1st Edition

Reimagining Public Managers Delivering Public Value

By Usman W. Chohan Copyright 2021
    152 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    152 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Public value theory speaks to the co-creation of value between politicians, citizens, and public managers, with a focus on the public manager in terms of her contributions, initiatives, and limitations in value creation. But just who are public managers? Public value regularly treats the "public manager" as synonymous with bureaucrat, government official, civil servant, or public administrator. However, the categories of public managers represent a more versatile and expansive set of agents in society than they are given credit for, and the discourse of public value has typically not delved sufficiently into the variety of possible cadres that might comprise the "public manager."

    This book seeks to go beyond the assumed understandings of who the public manager is and what she does. It does so by examining the processes of value creation that are driven by non-traditional sets of public managers, which include the judiciary, the armed forces, multilateral institutions, and central banks. It applies public value tools to understand their value creation and uses their unique attributes to inform our understanding of public value theory. Tailored to an audience comprising public administration scholars, students of government, public officials, practitioners, and social scientists interested in contemporary problems of values in society, this book helps to advance public administration thought by re-examining the theory’s ultimate protagonist: the public manager. It therefore constitutes an important effort to take public value theory forward by going "beyond" conceptions of the public manager as she has thus far been understood.

    About the Author

    Acknowledgements

    Introductory Quote

    List of Tables

    List of Figures

    List of Acronyms & Abbreviations

    Preface

    Chapter 1: Introduction

    The Public Manager as Protagonist

    The Ambiguities of PVT

    The aim of this book

    The Structure of this Book

    Chapter 2: The Judiciary as Public Manager

    Public Value and the Judiciary

    Judicial Performance

    The Strategic Triangle

    Judicial Activism and Politics-Administration Dichotomy

    Judicial Value Creation

    Conclusion

    Chapter 3: The Armed Forces as Public Managers

    Introduction

    Defense & Security as Public Goods

    Collective Security & PV Destruction as Creation

    Armed forces in non-defense value creation

    The Strategic Triangle

    Legitimacy and Recognition

    Operational Resources

    Armed Forces as Arbiters of Value

    Conclusion

    Chapter 4: Multilateral Public Managers

    Introduction

    The IMF as institution of multilateral public managers

    Who creates value for whom?

    The Strategic Triangle

    Legitimacy: reciprocal legitimation

    Recognition of value: the urgent and the important

    Operational resources: surrender and obsolescence

    Multilateral PV Problems

    Leadership of a World Public

    Rhetoric

    Value Destruction

    Conclusion

    Chapter 5: Central Banks as Public Managers

    Introduction

    The Value Creation of Central Banks

    Central Bank Independence the Politics-Administration Dichotomy

    The Arbiters of Value?

    Strategic Triangle for Central Banks

    Legitimacy

    Recognition of Value

    Operational Resources

    Measuring the Value of Value

    The Rhetoric of Central Banks

    Conclusion

    Chapter 6: Conclusion: The Kaleidoscope of Public Managers

    Strategic Triangle Approaches

    Recent Questions in Public Value

    Lessons for NTMs

    Interplay between NTMs

    Macro-micro

    Outfield Value

    Politics-Administration Dichotomy

    Limitations & Future Research

    So who are the Public Managers?

    Index

    Biography

    Usman W. Chohan, PhD, is a public value theorist who serves as Director for Economics and National Affairs at the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies (CASS), and has been a post-doctoral fellow at UNSW Canberra, Australia. He has previously served at the National Bank of Canada and the World Bank. He was included among Australia’s 50 Top Thinkers by the Conversation in 2016. He has resided in ten countries on five continents and is President of the International Association of Hyperpolyglots, with fluency in eight different languages. He has been a Global Shaper of the World Economic Forum and is today included among the leading Business Authors in the rankings of the Social Science Research Network. His most recent book, published by Routledge, is Public Value Theory and Budgeting: International Perspectives.