Public Money & Management

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Paradoxes and prospects of ‘public value’

Colin Talbot

To cite this article: Colin Talbot (2011) Paradoxes and prospects of ‘public value’, Public Money &
Management, 31:1, 27-34, DOI: 10.1080/09540962.2011.545544

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Published online: 24 Jan 2011.

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Paradoxes and prospects of
‘public value’
Colin Talbot
This article explains where we are with public value, how we got here and where
we should go with it. It suggests a re-conceptualization that incorporates self-
interest, public interest and procedural interest as the fundamental bases of public
value creation. It goes on to suggest ways in which this could be operationalized
using a ‘scorecard’ approach.
Public value has both an intrinsic and a
contingent interest: intrinsic because of the
challenge it presents to the validity of some of
the thinking behind the new public
management (NPM) of the 1980s and 1990s;
and contingent because of the rise of interest in
public value in influential parts of public policy
communities. Public value essentially tries to
weld together ideas about efficiency and
effectiveness in the provision of public services
with notions of democratic legitimacy and
trust—in some ways it could be seen as a
synthesis of older public administration and
public interest ideas with aspects of NPM. Public
value is certainly not yet a new paradigm in the
sense that it has not yet captured the policy
agenda in the way that NPM arguably did in
some countries, but it is certainly becoming
influential enough in policy-making and
academic circles to merit further attention.
Public value, like most modern social science
(Barkow et al., 1995; Wilson, 1998; Pinker,
2002), shies away from examining the
assumptions it implies about human nature (as
does rational choice economics). This article
confronts this omission and provides a
grounding of public value in our evolved and
contradictory human nature (Talbot, 2005a).
The article also addresses the problem of
operationalizing public value for research and
policy use by proposing a public value scorecard.
This is an ambitious agenda for a single
article and some of the argument is necessarily
somewhat telegraphic. It is essentially a sketch
for wider lines of enquiry, which may become
increasingly important if and when public value
becomes a more pronounced phenomenon
nationally and internationally.
Background—transatlantic policy transfer
The most influential work on public value—
Mark Moore’s Creating Public Value—was
published in the USA in 1995. However, it is
© 2011 THE AUTHOR
JOURNAL COMPILATION © 2011 CIPFA
27
only in the past few years that it has been Colin Talbot is
steadily gaining adherents and interpreters in Professor of Public
the UK. Public value is clearly becoming Policy and
fashionable among think-tankers and policy- Management,
makers (for example Kelly et al., 2004; Horner Manchester Business
and Hazel, 2005); and a small but significant School, UK.
academic literature has also begun to emerge
(Davis, 1998; Gupta, 2002; Smith, 2004;
O’Flynn, 2005; Stoker, 2005; Talbot, 2006).
Public value is not universally popular and
has been subject to attack (Elstein, 2004). One
specific criticism is that public value assumes
that public managers are purely public spirited
and imbued with the ‘public interest’. This
ignores the possibility of self-interested action
by public managers, or indeed that their view
of the public interest may not coincide with that
of elected representatives (Walker, 2006).
In UK public policy terms, there has also
been one noticeable absentee from the ranks of
the public value advocates: HM Treasury—an
important omission. Treasury largely absented
itself from the discussions organized by the
Cabinet Office Strategy Unit in 2001/02, despite
some ministerial support, which led up to the
first version of their ‘public value’ paper (Kelly
and Muers, 2002) and they have apparently
remained sceptical.
The policies of the new coalition
government in Britain on ‘performance’ remain
in a state of flux. Some aspects of New Labour’s
‘targets’ have been dispensed with, but other,
modified, forms of performance reporting seem
destined to survive. It is as yet unclear if public
value will figure at all in their thinking.
Public value should not be seen in
isolation—it is only one of a number of American
ideas that have challenged NPM. From
defenders of traditional public administration
(Goodsell, 1994), challengers of technocratic
performance management (Radin, 2006), to
advocates of the ‘new public service’ (Denhardt,
2000; Denhardt and Denhardt, 2002) a number
DOI: 10.1080/09540962.2011.545544
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT JANUARY 2011
28
of alternatives have been floated. Indeed, in
many ways the book which heavily influenced
the Clinton administrations, Reinventing
Government (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), was
itself far from pure NPM in its diagnosis or
policy recommendations.
So why has public value been attracting so
much attention? There are many possible
explanations. The relentless search for the
latest new big idea is just as strong in the public
sector as it clearly is in the private domain
(Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006). The previous new
paradigm, NPM, is well past its sell-by date and
public value, some would argue, is the
management paradigm best suited to the new
‘networked governance’ of the UK (Newman,
2001; Stoker, 2005).
Whatever the precise reasons for the
emergence of public value as a policy trend, it
clearly appeals as an approach, in its various
guises, by offering an alternative to the narrow,
one-dimensional and economistic ideas which
underpinned much of the NPM movement of
1990s. Public value celebrates the contribution
which the public sector can make to the ‘good
society’, and doesn’t just see it as a necessary
evil: the result of ‘market failure’. But at the
same time it recognizes the need for efficiency
and quality. Public value seems ideally suited to
the new era of spending reviews and economies
facing much of Europe,
Turning to the main ideas, and variations,
in the public value movement, this article offers
a slightly different conceptualization as a basis
for ‘public value’—one which is rooted in the
formation of contradictory human nature. It
will also attempt to demonstrate how public
value can be operationalized, something sadly
lacking from much of the existing literature
and perhaps a reason for its somewhat slow
growth, in the US and the rest of the world,
thus far.
Varieties of public value
Mark Moore’s book sets out the public value
approach in some detail, with many examples.
However, it is sometimes opaque in its
definitions and it takes some effort to try to
disentangle both theoretic and operational
aspects of public value as he conceives it. His
basic definition is that: ‘managerial success in
the public sector with initiating and reshaping
public sector enterprises in ways that increase
their value to the public in both the short and the
long run’ (Moore, 1995, p. 10, emphases added).
In other words, as with the creation of value in
the private sector, ultimately it is people who
decide whether something is valuable or not.
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT JANUARY 2011
This argument has been described by some
as tautological—public value is what the public
values. However, in this sense it is not really any
different from ‘private value’. In the private
sector, the customers (people) and their choices
determine the value of any product or service.
It doesn’t matter how much is spent on creating
it, if customers don’t want it, it is valueless. The
same is true in the public sector, but here the
‘customer’ is the whole citizenry. It is the
combined preferences of the whole people that
decide whether or not any public domain
activity is creating or destroying value.
The main alternative view to this is the
objectivist one, most notably developed by Karl
Marx in his ‘labour theory of value’, in which
‘price’ and ‘value’ are rigorously separated.
While there may be a grain of truth in Marx’s
account (real things are really created and
really embody ‘dead labour’), few would doubt
that, for all practical purposes, value in the
private sector is driven by subjective views
about what constitutes value, however much it
is dressed up in apparently objective accounting
or asset valuations. The market is by definition
subjective, as the recent turmoil in financial
markets on a global scale have amply
demonstrated.
Public value, then, is the combined view of
the public about what they regard as valuable.
Precisely how these, often contradictory, public
preferences are combined is a separate issue.
In the public value perspective, it must be
through some form of representative, and also
sometimes participatory, democracy as well as
through participation by users. The democratic
aspect is important to secure the legitimacy and
trust of the people for public activities. And,
argues Moore, the very act of obtaining consent
improves public value. The more people
participate in framing public action, the more
they value the resulting action even if it was not
their personal preference. But as their
preferences will change over time, so public
activities have to constantly adapt and seek re-
legitimization and renewed trust. Just as
something which is valuable in the private
sector today may be valueless in the future—
how many of us have an ‘obsolete’ but fully
working computer in their loft which has no, or
very little, realizable value in our society?
Assumptions of public value: self-interest,
public interest and procedural interest
During the latter half of the 20th century, ideas
from micro-economics about rational choice
and so-called ‘public choice’ dominated not
only economics, but also invaded other social
© 2011 THE AUTHOR
JOURNAL COMPILATION © 2011 CIPFA

sciences such as politics and public administration.
They also spread from academia into the policy
communities of mainly ‘anglo’ countries and
provided the intellectual underpinning for
Thatcherism, Reganism and NPM.
The basic idea is that humans are always and
everywhere ‘rational utility maximizers’ and this
affects their every decision process from
economics to politics and even personal
relationships. In politics and public
administration this movement was called ‘public
choice’ (with an offshoot called ‘bureau-
shaping’—see Dunleavy, 1991; James, 2003) and
it is sought to displace older ideas about ‘public
interest’.
Public interest has a long history, dating
back to Aristotle, including in the last century
many advocates of public administration’s role
in securing the public interest (Bozeman, 2007).
More recently, there has been something of a
surge in writing defending public interest (for
example Moore, 1995; Denhardt and Denhardt,
2002; Radin, 2006). As Bozeman’s subtitle—
Counterbalancing Economic Individualism—
suggests, there is not necessarily an either/or
choice between self-interest and public interest.
Rather, there may be a way of addressing these
issues, and their roots in human nature.
Indeed, in recent years a counter-revolution
has been occurring in thinking about human
nature and human motivation. In micro-
economics, evolutionary psychology, public
policy and several other fields, the idea that
humans are both self-regarding and altruistic,
social, animals has taken root and been reinforced
by both empirical and theoretical developments.
As the ethicist Peter Singer put it succinctly, ‘we
were social before we were human’ (Singer,
1999).
In this perspective, then, humans are both
self-regarding and other-regarding, selfish and
altruistic. Significant numbers of academics across
a range of fields have explored this idea, including
in management and organization studies (Quinn,
1988; Quinn and Cameron, 1988; Quinn et al.,
1996), public policy (Le Grand, 2003), economics
(Margolis, 1982; Mansbridge, 1990), in
evolutionary psychology (Sober and Wilson,
1998), ethology (de Waal, 1996) and even in
attempts to bring them all together into unified
explanatory frameworks (Fiske, 1991; 2004;
Talbot, 2005a). Management consultants and
gurus have also joined in the discussion (Peters
and Waterman, 1982; Handy, 1995; Harvey,
1996; Price Waterhouse Change Integration
Team, 1996).
There is another aspect of human nature
that is important beyond selfishness and
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29
altruism—our concern with what has been called
‘procedural fairness’. In their book Happiness &
Economics, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer conclude,
on the basis of strong empirical evidence, that
people value and derive pleasure from
participation in fair and transparent processes,
whatever the outcome (Frey and Stutzer, 2001).
This is a very important finding and counters
much of the NPM lack of concern with public
domain processes. Perhaps the most pure
expression of this NPM position, that the public
are not in the least concerned with processes and
procedures and only in what they get from
public services, was made in a widely-cited speech
by a prominent UK government minister in the
early 1990s (Waldegrave, 1993).
Frey and Stutzer argue that it is the modern
democratic polity which most provides
procedural fairness, and that, within democratic
polities, those with the greatest direct
participation are perceived as more fair than
others. Using numerous empirical examples,
and in particular some interesting analysis of
differences between (usefully comparable) Swiss
cantons, they show that representational
democracy as a key procedural element in public
services increases happiness. They also
demonstrate that the more participatory systems
seem to produce even greater satisfaction with
the procedural aspects of the public domain,
even when individuals do not get their self-
interests or their public interest preferences
satisfied. Procedural interests thus, it should be
noted, to some extent synthesize self-interest
and public interests.
It is possible to hypothesize that this aspect of
human nature is also evolved, but not in quite the
same way as altruism and self-regarding
behaviours. A branch of rational choice theorizing
has attempted to explain the ‘evolution of co-
operation’ and even altruism (Axelrod, 1985)
using game theory approaches which
demonstrate that iterative interactions may lead
to the evolution of what are, in effect, rules for
procedural fairness. Individual ‘players’ may
not get what they want in any particular ‘round’
of the game, but if they feel the rules (institutions)
are operating fairly they will continue to co-
operate. This is of course cultural, rather than
biological evolution, but it is equally universalistic
in application—and it may be at least partially a
consequence of gene-culture co-evolution
(Wilson, 1975; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2008).
Interestingly, the performance measurement
movement within public services has been in
part justified as an increase in accountability and
participation (Talbot, 2005b). A policy statement
by the UK’s Labour government about the
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT JANUARY 2011
30
introduction of public service agreements
(PSAs—a form of performance reporting by
central government departments) makes this
explicit: ‘The publication of PSAs represents a
fundamental change in the accountability of
government to Parliament and the people’
(Treasury, 1998, p. 2).
However, Pollitt suggested that a key gap in
this performance measurement movement has
been precisely the absence of an active role by
democratic institutions and political processes
(Pollitt, 2006). Public value potentially addresses
this gap through its emphasis on legitimacy and
trust, re-establishing the idea that in a democratic
polity it is not just individual benefits from services
or outcomes, or public interest benefits, but also
the procedures by which they are shaped and
decided upon which determine the utility of
public services performance (see also Radin,
2006).
Public value potentially captures all three of
these—self-interest, public or social interest and
procedural interest—in a single framework:
•Self-interest captures the need for public services
to provide good quality and efficient services
at an optimum price to both the taxpayer/
citizen and the ‘customer’.
•Public interest stresses the social outcomes aspects
of public services—providing taxes and
legitimacy for ‘common good’ activities that
improve the welfare of all citizens (and have
an inherently redistributional content).
•Procedural interest emphasises the need for equity,
fairness and due process in the way in which
people get to participate in shaping public
decisions and even individual services.
It should be stressed that these are not about
different interests expressed by different groups
or individuals—these three sets of interests can
be displayed by the same individuals at the same
time. This answers the paradox that people
genuinely, and with often altruistic motives,
support more public provision or calls that
‘something must be done’; demand appropriate
procedural fairness, however inefficient; and at
the same time demand less taxation. This happens
because people have all three sets of motivations.
Public interest versus self-interest
Potential conflicts between self-interest and public
interest are not difficult to find. Individual users
of public services who demand ‘customer’ rights
to choice, flexibility in service etc., clearly
potentially conflict with public interest concerns
about equity in the output and outcomes of
public services. An individual’s public interest
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT JANUARY 2011
concerns with redistribution to achieve greater
equality can likewise conflict with the same
individual’s self-interest. For example, the
demand for higher levels of public provision in
areas like health and education conflict with an
individual’s interest in lower taxes. There is
ample opinion poll evidence that the same
individuals display simultaneous public interest
and self-interest views (Ipsos MORI, 2007).
Self-interest versus procedural interest
Representative and participative forms of
providing for procedural interest are both devices
for aggregating preferences in ways which
inevitably conflict with the self-interest of at least
some individuals. Minorities often fail to satisfy
their self-interests, while achieving procedural
interest. In some cases, the ‘Abilene Paradox’
(Harvey, 1988) can occur—collective decisions
can end up disadvantaging everyone involved to
some degree.
Procedural interest versus public interest
Efforts are continually made to provide for
procedural fairness, but this can equally
frequently come into conflict with perceived
public interest. Examples might include when
justice systems become slowed down by
procedural rules causing distress to victims and
accused alike, or when criminals are perceived to
‘get away with it’ due to ‘technicalities’. Likewise
attempts to provide for greater participation to
satisfy procedural interests (Frey and Stutzer,
2001) may be seen as running counter to the
public interest by slowing decision-making,
producing perverse results and being too costly
without sufficiently compensating benefits (Cooke
and Kothari, 2001).
Understanding public value
The balance of self-interest, public and procedural
interest, which creates public value will likely
change over time, over services and between
cultures, but with all three always being present
to some degree (see figure 1). It is tempting to
suggest that any strong movement towards
privileging one set of interests could be met with
countervailing pressures towards the other two.
There will also doubtless be institutional and
cultural influences on the precise balance and
shaping of these preferences in any one time and
place. In the USA, for example, cultural and
institutional factors probably explain why public
interest is often expressed in non-state forms
(voluntary contributions and actions), whereas
in Europe it is more likely to take a state-based
nature (tax and spend), although in both cases
there is significant altruistic action in both state
© 2011 THE AUTHOR
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and voluntary sectors (Pharr and Putnam, 2000).
What does this conceptualization add to
public value? First, it paces public value firmly in
the same territory as the rational choice and
public choice approaches which underpinned
the NPM movement. Rational and public choice
theories are based upon assumptions about
human nature, even if their proponents do not
usually conceptualize their theories in this way.
By providing an alternative view of human nature
which encompasses self-interest, public (altruistic)
and procedural interests this approach provides
a much more secure foundation for approaching
public value.
Second, while this approach does not directly
provide a way of operationalizing public value,
the notions of combining self-interest, public
and procedural interests do make a very
important contribution. By emphasising the
conflicting interests and values that have to be
satisfied within any framework for evaluating
public value, a far more realistic model can be
created, as will be demonstrated below.
Prospects for and benefits of public value
Given the above conceptualization, what are the
benefits of a public value approach? In Moore’s
formulation of public value—as being a balance
between achieving trust and legitimacy, provision
of services and social outcomes—there is clearly
an attempt to balance the competing values of
self-interest, public and procedural interest, if
not stated in exactly these terms. Moreover,
given the fluidity of the way in which self-interest,
public and procedural interests interact, public
value is seen as a dynamic answer which constantly
has to, and can, evolve to meet changed conditions
for its realization.
While Stoker (2005) specifically ties public
value to networked forms of governance, this is
an overly restrictive approach. Not all public
domain activities fall within the definitions of
‘networked governance’ and some areas of public
activity are, and will likely remain, bureaucratic
in form—such as social security payments, tax
collecting and prisons (Osborne and Gaebler,
1992). These types of organizations could be
unnecessarily excluded from application of a
public value policy approach. In Moore’s work
there are many examples of the concrete
application of public value which include precisely
more traditionally hierarchical and bureaucratic
forms of public organization (Moore, 1995).
Similarly, an attempt to apply a public value
framework to reform of a public administration
system which is still very much traditionally
hierarchic in nature—in the Republic of
Macedonia—demonstrates that such an
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31
approach is possible (Talbot, 2006).
Public value may indeed be particularly
relevant in networked governance circumstances,
but it is not only applicable there. One of the
benefits of public value therefore may well be
that it potentially embraces a far wider spectrum
of public domain institutional arrangements than
either public interest or public choice approaches.
Operationalizing public value—a scorecard
approach
Mark Moore noted that ‘we have no way to
conduct a rigorous test of what managerial
practices are better than others’ (1995, p. 10).
A reliable conceptual framework, and some
way of developing metrics of performance
against the elements of such a framework,
therefore seems necessary to provide a guide to
public managers and others seeking to create
public value. How might such a task be
approached?
Balanced scorecards, and the associated
disciplines of strategic mapping and
performance management (Kaplan and
Norton, 1996, 2004), may provide a useful
conceptual framework for operationalizing
public value. The scorecard approach suggests
that for—mainly private sector—organizations
there are four foci: innovation, financial,
internal processes, and customers—which are
permanent features of private value creation
(although, of course, Kaplan and Norton do
not use the term ‘private value’). A scorecard
provides the conceptual framework within
which metrics can be developed. More
importantly, however, the scorecard approach
stresses the trade-offs and balance that has to
be achieved between the four foci—they can be
both mutually supportive but also, and crucially,
mutually undermining depending on the way
the relationships between innovations, financial,
Figure 1. Public value—balancing interests.
Public
Interest
Public
Value
Self Procedural
Interest Interest
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT JANUARY 2011
32
internal processes and customers are managed.
In short, they can lead to creative tensions or
destructive conflicts. This is clearly a similar
approach to Moore’s public value ‘strategic
triangle’.
However, the balanced scorecard itself is
clearly not suitable for applying to public value
creation, conceived as it was in the private
sector. Recent research on UK public
organizations using balanced scorecard
approaches found that although all eight case
study organizations used scorecards, none of
them were the actual Kaplan and Norton
balanced scorecard and they were all ‘home
grown’ and different from one another (Talbot
and Johnson, 2005).
Moore’s original conceptualization
included three main elements:
•Creating trust and legitimacy in their
enterprise.
•Improving operations and services.
•Envisioning the social results which managers
are expected to focus upon in creating public
value (Moore, 1995 pp. 71–76).
The UK’s Strategy Unit effectively added two
extra dimensions or ‘foci’—resources; and
processes (Kelly and Muers, 2002). However,
neither suggested at this stage any sort of
‘scorecard’ approach. (Moore subsequently
proposed a scorecard based on the PV
approach, in a 2003 paper, but for reasons I
will not explore in this article his proposed
scorecard is not adopted here.)
If we combine these five elements (three
from Moore and two from the Strategy Unit)
and change the language to one of ‘focus’ (as in
the original balanced scorecard) and a public
value scorecard is created (see figure 2).
Important points to note about such a
scorecard (as with Kaplan and Norton’s version)
are:
Figure 2. Public value creation framework.
  It is, however, not too early to see that public
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT JANUARY 2011
•First, it is a template into which any strategic
content—including diametrically opposite
ones—can be poured.
•Second, it is highly interactive and non-
linear—each focus can have positive
reinforcing or negative undermining effects
on the others, involving iterative feedback
loops.
•Third, it is particularly useful in dealing with
public organizations which can be viewed as
complex adaptive systems—where linear
performance approaches can be extremely
misleading (Axelrod and Cohen, 1999).
So how does this relate to the self-interest,
public and procedural interest discussed above?
It is possible to map these interests against the
suggested five foci to illustrate the different
emphasis each gives to any particular focus
(see table 1).
The results show clearly the sort of tensions
that have to be traded off or balanced in
creating public value. It clearly captures many
familiar dilemmas in public management and
provides a useful analytical framework for
thinking about the main aspects of public value
creation.
To illustrate with an example. Social results
from a self-interest perspective are primarily
in the ‘what’s in it for me or my family?’ mode,
whereas public interest is more concerned
with genuinely social impacts. From the
procedural interest viewpoint, it is the process
of deciding on social and community results
which is crucial, rather than (or as well as) the
actual results themselves. Each interest
emphasises different, legitimate, aspects of
social results and public value is about achieving
the maximal satisfaction of, or balance between,
all three at any particular time.
A topical policy debate in the UK about
education reform illustrates the utility of this
approach even further. The government
proposes to introduce greater diversity
amongst school types and more choice for
parents in selecting schools (self-interest). The
opponents of the reforms point to possible
inequity and social division issues (public
interest) and the attempted compromise
focuses on the procedure and degree to which
schools can exercise choice (procedural
interest).
Conclusion
It is clearly too early to tell if public value is of
sufficient interest to policy-makers and
practitioners, even in the UK, for it to take off.
© 2011 THE AUTHOR
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Table 1. Map of interests against the five foci suggested in this article.

Self-interest Public interest Procedural interest

Trust and Respect for individual rights, Respect for democratic Respect for democratic and
legitimacy complaints and restitution, and consultative decisions consultative processes
focus and confidentiality

Resources focus Are purchased in economic Are purchased in socially Are purchased in fair,
and competitive ways useful ways (for example fair transparent and honest
trade, fair wages, locally etc.) ways

Processes focus Are flexible and responsive to Are equitable, responsive to Are formalized, fair,
individual wants and efficient democratic control and are transparent and honest
effective

Services focus Are delivered in flexible, cost- Are delivered in socially Are decided in democratic
effective and efficient ways with equitable and effective ways and participative ways
choice for individuals

Social results Are delivered in cost-effective ways Are delivered in equitable ways Are decided in democratic
focus which enhance individuals’ lifestyles which enhance social justice and participative ways

value potentially offers a very different
theoretical and practical approach to the
understanding and practice of public
management than either the older public
administration or the NPM traditions.
The approach in this article to
underpinning public value with a view of human
nature is clearly not absolutely necessary to
accept public value as such. But the
development of the (contradictory) self-interest,
public and procedural interest framework does
extend the explanatory power of the public
value perspective and the model presented
illustrates this sufficiently to be worth further
investigation. It addresses the criticism of public
value that it assumes a public interest, and
perhaps procedural interest, perspective on
public managers motivations and ignores self-
interest issues such as ‘producer capture’ or
‘budget maximization’. The approach offered
here suggests that self-interest, public and
procedural interests of public managers,
politicians and public all have to be taken into
account.
Finally, the approach to operationalizing
public value is not the only one possible and is
bound to have both weaknesses and strengths,
as all such reductionist models inevitably do
(Talbot 1999). The scorecard approach,
however, seems especially applicable because
of the initial simplicity but ability to
accommodate complexity and non-linear
interactions which it offers. Whether it has
sufficient research and practical applicability
also remains to be tested.
Postscript
Since this article was originally drafted my
thinking on how to configure public values has
moved on somewhat, and is now outlined in
© 2011 THE AUTHOR
JOURNAL COMPILATION © 2011 CIPFA
chapter 6 of my new book, Theories of Performance
(Talbot, 2010). This extends, rather than
replaces, the idea of balancing competing public
values. I would now also modify somewhat my
view of ‘value’ to include both ‘brute’ value and
subjective valuations, which is also discussed at
length in the new book. ■
References
Axelrod, R. (1985), The Evolution of Cooperation
(Basic Books, New York).
Axelrod, R. and Cohen, M. D. (1999), Harnessing
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