P10 Public service resilience: the contribution of public value
Corresponding chair and review group chair
Marek Ćwiklicki, Prof. Cracow University of Economics, Poland. E-mail: cwiklicm@uek.krakow.pl
Co-Chairs
Adina Dudau, Dr, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK.
Alessandro Sancino, Prof. University of Milan-Biocca, Italy, and Open University.
Kirsty Strokosch, Dr, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK.
Description
Public value is rooted in public perception (Meynhardt, 2015) and is a subject of change, re-definition, and valuation (Rutgers, 2015). For several decades now, it has been grafted with private benefit dominant values due to political commitment to neoliberal efficiency-maximisation. Our recent global Covid-19 experience challenged the legitimacy of the latter, which compromised public service resilience, as evidenced by the generalised disruption to public services globally. Does this necessarily mean that public value offers a way forward for public service resilience? The literature connecting the two is too scant to enable any competent answers to this question, but some recent effort in that respect is noteworthy: Heath et al. (2021) public value analysis of individual resilience in ambulance staff, Loeffler and Bovaird’s (2021) and Grant’s (2021) assertion of the resilience’s contribution to creating and maintaining public value. At organisational and service levels, there is no compelling argument connecting the two, but Meynhardt’s (2014, 2015) studies take us closer to a meaningful association. We call on IRSPM scholars to help us in this quest. In bringing together the concepts of public value and resilience, the panel is inclusive of neighbouring concepts such as ‘continuity’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘public values’.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Sustaining public value in turbulent times
- Timeliness of public values
- Shaping resilience by adjusting public and private value(s)
- Mapping and measuring changes in public value
- The contribution of public value to service resilience
- Contradictions, tensions and compatibility of values for public service resilience
- The social mechanisms generating resilience (e.g. emerging properties, tipping points, self-organisation)
We welcome both theoretical and empirical papers based on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research designs.
References
Duit, A. (2016). Resilience Thinking: Lessons For Public Administration. Public Administration, 94(2), 364–380. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12182
Loeffler, E. and Bovaird, T., 2021. User and community co-production of public value. In The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes (pp. 31-57). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Heath, G., Wankhade, P. and Murphy, P., 2021. Exploring the wellbeing of ambulance staff using the ‘public value’ perspective: opportunities and challenges for research. Public Money & Management, pp.1-11.
Meynhardt, T., Gomez, P. and Schweizer, M., 2014, February. The Public Value Scorecard: what makes an organization valuable to society?. In Performance (Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-8). Ernst & Young Global Limited.
Meynhardt, T. (2015). Public Value: Turning a Conceptual Framework into a Scorecard. In J. M. Bryson, B. C. Crosby, & L. Bloomberg (Eds.), Public Value and Public Administration. Georgetown University Press.
Rutgers, M. R. (2015). As Good as It Gets? On the Meaning of Public Value in the Study of Policy and Management. The American Review of Public Administration, 45(1), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074014525833