Public Money & Management

Creating value for citizens in public service ecosystems

This PMM theme issue will examine how public services can contribute to value creation for citizens within public service ecosystems (PSEs), considering implications for public administration and management theory and/or practice.

To better understand how social, ecological and economic value for citizens could be fostered in the context of public services, researchers have for the past decade addressed how the systemic, relational and context-dependent nature of value creation is situated within PSEs. In short, value creation explores how public services can be understood as resources that enable citizens to create/co-create value in their lives, and the PSE framework, first, draws attention to the hindering and enabling dynamics and conditions of value creation, embedded in and between individual, organizational and institutional levels of PSEs. To illustrate this more clearly, in the context of public services, value creation for citizens takes place through politically governed organizations. These organizations operate at the intersection of individual needs and collective interests. As a result, administrative and political contexts inevitably influence how value is created, what is possible, and how these processes unfold. Public administration and management research and practice informed by the analytical framework of PSEs are therefore well placed to take seriously the systemic characteristics and inherent tensions that shape public service environments.

Second, the PSE framework can help public sector managers, practitioners and researchers overcome the dyadic, service-user and organization-centric focus of value creation. This calls for attention, for example, to the roles and the variety of actors such as service users, family members, politicians, managers, practitioners and professionals in local, regional and national (public, private and non-governmental organizations) contexts. When viewed through the PSE framework, importantly, human-centric value creation/destruction processes become more appreciative also of the importance of non-living elements such as built environment, facilities, technologies, equipment and means of transport.

Third, utilizing the PSE framework to understand value creation for citizens calls for a more nuanced understanding of value. The conceptualization and understanding of value needs to incorporate both value for the service user and societal/collective value for citizens/communities, as well as considering both individual and collective beneficiaries in a more nuanced and appreciative way.

Building on these ideas, this PMM theme aims to provide a timely overview of how the theoretical and empirical approaches of value creation can better consider:

• The variety of actors and their individual conditions, characteristics, and roles in PSEs.
• The dynamic interplay of value as societal value for the citizens/communities and value as individual value for the service user, and the implications of this interplay in terms of value destruction in PSEs.
• The dynamics and conditions hindering and enabling value creation in and between the individual, organizational and institutional levels of PSEs in specific contexts.

We therefore seek contributions that interrogate both value creation and PSEs further and which consider their implications for public administration and management theory and/or practice. Submissions can be theoretical or empirical. For research articles, a variety of research perspectives and methods are welcomed. Research articles should contribute to theory, as well as practice and/or policy. In addition, 1000-word debate articles and 3500-word new development articles are also welcome to enrich the pragmatic debates.

Contributions can address, but are not limited to, the following issues:

• Examining the implications of the roles and individual characteristics of service users in value co-creation, for example from the perspective of vulnerable service users and family carers.
• Addressing the implementation and utilization of technologies from a PSE and value creation perspective.
• Widening the empirical focus from private-benefit services to include more public-benefit services such as utility services, transportation, housing, prison management or urban development, emphasizing ‘value for citizens’ as an outcome.
• Exploring the implications of understanding place-based public services from a PSE and value creation perspective.
• Addressing the hindering or enabling dynamics and conditions of value creation in and between the individual (i.e. beliefs, aims, values and practices, or knowledge, skills and resources of individuals), organizational (i.e. organizational structures or practices related to data security) and institutional (i.e. regulatory systems, laws, policy frameworks and institutional norms) levels of PSEs in particular contexts, for example by utilizing ‘conflict’ as an analytical tool.
• Interrogating and developing Public Service Logic (PSL) as a framework for investigating and evaluating value creation within PSEs.

(A list of relevant papers is available upon request from the guest editors.)