Realizing public values: enhancement or obstruction? Exploring value tensions and coping strategies in the co-production of social care

Abstract

We examine the potential of co-production to enhance or obstruct the realization of public values by analyzing what value tensions co-producers experience and what coping strategies they follow. In-depth study of a social care initiative in Flanders shows that co-production enhances the realization of values relating to services delivered, relationships between public servants and citizens, and the democratic quality of the service delivery process. However, public servants and citizen co-producers experience tensions between values, such as efficiency, individual freedom of co-producers, reciprocity, and inclusion. In trying to deal with these value tensions public servants are found to follow a variety of coping strategies, whereas citizen co-producers tend to escalate tensions or avoid coping with them. The type of coping strategy followed, however, influences if and what values are ultimately represented in the service delivery process and its results.

The Influence of Public Values on User Participation in e-Government: An Exploratory Study

“…Finally, and most importantly, the typology was used for Page 2105 research on participation by citizens in the development of services. This topic is closely related to our research, which makes it highly suitable for application in this research [4].…”

“…What has however been researched is the relation between public values and the inclusion of citizens or other users in the co-creation of services. This research has, for example, been undertaken by [4], [16]. So, there is clearly an interest in the topic of public values and participation, but there is also a neglect of the relation between public values and participation methods in an e-government context.…”

“…On the basis of recent public values research [4], a number of public values have been selected, emphasizing three clusters of public values which are expected to influence the decision on making use of user participation methods. The first cluster focuses on service delivery.…”

“…Our research focuses on the hypothesis that the choice of a 'User participation Method' is influenced by the 'Public Values' that are sought in an e-government project. As explained above, we relied on the review of [3] for the methods and on [4] for the values.…”

“…What is however often forgotten in both public administration and information systems literature, is the relation between the public values sought by the civil servants working on egovernment projects and the inclusion of users in those projects. Public values are an important context factor that can be described as 'normative concepts that are used to give direction to public action and/or legitimize such action', they steer the direction and choices made by civil servants [4] and are as such also expected to impact the choice on the type of user participation method. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of public values on the choice of user participation methods, thereby to understand how public values impact policy makers in their selection of user participation methods for the development of e-government services.…”