises, little is known about the origins of public value failure and even less about the role that organizations and public policy play in creating public value failure. Accordingly, this analysis explores the origins of public value failure using examples from for‐profit higher education. A selection of organization and public policy concepts are integrated into a public value mapping framework to develop a theoretical basis for public value “failure drivers.” In addition to advancing public value theory, an understanding of the origins of public value failure and the role of failure drivers has important implications for the design of public value–maximizing strategies and institutions.

Affective commitment within the public sector: antecedents and performance outcomes between ownership types

“…Therefore, we support the call for future research to establish if different expectations, goals, and pressures can be reconciled between ownership types within the service network for public value creation (Hodgkinson, Hannibal, Keating, Chester Buxton, and Bateman 2017). A qualitative investigation would be appropriate here to shift the public management narrative on ownership away from emotion, opinion, assumption, and normative bias (Anderson and Taggart 2016) toward service values and public value creation.…”

Bureaucracy and the Failure of Politics: Challenges to Democratic Governance

“…This is apparent in the widespread restructuring of bureaucratic organizations by contracting to the private sector, using non-profit organizations for service delivery, transferring the responsibility of government programs to subnational governments, or simply not delivering services at all (Compton & Meier, 2017). Contracting to the private sector ignores the basic principal-agent problem of implementation by organizations interested in minimizing costs rather than delivering services (Donahue & Zeckhauser, 2011) and the historical problem of corruption that plagues many government–private partnerships (e.g., U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD], for-profit universities; see Anderson & Taggart, 2016). Substituting nonprofits for private firms merely changes the conflict from one about costs to one about values given the strong values component associated with many nonprofits (Donahue & Zeckhauser, 2011).…”

Norm Transfer in US Technology Transfer: A Lesson for Policy Makers

“…Organization studies is often concerned with understanding differences between public and private organizations. For example, scholars have examined goal complexity in public organizations (Anderson & Stritch, 2015;Rainey & Bozeman, 2000), and how organizational structure and goal clarity of private firms can lead to certain forms of public value failure (Anderson & Taggart, 2016). While the relationship between public and private organizations is complex, there are many domains of social enterprise that operate according to stylized assumptions of what public and private organizations do and do not do well (Rainey & Bozeman, 2000).…”