New development: Mitigating disvalue through a material understanding of public value co-creation

Abstract

Public management scholars have recently recognized that there is a romantic bias towards public value co-creation, with cases of public value destruction, loss and/or appropriation often being neglected. To correct this fundamental issue, this article focuses on the opportunity for a material understanding of public value co-creation processes. The authors discuss why this material understanding is critical to mitigate disvalue and to facilitate the transformation of the public sector into an arena for co-creation.