Public value is the equivalent of shareholder value in public management. Public value can be instituted as an organising principle in a public sector organisation, providing a focus in the context of which individual employees are free to pursue and propose new ideas about how to improve the working of the organisation, in terms of efficiency or services. Public organisations seeking to use public value as a principle need to create a corporate culture in which the pursuit of public value by employees is rewarded just as pursuing shareholder value is rewarded in private corporations.

The term and concept were invented by Harvard professor Mark H. Moore, who published a book on the subject, Creating Public Value Strategic Management in Government, in 1995. Since then the concept has been taken up initially by academics, think tanks and NGOs, and later by a number of public sector organisations in the United Kingdom. In 2004 it was used by the BBC as the cornerstone of its manifesto for the renewal of its charter.

The concept may be contrasted with market failure as a means of conceptualising public ownership.

References

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Mark H. Moore (1995), Creating Public Value Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press ^*

External links

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• The Work Foundation, January 2005, Adding Public Value
• James Crabtree, The New Statesman, 27 September 2004, "The revolution that started in a library"
• BBC, June 2004, Building Public Value - BBC report on renewal of its charter
• Barry Bozeman (2002), "Public-Value Failure: When Efficient Markets May Not Do", Public Administration Review 62(2), March/April 2002
• Mark Moore's Harvard profile

Government