Rethinking value in public management

Abstract

With the ascent of the concept of public value, the theory and practice of administration have shifted from a focus on management, effectiveness and efficiency (as espoused in New Public Management) towards an agenda of public value creation. This has resulted in a large, heterogenous number of scholarly publications on public value. In this paper, we review this important body of work from the period 1994 to 2019, discuss it critically and propose a few avenues for future research – especially in terms of conceptualizing public value. We do so by using a mixed-methods approach, incorporating semantic-network analysis, which allows a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the field of public value. In this article we show in great detail how the literature on public value has evolved and is configured, categorize how value is defined and measured within the literature, introduce a novel mixed-methods approach for literature reviews, and provide three conceptual contributions including (1) digitalization in public value theory can expand our understanding of citizens, (2) public value is more than just public, and (3) visualizing public value through controversy maps. Finally, we provide suggestions for further research.