Public Value Failure Research Articles

Public values failure associated with Hurricane Ian power outages

Power outages from extreme weather events can diminish community resilience, making it difficult for the areas impacted to bounce back after such events. For socially vulnerable populations, the frequency and duration of power outages can be even more severe. Governments have an obligation to protect public values, or those values that are most fundamental to society, which includes equitable resilience. Using Jørgensen and Bozeman's inventory of public values, this manuscript explores how power outages from extreme weather events create public values failures. More specifically, the manuscript evaluates intraorganizational aspects of public administration during power outages in Florida during Hurricane Ian in 2022. Framing power outages as a public values failure may motivate greater time and effort toward improving equitable access to more resilient power systems.

Aligning the logics of inquiry and action to address the biodiversity crisis.

Despite an abundance of research reaffirming biodiversity's importance to the health of our planet and our society, species continue to go extinct at an alarming rate. Why has continued research on the value of biodiversity not had the intended effect, and what can be done about it? Here, we describe biodiversity loss as a public value failure and the result of a misalignment between the logic of inquiry (which guides scientists) and the logic of action (which guides practitioners). We draw lessons from our own research to propose the creation of a 'National Biodiversity Strategy,' designed to link the logic of inquiry with the logic of action and coordinate the production of both actionable conservation science and informed conservation action. Article Impact Statement: The logic of inquiry can be linked with the logic of action to bring actionable science to informed conservation action. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

An Analysis of Shenzhen Talent Housing Policies Based on The Model of Public-Value Failure

Shenzhen, the emerging economic center of Southeast China, is facing a transition that the talents are pivotal to achieve the goal of sustainable development. In this case, college graduates’ settlement at Shenzhen is hampered by a series of problems. Based upon Shenzhen’s talent housing policies implemented and updated in the past few years, the paper utilizes Barry Bozeman’s Public-Value Failure Model to explain the present challenges, focusing on college graduates’ willingness to settle down at first-tier cities such as Shenzhen and investigating the factors influencing the degree of satisfaction with housing conditions. The research focuses on the implementation of Shenzhen’s talent housing policy and utilizes the Likert questionnaire and data processing approaches to analyze the research objects from a quantitative perspective, which reveals that the quality of construction, housing location, and property are among their major concerns. Furthermore, based upon Bozeman's criteria of public failure, possible imperatives for further promotions in the design of talent housing policy are important implications of the study, policy makers are advised to concern more from a long-term perspective, integrating market efficiency, individual happiness, and the goal of sustainable development within the dynamic process of implementation.

Professional managers, public values? The delicate balance between corporatization and stewardship to society

ABSTRACT Corporatization is a trend in local public service delivery. However, research into how public values can be preserved after corporatization has lacked. This study analyses what factors underlie the presence of ‘public values’ in municipally owned corporations (MOCs). I find that the best predictor of stewardship to society in MOCs is their strategic managerial autonomy. This finding challenges the literature on public value failure, which argues that government by proxy should lead to lesser public values. Instead, it is plausible that increasing autonomy after corporatization can shield service delivery from political rent-seeking, which can protect public values.

When Deaths Are Dehumanized: Deathcare During COVID-19 as a Public Value Failure

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is still gripping the world, brought death front and center into many people’s lives. In the United States, however, some of the deaths were treated as “more tragic” than others given someone’s economic use value coupled with dehumanizing language. Using Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, this is understood as a public values failure when economic productivity eclipses public health and humanity. Introducing a conceptual framework, this article explores this death narrative and implores public administrators to think about death management in a humane framing.

Assessing public value failure in government adoption of artificial intelligence

AbstractIn the context of rising delegation of administrative discretion to advanced technologies, this study aims to quantitatively assess key public values that may be at risk when governments employ automated decision systems (ADS). Drawing on the public value failure framework coupled with experimental methodology, we address the need to measure and compare the salience of three such values—fairness, transparency, and human responsiveness. Based on a preregistered design, we administer a survey experiment to 1460 American adults inspired by prominent ADS applications in child welfare and criminal justice. The results provide clear causal evidence that certain public value failures associated with artificial intelligence have significant negative impacts on citizens' evaluations of government. We find substantial negative citizen reactions when fairness and transparency are not realized in the implementation of ADS. These results transcend both policy context and political ideology and persist even when respondents are not themselves personally impacted.

Leading for social change: Waste management in the place of social (ir)responsibility

AbstractWhat leadership practices can be enacted in contexts of public values failure and with low social capital to enact positive social change? This article studies public management and leadership dynamics in the “Land of Fires” (Italy), a place where waste management has historically been affected by mafia infiltration. Our research is based on a multi‐site single case study strategy with qualitative data obtained from semi‐structured interviews with several key stakeholders, including public and business managers, civil society leaders, local journalists, local politicians, regional and national politicians, and citizens in their role as co‐producers of public services. From a theoretical point of view, our findings contribute to the literature on both place leadership and collaborative governance. From a practical point of view, we shed light on the importance of four interrelated leadership practices to be enacted by public managers and civic leaders to promote positive social change: (a) to recognize and call into existence different publics; (b) to mobilize political leadership; (c) to obtain media salience; and (d) to develop institutional opportunities for enabling agonistic civic capacity.

Addressing public-value failure: remunicipalization as acts of public entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT The idea of “pragmatism” provides a successful account explaining why municipalities re-internalize previously privatized responsibilities for service delivery. This paper develops the idea by accounting for remunicipalization in contexts defined by failures with service innovation – rather than delivery – under privatization. This account highlights remunicipalization as an act of public entrepreneurship and offers a complementary explanation for the dynamics in local service restructuring. Analytical utility is demonstrated in a case study of the restructuring of local energy supply in Aalborg Municipality, Denmark. In perspective, the paper refines the understanding of contexts, behaviours, and dynamics leading to remunicipalizations in the twenty-first century.

경기도 대체인력지원사업의 탐색적 연구 - 공공가치실패모델을 중심으로 -

경기도 대체인력지원사업의 탐색적 연구 - 공공가치실패모델을 중심으로 -

Angling for Sharks, Not Pilot Fish: Deep Corruption, Venal Corruption, and Public Values Failure

Angling for Sharks, Not Pilot Fish: Deep Corruption, Venal Corruption, and Public Values Failure

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

AbstractWhile 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.

Inequalities in scholarly knowledge: Public value failures and their impact on global science

There is a growing body of literature that acknowledges the overall trends in publication patterns in the least economically advantaged countries. The pattern shows that there are disparities between the Global North and Global South with regard to indexed publication output. Few studies, however, empirically assess the impact that this systematic disparity has on global scientific knowledge. This paper examines this systematic disparity by (1) analysing the co-authorship patterns of the least economically advantaged countries using bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science ISI database, and (2) applying the public-value failure mapping tool to identify potential failures in the scientific scholarship. Our analysis provides strong evidence of public value failures in global scholarly publication output. The paper contributes to the science policy and public value failure literatures using novel theoretical and methodological approaches to explore issues of equity and inequality in global science.

(Co)-Contamination as the Dark Side of Co-Production: Public value failures in co-production processes

Co-production is associated with the expanding role that citizens and other third-party actors assume in the development and delivery of public services. While there are benefits to co-production, there are also challenges. This study draws from the marketing literature on value co-destruction to describe the processes in co-production of public services that can negatively affect public values from regular producers and users. We refer to this public value failure as co-contamination. Two case studies are used to explore some of the ‘dark sides’ of co-production. Our analyses reveal the co-contaminating aspects of this process and offer implications for public managers.

The Political Economy of Public Values

During the years that have elapsed since the publication of Moore’s and Bozeman’s quite different theories of public value, a great deal of attention has been focused on the public value(s) topic. In this essay, we discuss the evolution of the respective approaches, but particular attention is given to the criteria Bozeman established as “public values failure criteria,” a set of ideas juxtaposed against and influenced by market failure criteria. We suggest two new criteria worth adding to the original Bozeman model. The first of these is related to Moore’s work on the “public sphere.” We offer a somewhat different definition of “public sphere,” one that seems compatible with public values failure criteria. The second criterion pertains to “progressive opportunity,” a criterion taking into account the injurious potential of social inequities. We show the two criteria are especially relevant to the concerns in contemporary political economy disputes and that the two desiderata reinforce one another.

As Good as It Gets? On the Meaning of Public Value in the Study of Policy and Management

Public values are being promoted as a core concept in the study of public administration, in particular, in discourses surrounding Moore’s public value management and Bozeman’s public value failure. This article outlines the approaches to the concept of values and public values. Particular attention is paid to the founding distinction between facts and values, which proves to be less clear than usually assumed. After discussing a range of possible characteristics of public values, an encompassing definition is attempted, which consequently has to accommodate opposing characteristics. It is concluded that the concept of public value is a fuzzy concept, and that is probably “as good as it gets.”

The Stakes in Bayh-Dole: Public Values Beyond the Pace of Innovation

Evaluation studies of the Bayh-Dole Act are generally concerned with the pace of innovation or the transgressions to the independence of research. While these concerns are important, I propose here to expand the range of public values considered in assessing Bayh-Dole and formulating future reforms. To this end, I first examine the changes in the terms of the Bayh-Dole debate and the drift in its design. Neoliberal ideas have had a definitive influence on U.S. innovation policy for the last thirty years, including legislation to strengthen patent protection. Moreover, the neoliberal policy agenda is articulated and justified in the interest of “competitiveness.” Rhetorically, this agenda equates competitiveness with economic growth and this with the public interest. Against that backdrop, I use Public Value Failure criteria to show that values such as political equality, transparency, and fairness in the distribution of the benefits of innovation, are worth considering to counter the “policy drift” of Bayh-Dole.

Public Value Mapping of Equity in Emerging Nanomedicine

Public values failure occurs when the market and the public sector fail to provide goods and services required to achieve the core values of society such as equity (Bozeman 2007). That public policy for emerging health technologies should address intrinsic societal values such as equity is not a novel concept. However, the ways that the public values discourse of stakeholders is structured is less clear and rarely studied through the lens of public interests. This is especially true in the health sciences discourse. Using the public value mapping (PVM) model I present a case study of the intrinsic value of equity in nanomedicine for cancer and the imperatives for translational research, an instrumental value to achieve equity. After reviewing and coding nearly 700 value statements from several hundred public documents, I find that that the discourse on values varies between documents that address basic research and documents that address the application of the knowledge produced in basic research, with some especially notable disconnections. This paper demonstrates the importance of further refinement of methods for testing the PVM framework if the societal goal is to improve consistency of the public value discussion by those involved in developing and applying new technologies. The paper also demonstrates the value of a PVM approach for complex science policy analysis, especially for emerging technologies like nanomedicine.

Public Value Mapping and Science Policy Evaluation

Here we present the framework of a new approach to assessing the capacity of research programs to achieve social goals. Research evaluation has made great strides in addressing questions of scientific and economic impacts. It has largely avoided, however, a more important challenge: assessing (prospectively or retrospectively) the impacts of a given research endeavor on the non-scientific, non-economic goals—what we here term “public values”—that often are the core public rationale for the endeavor. Research programs are typically justified in terms of their capacity to achieve public values, and that articulation of public values is pervasive in science policy-making. We outline the elements of a case-based approach to “public value mapping” of science policy, with a particular focus on developing useful criteria and methods for assessing “public value failure,” with an intent to provide an alternative to “market failure” thinking that has been so powerful in science policy-making. So long as research evaluation avoids the problem of public values, science policy decision makers will have little help from social science in making choices among competing paths to desired social outcomes.

Public values and public failure in US science policy

Domestic science policy in the United States is linked inextricably to economic thinking. We seek to develop a practical analytical framework that confronts the manifest problems of economic valuing for science and technology activities. We argue that pervasive use of market valuation, market-failure assumptions and economic metaphors shapes the structure of science policy in undesirable ways. In particular, reliance on economic reasoning tends to shift the discourse about science policy away from political questions of “why?” and “to what end?” to economic questions of “how much?” Borrowing from the “public values failure framework”, we examine public values criteria for science policy, illustrated with case vignettes on such topics as genetically modified crops and the market for human organs.