Professor Stephen Osborne presents a paper at the 2016 Political Studies Association Annual International Conference

This conceptual article is a work in progress co-authored with Professor Greta Nasi (Bocconi University) and CenSE’s doctoral researcher Pablo Escarate, who also attended the event.

Organised by the Political Studies Association, this major conference aims to promote the global study of politics, and it is oriented to researchers and experts engaged in a wide range of specialist subjects such as Public Policy and Administration, National and International Policies, and Party Politics and Contingent Political Issues, among others. The conference this year was held in Brighton from 21–23 March 2016, and its main theme was 'The Politics and the Good Life'.

The article was presented in the panel 'Values and The Public Services', proposing a novel approach towards the conceptualisation of value in the public sphere. Professor Osborne’s presentation started offering a critical analysis of the understanding of ‘value’ and ‘values’ offered by different paradigms of Public Management. This paper argues that approaches such as Public Administration, New Public Management, Public Value and Public Value Management offer a flawed understanding of ‘value’ during public services delivery, as they conceptualise it in a utilitarian manner with little regard to ‘values’. As a response, an integrating framework (based on the New Public Governance Paradigm and its Public-Service Dominant Logic) that considers value as a values-based construct is proposed.

In general terms, under this novel approach, the value of public services delivery is rooted in values systems, socially constructed, and embedded within relationships between service users, public services organisations, the community and the polity. Due to its relational nature, value can be either co-created or co-destroyed during interactions and negotiations between different actors embedded within public service systems, generating impacts at individual and/or collective levels.

The insights offered by this presentation were well-received by the audience, which was mainly comprised of political science scholars who engaged in a constructive debate where some valuable ideas and suggestions were provided in order to continue developing the value conceptualization framework. This was the first time that CenSE’s members participated at the PSA Conference, supporting the further development of networks and extending the impact of the research activities conducted in the centre.