Public administration, public leadership and the construction of public value in the age of the algorithm and ‘big data’
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Leighton Andrews |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12534 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Public administration, public leadership and the
construction of public value in the age of the
algorithm and ‘big data’
Leighton Andrews
Cardiff Business School, University of Cardiff,
Cardiff, UK
Correspondence
Leighton Andrews, Cardiff Business School,
University of Cardiff, Aberconway Building,
Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK.
Email: andrewsl7@cardiff.ac.uk
Public administration scholarship has to a significant degree
neglected technological change. The age of the algorithm and ‘big
data’is throwing up new challenges for public leadership, which are
already being confronted by public leaders in different jurisdictions.
Algorithms may be perceived as presenting new kinds of ‘wicked
problems’for public authorities. The article offers a tentative over-
view of the kind of algorithmic challenges facing public leaders in
an environment where the discursive context is shaped by corpo-
rate technology companies. Public value theory is assessed as an
analytical framework to examine how public leaders are seeking to
address the ethical and public value issues affecting governance
and regulation, drawing on recent UK experience in particular. The
article suggests that this is a fruitful area for future research.
1|INTRODUCTION
In one week in May 2018 the UK Health Secretary blamed a computer algorithm for errors in cancer screening, South
Wales Police admitted that the facial technology system they had used had thrown up thousands of ‘false positives’,
Amnesty International attacked the Metropolitan Police’s Gang Violence Matrix database as being racially discrimina-
tory, and the data profiling company Cambridge Analytica, under legislative scrutiny in the UK and other jurisdictions
over Facebook data harvesting, closed for business (BBC 2018; Burgess 2018; Hansard 2018; Solon and Laughland
2018). The challenges of algorithmic and data governance to public authorities could scarcely have been more dra-
matically revealed.
Yet technological change has largely been neglected by public administration (Dunleavy 2009; Pollitt 2010,
2012). Some researchers have articulated a new paradigm of ‘digital-era governance’, holding out ‘the promise of a
potential transition to a more genuinely integrated, agile and holistic government’visible in all its aspects to citizens
and employees alike (Dunleavy et al. 2005). This has been developed further as ‘Essentially Digital Governance’ideal-
ized as a ‘hypothetical new state’with ‘a small intelligent core, informed by big data, its activities restricted mainly to
Received: 19 September 2017 Revised: 9 May 2018 Accepted: 3 June 2018
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12534
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.
© 2018 The Author. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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