What the public wants and how it is best served: forensic scientists’ perceptions of the drivers of public value creation
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523221100916 |
| Author | Karl O’Connor,Kristian Lasslett,Sabrina Bunyan,David Duffy |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
What the public wants
and how it is best
served: forensic scientists’
perceptions of the drivers
of public value creation
Karl O’Connor
Ulster University, UK
Kristian Lasslett
Ulster University, UK
Sabrina Bunyan
Ulster University, UK
David Duffy
Ulster University, UK
Abstract
Government agencies are embracing the rhetoric of public value, but what does the
empirical evidence tell us about drivers of its creation? One critical source of insight
are the practitioners who turn public investment into public value through complex
forms of labour. This article identifies how public value is interpreted and created by
forensics scientists in the Criminal Justice System using Q Methodological interviews.
The results indicate that two very similar types of forensic scientist exist The study
finds that while the decisions of scientists are grounded in their expertise, their public
value motivations are to ‘add value’to the public through their science. They serve the
citizen through their science. They do not serve the consumer, client or victim directly.
The findings also indicate that there is a need to recognise hidden forms of value-added
Corresponding author:
Karl O’Connor, School of Criminology, Politics and Social Policy, Ulster University, Newtownabbey,
Antrim, UK.
Email: k.oconnor@ulster.ac.uk
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2023, Vol. 89(4) 1046–1061
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523221100916
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activity that take place upstream in public-value chains, ensuring that there are systems
in place to maximise their impact downstream.
Points for practitioners
•Forensic scientists are motivated to serve the public, not the consumer or customer.
•In order to build capacity within Criminal Justice Systems, agency leaders need to
build a relationship based on mutual professional respect rather than a supplier–con-
sumer relationship.
•If administrative reform is to be guided by academic research, practitioners should use
the language of public value rather than the language of new public management.
•Public value is often created through inter-institutional value chains that can conceal
the contribution of upstream value-added activity to desirable public outcomes. It is
critical that the value-added process is traced on an inter-institutional basis, and max-
imised through effective forms of inter-institutional collaboration.
Keywords
forensic science, new public management, public value, Q methodology
Introduction: public value
Crises such as COVID-19 and the climate change emergency have placed a renewed spot-
light on the critical role the public organisation of value-added activity can play in addres-
sing existential social challenges facing the global community. This confluence of
emergencies comes against a wider academic and policy backdrop that has emerged
since the mid-1990s, that confronts the more reductionist inclinations present in different
iterations of neoliberalism and new public management (NPM). These paradigms have a
tendency to frame state expenditure as a net cost to the wider economy, rather than an
investment that generates a potentially significant social yield, measurable using both
economic and political metrics.
Public value has emerged out of this fertile historical and political context as both an
arena of applied research and as a post-neoliberal tool for public sector management
(Moore, 2014; O’Flynn, 2007; Vanleene et al., 2019). Common to both iterations of
public value is a recognition that the investment of revenues in public sector activity is
a strategic act that has the potential to produce a wide range of social benefits
(Mazzucato and Ryan-Collins, 2019). Also common to both areas is a recognition that
public sector managers lack the sophisticated modelling tools for understanding how
public investment in human resources and infrastructure, that are united through
complex labour processes, generate a social yield of a particular qualitative and quanti-
tative type (Barber, 2017; Moore, 2014; Papi et al., 2018). This has prompted critical
questions over how public value can be defined, created, and measured.
O’Connor et al. 1047
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