Beyond co‐production: Value creation and public services
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Stephen P. Osborne,Greta Nasi,Madeline Powell |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12718 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Beyond co-production: Value creation
and public services
Stephen P. Osborne
1
| Greta Nasi
2
| Madeline Powell
3
1
Strategy Group, University of Edinburgh
Business School, Edinburgh, UK
2
Department of Public Management, Bocconi
University, Milan, Italy
3
Department of Marketing, University of York
Management School, York, UK
Correspondence
Stephen P. Osborne, Chair of International
Public Management, Strategy Group,
University of Edinburgh Business School,
Edinburgh, UK.
Email: stephen.osborne@ed.ac.uk
Funding information
European Union's Horizon 2020, Grant/
Award Number: 770356
Abstract
This paper argues for the need to go beyond appreciating
co-production as a stand-alone process. Rather it offers a
holistic model of value creation for public services, by
integrating insights from both the public administration
and management and the service management and mar-
keting literatures. The components of this model are the
loci, elements, and processes of value creation. Co-
production is located within this model but only as one
process, not as the pre-eminent one. The implications of
this new model for public management theory and prac-
tice are explored.
1|BEYOND CO-PRODUCTION…
Since the groundbreaking work of Ostrom (1972), co-production has become an influential discourse in public admin-
istration and management (PAM), defined as “regular, long-term relationships between professionalized service pro-
viders…and service users…where all parties make substantial resource contributions”(Bovaird, 2007 p. 847). The
discourse arose because of concerns about “nefarious”public officials “thwarting the will”of citizens for greater
influence on their public services (Vroom & Yetton, 1973). A significant body of PAM research on co-production has
subsequently matured, with a variety of foci. Inter alia, these foci include resource leverage, facilitation of innovation,
and as a driver of public service reform (e.g., Alford, 2014; Brandsen et al., 2018; Loeffler & Bovaird, 2020; Nabatchi
et al., 2017; Pestoff, 2019).
This co-production discourse has become an important contribution to PAM but has also been subject to
increasing critiques (Steen et al., 2018). These critiques include the impact of professional power on co-production
(Farr, 2018), problems in the implementation of co-production (Palumbo & Manna, 2018), and the manipulation of
co-production to their own ends by public officials (Bouchard, 2016).
Received: 6 July 2020 Revised: 19 November 2020 Accepted: 19 December 2020
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12718
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which
permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no
modifications or adaptations are made.
© 2021 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Admin. 2021;99:641–657. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 641
Such critiques do not undermine the significance of co-production within PAM, but rather require the evolution
of a more nuanced analysis of it. This has begun to arise from scholars seeking to integrate service management and
marketing (SM&M) theory with the PAM discourse (e.g., Gronroos, 2019; Hodgkinson et al., 2017; Osborne
et al., 2016). These scholars have argued that the fatal imperfection in the predominant co-production discourse is
that it is not situated within a meta-dialogue that appreciates the links between the processes of public service deliv-
ery/production and the value that such delivery seeks to add to citizens/society at the point of service
use/consumption (Alford, 2016).
The present paper is a conceptual one that responds to this debate. It argues that PAM has traditionally focused
on the production of public services, while a holistic model must integrate this with their use/consumption. This defi-
cit has begun to be rectified in recent years (e.g., Hodgkinson et al., 2017), with a core debate being about under-
standing the nature of value creation (and co-creation) by/for public service users—and with co-production as part of
this larger debate. However, the concept of “value”continues to be undertheorized and poorly understood in
PAM—in theory and in practice (Jo & Nabatchi, 2016).
Consequently, this paper responds to this gap. It offers a novel three-dimensional appreciation of value creation
in public services that links their production and use/consumption. As suggested above, the existing co-production
literature has focused almost exclusively on the production side of this equation with limited attention to the equally
important domain of use/consumption of a public service—often dismissed as simply “consumerism”(Jung 2010).
This is a fault-line in PAM theory and one that has real-life implications—it is hard to design and deliver public ser-
vices to create value for users and citizens if it is not clear exactly what such value/value creation comprises. This
paper addresses this imbalance directly. It asks: how can we conceptualize value and value creation
1
for public services?
This is the unique contribution of this paper.
2|EXISTING CONSIDERATIONS OF “VALUE”IN PAM
The prevailing paradigm of PAM in recent times has been the New Public Management (NPM). It is certainly
true that “value”has been a consistent element of the NPM discourse since its outset—such as the Value for
Money and Best Value programmes in the UK. However, critics have argued that such approaches either evalu-
ated only public service costs and how to reduce them or used “value”as a proxy for public service performance
(Kloot & Martin, 2000). In the United States, a similarly critical literature has arisen, as part of the Public Value
(PV) discourse (e.g., Rutgers, 2015).
An exploratory literature search conducted through Google Scholar using the keywords “value,”“value
creation,”and “new public management”failed to identify any papers that examined the dimensions of value of pub-
lic services within the NPM, beyond the broad-brush presentations above. Increasingly, therefore, critics of the NPM
have argued that this preoccupation with “value as costs”has undermined its ability to understand noneconomic
forms of value-added through public services delivery (e.g., Farr, 2016; Hardyman et al., 2019). There is of course a
robust literature on the performance of public services and at its strongest this does engage with public service out-
comes as an element of performance (Yang & Northcott, 2019). However, it also demonstrates a fixation with the
internal efficiency of public service organizations (PSOs) and/or a sole focus on objective rather than subjective indi-
cators of service outcomes (Hvidman & Andersen, 2014).
These critiques have led to attempts to explore the value that public services add to society, including Moore's
(1995) PV model and Denhardt and Denhardt's (2000) New Public Service agenda. These have been important con-
tributions. However, they have lacked both an appreciation of the links and tensions between individual and societal
value and an overarching framework within which to situate value creation as the fundamental building block of pub-
lic services delivery—and which links their production with their use/consumption. We argue that this link can be
provided by integrating the insights from the SM&M literature with those of PAM. SM&M addresses directly the
nature of value and value creation in services, while the PAM literature addresses the publicness of public services
642 OSBORNE ET AL.
Get this document and AI-powered insights with a free trial of vLex and Vincent AI
Get Started for FreeStart Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting