Bozeman’s Approach

Public values for Bozeman thus are measureable, although clearly there can be disagreements about how the values are to be conceptualized and measured. One implication is that analysts, citizens, and policy makers should focus on what public values are, and on ways in which institutions and processes are necessary to forge agreement on and achieve public values in practice.

Note that Bozeman’s approach is both positive, when he asks what the normative consensus on values is, and normative, when he argues that public values failures should be corrected. Note, too, that Bozeman  is silent on the role of the nonprofit sector and, to a lesser extent, on the public sphere more generally; on the rights, responsibilities, or weights to be given to non-citizens; and on the role and importance of power in contests over public values. Regarding the effects of political power, Jacobs believes that in the U.S. context Bozeman severely underestimates the extent of dissensus, the disproportionate influence of affluent citizens and organized interests, and the extent to which governing structures favor inaction and drift.

Mark Moore on Creating Public Value Whereas Bozeman focuses on the policy or societal level, Mark Moore, another important voice in the literature, focuses on public managers. He, too, is concerned about devaluing of government and public managers in an era of economic individu alism and market ascendency, and he initially conceived of public value as the public management equivalent of shareholder value. He seeks both a persuasive rhetoric and an approach to discern ing, championing, and achieving public value—or what he calls creating public value. Public value primarily results from government performance, so his view of public value creation in this early book is narrower than in much of the later literature.

Moore believes that citizens want from their governments some combination of the following that together encompass public value: (1) high-performing service-oriented public bureaucracies, (2) public organizations that are efficient and effective in achieving desired social outcomes, and (3) public organizations that operate justly and fairly, and lead to just and fair conditions in the society at large. While Moore’s definition of public value is vaguer than Bozeman’s, it highlights reasonably specific public values: efficiency, effectiveness, socially and politically sanctioned desired outcomes, procedural justice, and substantive justice. Like Bozeman, Moore’s definition of public value can encompass input, process, output, and outcome measures.

Moore develops the philosophical foundations of his approach to public value as a prelude to establishing what he calls “public value accounting.” He makes three assertions: First, a public collectively defined through democratic processes is the appropriate arbiter of public value when collectively owned assets of government are being deployed. Second, collectively owned assets include not only government money, but also state authority. Third, assessing the value of government production relies on an aggregation of costs and benefits broadly conceived; but also on collective deter minations concerning the welfare of others, duties to others, and conceptions of a good and just society. Moore uses these philosophical premises to develop a public value account. On the benefit side is the achievement of collectively valued outcomes, while on the cost side are the costs of using public authority and collectively owned assets.

Moore argues that public managers should use the strategic triangle. Strategy must be (1) aimed at achieving something that is substantively valuable (i.e., must constitute public value); (2) legitimate and politically sustainable; and (3) operationally and administratively feasible (see also Alford and O’Flynn 2009). Moore “equates managerial success in the public sector with initiating and reshaping public sector enterprises in ways that increase their value to the public in both the short and the long run” (1995, 10), which requires a “restless, value-seeking imagination”