Public Value and the Digital Economy

1st Edition Usman W. Chohan

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/public-value-and-the-digital-economy-1st-edition-usm
an-w-chohan/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Public Value and Public Administration Public

Management and Change John M. Bryson

https://ebookmeta.com/product/public-value-and-public-
administration-public-management-and-change-john-m-bryson/

Economic Diversification in Nigeria: The Politics of

Building a Post-Oil Economy 1st Edition Zainab Usman

https://ebookmeta.com/product/economic-diversification-in-
nigeria-the-politics-of-building-a-post-oil-economy-1st-edition-
zainab-usman/

Consumption Based Forecasting and Planning Predicting

Changing Demand Patterns in the New Digital Economy 1st
Edition Charles W. Chase

https://ebookmeta.com/product/consumption-based-forecasting-and-
planning-predicting-changing-demand-patterns-in-the-new-digital-
economy-1st-edition-charles-w-chase/

Doing Public Good? : Private Actors, Evaluation, and

Public Value 1st Edition R. Pablo Guerrero O.

https://ebookmeta.com/product/doing-public-good-private-actors-
evaluation-and-public-value-1st-edition-r-pablo-guerrero-o/
The Political Economy of Housing Financialization
Comparative Political Economy Gregory W. Fuller

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-political-economy-of-housing-
financialization-comparative-political-economy-gregory-w-fuller/

Digital Transformation Management: Challenges and

Futures in the Asian Digital Economy 1st Edition
Mohammad Nabil Almunawar

https://ebookmeta.com/product/digital-transformation-management-
challenges-and-futures-in-the-asian-digital-economy-1st-edition-
mohammad-nabil-almunawar/

Trust Organizations and the Digital Economy Theory and

Practice 1st Edition Joanna Paliszkiewicz

https://ebookmeta.com/product/trust-organizations-and-the-
digital-economy-theory-and-practice-1st-edition-joanna-
paliszkiewicz/

The Political Economy of Digital Ecosystems 1st Edition

Meelis Kitsing

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-political-economy-of-digital-
ecosystems-1st-edition-meelis-kitsing/

Public Service Logic; Creating Value for Public Service

Users Citizens, and Society through Public Service
Delivery 1st Edition Stephen P. Osborne

https://ebookmeta.com/product/public-service-logic-creating-
value-for-public-service-users-citizens-and-society-through-
public-service-delivery-1st-edition-stephen-p-osborne-2/
Public Value and the Digital
Economy

How can the public manager create and co-create value in the digital
economy? While there is much exciting work being done, there is a
pressing need to recontextualize public value theory (PVT), specifically in
terms of its theoretical precepts, in the fluid and dynamic environment that
the digital economy has produced. Much of the theoretical undergirding
of PVT predates the full onset of today’s digital economy, leaving aside
phenomena including citizen-driven innovations, decentralized digital
structures, and the algorithmic foundations of new economic life.
This is why a conceptually driven exercise in contemporizing PVT
would be of great value to public administration’s theoreticians seeking
to lead the theory in catching up to the praxis. This book seeks to answer
the question of creating and co-creating public managerial value by
developing chapters that revisit categories central to the functions of
public managers in relation to other value-creating agents under PVT.
It introduces new and important lenses to PVT that are grounded in the
praxis of the digital economy, raising new questions about old problems
in PVT and generating newer formulations that push PVT forward and
make its debates salient to the futures that lay before the modern public
manager. The book therefore constitutes an important effort to take PVT
forward by shedding new light on the potency of the public manager in
confronting and constructing the digital economy through co-creation
with the other agents of public value.
It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and policy makers in
the fields of public and nonprofit management, public administration and
policy, and PVT.

Usman W. Chohan, PhD, is a public value theorist who serves as Director

for Economics & National Affairs at the Centre for Aerospace & Security
Studies (CASS), Pakistan.
Routledge Advances in Management and Business Studies

Affirmative Action in Malaysia and South Africa

Preference for Parity
Hwok-Aun Lee

Consumer Financial Vulnerabilities in Malaysia

Issues, Trends and Psychological Aspects
Nurul Shahnaz Ahmad Mahdzan, Mohd Edil Abd Sukor,
Izlin Ismail and Mahfuzur Rahman

Management Theory, Innovation, and Organisation

A Model of Managerial Competencies
Katarzyna Szczepańska-Woszczyna

Collaborative Spaces at Work

Innovation, Creativity and Relations
Edited by Fabrizio Montanari, Elisa Mattarelli and Elisa Mattarelli

Online Place Branding

The Case of Hong Kong
Phoenix Lam

Performance Drivers in the Australian Banking and Financial Industry

Ami-Lee Kelly, Ashish Malik and Philip J. Rosenberger III

Management Education and Automation

Edited by Hamid H. Kazeroony and Denise Tsang

Public Value and the Digital Economy

Usman W. Chohan
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Advances-in-Management-and-Business-Studies/book-series/
SE0305
Public Value and
the Digital Economy

Usman W. Chohan
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 Usman W. Chohan
The right of Usman W. Chohan to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chohan, Usman W., author.
Title: Public value and the digital economy / Usman W. Chohan.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series:
Routledge advances in management and business studies |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021006319 (print) | LCCN 2021006320
(ebook) | ISBN 9780367673895 (hardback) | ISBN
9780367673925 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003131168 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Internet in public administration. | Public
administration—Technological innovations. | Information
society. | Information technology. | Value.
Classification: LCC JF1525.A8 .C4595 2022 (print) | LCC
JF1525.A8 (ebook) | DDC 352.3/802854678—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006319
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006320
ISBN: 978-0-367-67389-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-67392-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-13116-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To those who strive for a digital future
where value creation is prioritized,
above all, for the public
Contents

About the Authorix

Acknowledgmentsxi
List of Tablesxii
List of Figuresxiii
List of Acronyms and Abbreviationsxiv
Prefacexvi

1 Introduction 1
Introduction: Public Value for the Digital Economy 1
Public Administration Theories and the Digital
Economy 3
Existing Efforts to Study the Question 7
What Is Digital Economy and Why Does It Matter? 9
Co-Creation: The Lens of This Book 13
Outline of This Book 17
Concluding Remarks 22

2 Co-Creating Value With Politicians: Parliamentary

Technology Offices 30
Introduction 30
What Are PTOs? 33
The Digital Economy and PTOs 36
PTOs and PBOs 38
Responsible Innovation and Public Value 42
Strategic Triangle 46
Legitimacy 46
Recognition of Value 47
Operational Resources 49
How Would PTOs Fare in the Post-Truth Era? 50
Concluding Remarks 53
viii Contents
3 Co-Creating Value With Citizens: Regulating the
Cryptocurrency Space 59
Introduction 59
Civil Society and Public Value 63
Security vs. Freedom: The Conflict of Values 67
National-Level Regulation—United States 69
Strategic Triangle 73
International Regulation of Cryptocurrencies 76
Central Bank Digital Currencies 80
Conclusion 82

4 Co-Creating Value With the Private Sector: PPPs and

Digital Taxation Policy 91
Introduction 91
Public Value and the Private Sector 94
Accommodative VCC: Public–Private Partnerships 98
Oppositional VCC: Digital Tax Policies 103
Public Value’s Expenditure Orientation 110
Concluding Remarks 112

5 The Digital Public Manager: Decentralized Autonomous

Organizations 119
Introduction: Human Managerial Interactivity in Public
Value 119
The Public Manager as Human and Algorithm 123
Evaluating the Algorithmic Public Manager 125
Efficiency, Accountability, and Equity: Advantages of
DAOs 125
The Limitations of Algorithmic Public Managers 128
The Strategic Triangle 130
Conclusion 132

6 Conclusion 136
The Usefulness of Value Co-Creation as a Lens 138
Revisiting Facets of the Digital Economy 140
Limitations 143
Future Research 146
Final Remarks 149

Index152
About the Author

Dr. Usman W. Chohan (b. Manhattan, New York) is a public value the-
orist with specializations in budgetary theory, parliamentary fiscal
scrutiny, the One Belt One Road, cryptocurrencies and blockchain,
and defense economics. His research has sought to push the boundary
of public value theory in search of creative and innovative solutions
that drive value creation processes for the public. His two most recent
books, Public Value and Budgeting: International Perspectives (Rout-
ledge, 2019) and Reimagining the Public Manager: Delivering Pub-
lic Value (Routledge, 2020), also pursue the same approach toward
enriching public value theory.
Dr. Chohan serves as Director for Economics and National Affairs at
the Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS), which is one of
the premier research institutions in Pakistan. He has also been a post-
doctoral fellow at UNSW Australia, where he also completed his PhD
in Economics on a full scholarship, having created the world’s first
multidisciplinary synthesis of Independent Legislative Fiscal Institu-
tions (IFIs), using public value to arrive at the solutions to his doctoral
work. He has also previously studied at McGill University, Western
University, and Tsinghua University, and he has been a Global Shaper
of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Dr. Chohan is ranked among the top 10 business authors and among the
top 40 out of the 500,000+ academic authors in readership over the
past 12 months (as of February, 2021) on the Social Science Research
Network (SSRN), which is the top open-access knowledge repository
in the world. He previously had been a consultant with the World
Bank (Social Accountability, WBI), working on issues of fiscal govern-
ance reform, and specifically, the implementation of IFIs to help bring
impartial and nonpartisan financial expertise into global governance
systems. He is a Global Advisory Board Member of Economists With-
out Borders. Earlier on, he had served as the Special Situations Analyst
in the Global Equities Team at Natcan Investment Management, the
investment arm of the National Bank of Canada. The Global Equities
x About the Author
team had six global investment professionals including Usman and
$3 billion dollars in Assets under Management (AuM).
Dr. Chohan is the serving president of the International Association of
Hyperpolyglots (HYPIA), which receives individuals who speak 6+
languages fluently, and is himself fluent in seven Indo-European lan-
guages while also conversant in various others. Given that his last six
residences were in cities on five different continents, Montreal, Bue-
nos Aires, Islamabad, Canberra, Warsaw, and Beijing, you will likely
find him roaming somewhere between these six coordinates across the
earth—at least after the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
Acknowledgments

This book was written during a tumultuous time while a second wave of
coronavirus (Covid-19) swept large swathes of the earth and unleashed
economic devastation, misery, and disease. The year 2020 was an
unnerving time for many, and it demanded of us a great patience and
inward focus as our lifestyles were distorted or altered in ways that few
could have imagined. My gratitude goes above all to those public manag-
ers, politicians, and members of civil society who have waged an inces-
sant battle against coronavirus. I look forward to the day that normalcy
returns to all societies, and the scars begin to heal.
That said, my own circumstances were thankfully not altered signifi-
cantly by the pandemic. Having done a PhD and postdoctoral fellow-
ship, I am quite familiar with self-isolation and quarantine. Long bouts
of introspection and disciplined, solitary work is required to complete
such a phase in life, and so I wish to thank those figures who helped me
to complete that journey, in preparation for the sedentary and yet fre-
netic scholarly pursuits of 2020. Those important people include Satish
Chand, Kerry Jacobs, Michael O’Donnell, Joanna Koper, Aron D’Souza,
Rick Stapenhurst, and certainly my parents, Naela and Musa Chohan.
I also acknowledge the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies
(CASS) and recognize its welcoming, collegial, and vibrant atmosphere
that has continued since its foundation when I joined as one of its found-
ing directors. My gratitude goes to ACM Kaleem Saadat, Amb. Jalil
Abbas Jilani, AM Wasim-ud-Din, AM Ashfaque Arain, AM Shahid Alvi,
AM Aamir Masood, AVM Sohail Malik, AVM Faheem-ullah Malik, Air
Cdre Tanveer Piracha, Dr. Syed Muhammad Ali, Senior Editor Sara Sid-
diq, as well as the researchers.
I am also grateful to Routledge for the excellent manner in which every
phase of this book project has been managed. This book represents a
third collaboration between us, a function in no small part of the profes-
sionalism and collegiality that Routledge continually demonstrates and
which I seek to reciprocate with outputs worthy of the publisher. I hope
this third book with Routledge is but one of many more.
Tables

1.1 Public Administration Discourses and Their Dispositions

Toward the Digital Economy 4
1.2 Centre of the Strategic Triangle 12
1.3 Outline of This Book 18
2.1 Comparison of PBOs and PTOs 38
2.2 Comparison of Responsible Innovation and Public Value 44
3.1 Public Managerial Institutions Regulating Virtual Assets
in the United States 70
3.2 The Strategic Triangle for US Public Managers
in Virtual Assets 74
3.3 Center of the Strategic Triangle for Cryptocurrency
Regulation76
3.4 Interpol and FATF: Strategic Triangle Elements 78
4.1 EU Examples of Digital Economy PPPs 101
4.2 The Values Underpinning Digital Taxation 108
4.3 Strategic Triangle Nodes in a Taxation Context 112
5.1 Goals of Public Value Addressed by DAOs 126
5.2 Limitations of DAOs’ Public Value 128
5.3 The Strategic Triangle and DAOs 131
Figures

1.1 Public Value Co-creation in the Digital Economy 14

2.1 Public value creation: PTOs as a lens 31
3.1 Value Co-Creation in Regulating Virtual Assets 66
3.2 Striking a Balance Between Fostering Innovation and
Promoting Accountability 68
4.1 PPPs and Digital Tax Policies as Lenses 93
5.1 DAOS as a Lens for PVT 122
6.1 Public Value Co-creation in the Digital Economy 140
Acronyms and Abbreviations

AML—Anti-Money Laundering
AuM—Assets under Management
BEPS—Base Erosion and Profit Shifting
CASS—Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies
CBDC—Central Bank Digital Currencies
CBO—Congressional Budget Office (US)
CFTC—Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
CRS—Congressional Research Service
CzRM—Citizen Relationship Management
DAO—Decentralized Autonomous Organization
DEG—Digital-Era Governance
DoJ—Department of Justice (US)
DST—Digital Services Tax
EC—European Commission
EPTA—European Parliamentary Technology Assessment (EU)
EU—European Union
FATF—Financial Action Task Force
FinCEN—Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (US)
GAO—Government Accountability Office (US)
GCI—Global Complex for Innovation (Interpol)
GDP—Gross Domestic Product
GNPBO—Global Network of Parliamentary Budget offices
HPC-CPPP—High-Performance Computing Contractual Public–Private
Partnership
HYPIA—International Association of Hyperpolyglots
ICO—Initial Coin Offering
ICT—Information and Communications Technologies
IFIs—Independent Legislative Fiscal Institutions
IP—Intellectual Property
IRS—Internal Revenue Service (US)
ISIS—Islamic State of Iraq & Syria
IST—Institute for Society and Technology (Flanders)
KYC—Know Your Customer
 Acronyms and Abbreviations xv
NBT—Norwegian Board of Technology
NPM—New Public Management
NTM—nontraditional managers
OCC—Office of the Comptroller for Currency (US)
OECD—Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development
OFAC—Office of Foreign Assets Control (US)
OPECST—Office of Parliamentary Evaluation of Scientific and Techno-
logical Choices (France)
OTA—Office of Technology Assessment (US)
PBO—Parliamentary Budget Office (Commonwealth)
PC2—Public–Private–Citizen Collaboration
PE—Permanent Establishment
POST—Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (UK)
PPP—Public–Private Partnerships
PTA—Parliamentary Technology Assessment
PTO—Parliamentary Technology Office
PV—Public Value
PVT—Public Value Theory
RI—Responsible Innovation
ROI—Return on Investment
SEC—Securities and Exchange Commission (US)
SSRN—Social Science Research Network
STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics
STOA—Science and Technology Options Assessment (EU)
TA—Technology Assessment
TAB—Technology Assessment Bureau [Büro für Technikfolgen-
Abschätzung] (Germany)
VA—Virtual Asset
VASP—Virtual Asset Service Provider
VCC—value co-creation
WC—The Wilson Centre (US)
WEF—World Economic Forum
Preface

This book was written at a time when much of the world expressed a
somewhat despondent mood regarding their near-term prospects. A pan-
demic was resurging in its second wave, the political culture of many
societies appeared mired in gridlock, and many institutions entrusted
with assuring the public of normalcy themselves appeared frighteningly
disoriented. Growing inequality, desperation, and commodity fetishism
characterized the lived experience of many around the world, and public
value destruction rather than value creation appeared much more promi-
nently in the discourse.
At the same time, society’s assumptions about the omnipresence of
digital life came into clearer focus, with far more people, myself included,
managing our professional lives through the online medium. Zoom calls
and Internet consumption assumed much greater centrality in the lives
of many. Indeed, the monopolistic corporate giants that dominated the
digital realm appeared in fact to be “raking in the dough,” to put it col-
loquially, as their soaring stock prices and the net worth of their owners
demonstrated. It seemed that the coronavirus pandemic was thrusting the
digital future upon us in an accelerated manner.
But the tumult in which our accelerating dependence on digital tech-
nologies was occurring did not detract from the fact that, sadly, there is
still much to be done to create value for society by constructing, harmo-
nizing, reorganizing, regulating, or reforming the structures that should
govern society’s digital architecture. Public managerial institutions still
would have much to do before the public would find its values about the
digital future properly articulated, and value would be created for them
rather than from them.
In other words, whether the coronavirus pandemic had erupted or not,
many pressing questions nevertheless loomed large regarding the role
that public managers could play in the 21st century’s digital economy,
particularly in terms of co-creating value with other agents of society:
politicians, civil society, the private sector, and other public managers.
Unfortunately, public value theory (PVT) has not, despite its prominence
in the public administration scholarship, caught up in terms of absorbing
 Preface xvii
the dynamic and evolving praxis of digital technologies. Unlike other pub-
lic administration theories (e.g. networked governance) or practitioner-
oriented efforts (e.g. e-government case studies), PVT has not grappled
pensively with the co-creation of value in a digital context.
This is because it is steeped in assumptions about society circa 1995,
when PVT was first offered as a viable public administration theory to
the academy—i.e. in a time before the full onset of the digital era. This
is the pressing gap that I seek to fill in this book, through four chapters
that cover the relationships between public managers and (1) politicians,
(2) civil society, (3) the private sector, and (4) public managers as digital
technology itself. I base this inquiry on the theoretical precepts of PVT,
brought forth into a contemporary setting.
I believe this effort will prove of use not just to students of MPA/MPP
degrees but to the vibrant PVT theoreticians who can take the contem-
porizing leap that I seek to take in this book. The initial response to this
book has been warm and curious, reflecting a larger consensus on the
book’s need than I had anticipated. But the clock is ticking, and even the
phrasing of a “digital future” is somewhat anachronistic, as the lock-
downs of 2020 showed, because we are looking at a “digital present” in
which public managers must deploy the “value-seeking imagination” and
the sense of enterprise and ingenuity that PVT asks of them.
It is my hope that this book stimulates the value-seeking imagination
that PVT often extols and that it encourages other scholars to advance
PVT’s concepts in a contemporary context. The 2020 pandemic has been
a time of earnest reflection, questioning, and recalibration. I hope this
book too offers a reflective, questioning, and recalibrating impetus to
public administration scholarship.
Dr. Usman W. Chohan
February, 2021
1 Introduction

Introduction: Public Value for the Digital Economy

The unquestionable success of public value theory (PVT) as a discourse
to inform the work of public managers has meant that scholars have
sought to use its frameworks to examine many different facets of public
administrative engagement (Alford & O’Flynn, 2009), praxis (Bening-
ton & Moore, 2011; Chohan, 2019), philosophy (Moore, 2014), and
thought (Meynhardt, Gomez, & Schweizer, 2014). As a mainstay of pub-
lic administration courses in many leading centers of learning, PVT has
garnered wide acclaim for presenting a worldview to public managers
that encourages them to channel a “restless, value-seeking imagination”
(Benington & Moore, 2011, p. 3), which both responds to what the pub-
lic values (Benington, 2009) and also to what creates meaningful value
for the public (Moore, 2007).
This was illustrated in the founder Mark Moore’s comment that public
value serves as “a framework that helps us connect what we believe is
valuable and requires public resources, with improved ways of under-
standing what our ‘publics’ value and how we connect to them” (Moore,
1995). As Williams and Shearer remark, the original thinking around
PVT sought “to help imbue public sector managers with a greater appre-
ciation of the constraints and responsibilities within which they work”
(2011, p. 1367). Indeed, PVT nudges public managers to ask themselves,
“why our work is valuable to society?” (Meynhardt, 2009, p. 214), from
which they can march onward to become “producers of real material
value” (Moore, 2014, p. 465). For this effort, PVT was once hailed as
“the next big thing in public management” (Talbot, 2009, p. 167).
Hartley et al. estimate that there are more than 700 publications annu-
ally that utilize or examine the concept of public value (2017, p. 670).
Despite its indubitable appeal, much criticism has been hurled against
the theory, and for various reasons, with the most prominent being
associated with its various ambiguities. Morrell comments that “further
clarification, specification and consensus over concepts and terminology”
is still wanting in the public value (PV) discourse (2009), and Stoker
2 Introduction
remarks that a “lack of clarity of response” persists in terms of provid-
ing “plausible answers” to various aspects of PVT (Stoker, 2006, p. 49).
Even the term “public” in public value has not received sufficient atten-
tion by scholars (Benington, 2009; Chohan, 2019, pp. 40–60) nor has
“public manager” (Chohan, 2020a). Bonina and Cordella also remark
that “many of the concepts embedded on the public values are ambigu-
ous and unbounded” (2009, p. 4).
Additionally, Williams and Shearer lament that “there remains some
lack of clarity over what public value is, both as a theory and as a
descriptor of specific public actions and programmes” (2011, p. 1367),
and they caution that “the public value framework does not derive from
a particular research tradition and there is, as yet, little by way of empiri-
cal research to support the claims made for it” (2011, p. 1381). On this
point, Hartley et al. warn that “public value may fade from view unless
empirical research is undertaken to test, challenge and extend the schol-
arly contributions” (2017, p. 670). A less generous appraisal of “the
Humpty Dumpty term of public value” is that it is “both everywhere
and nowhere” (Oakley, Naylor, & Lee, 2006, p. 2; see also Crabtree,
2004), and as a result, it is but “another vague term which seems to be
a messy hybrid of [public goods, public interest, and public domain]—
without any of their history or intellectual robustness” (Oakley et al.,
2006, p. 3). Dahl and Soss go as far as to accuse PVT of being a neolib-
eral gambit (2014).
Beyond the vagueness of concepts, there is also a need to consider
whether public value is really being mobilized to answer the more diffi-
cult questions that confront society today, including those that are termed
“wicked problems” because of their seeming intractability (see Roberts,
2000; Head & Alford, 2015). For example, PVT’s founder Mark Moore
and several other eminent public administration scholars attempted to
frame the global migrant (refugee) crisis in PVT terms, by first bifurcating
evaluations at the individual and collective levels and then by dividing the
philosophical approaches into utilitarian and deontological perspectives
(Geuijen, Moore, Cederquist, Ronning, & Van Twist, 2017, p. 625). After
offering a few abstractions at differing levels of analysis (e.g. individual
vs. collective), they ultimately resign themselves to “muddling through”
(as discussed in Lindblom, 1959), where they dig into a mish-mash of
(1) lamenting the absence of a unified world government (see suprana-
tional PV in Chohan, 2019, 2020a), along with (2) a call-to-arms for civil
society actions despite their fragmented scope and limited wherewithal.
For a theory touted as the “next big thing in public management” (Tal-
bot, 2009, p. 167), such an effort to grapple with the complexity, interde-
pendence, and magnitude of international problems and transformations
simply doesn’t do justice to those problems. In fact, it reinforces Stoker’s
contention that there is a “lack of clarity of response” vis-à-vis the provi-
sion of “plausible answers” to various aspects of PVT (Stoker, 2006, p. 49).
 Introduction 3
That example is but one of the many such ongoing challenges of formida-
ble enormity that interdisciplinary scholars seek to confront, and PVT’s
contribution toward framing and understanding (before even getting to
resolving) those wicked problems has yet to be adequately evidenced.
The digital economy is one such paradigm that is similarly vast, com-
plex, seemingly intractable, multifaceted, emergent, and abstruse. This is
echoed by Andrews, who remarks that numerous elements of the digital
economy, such as algorithms and big data, present wicked problems as
well (2019, p. 296).
As with PVT’s aforementioned definitional ambiguities, the digital
economy too isn’t clearly defined anywhere, which is why interpretations
of its importance, direction, and ramifications are source of vibrant debate
across many disciplines, in both natural and social sciences. Although the
notion of identifying an interplay between technology and public admin-
istration more broadly is not entirely new (Bovens & Zouridis, 2002;
see also review in Ingrams, 2019), it has nevertheless been observed that
there is a “deficit of [. . .] research that is supported by sound and estab-
lished theories to explain short-term dynamics and the long-term impact
of the digital economy on public administration” (Zhao, Wallis, & Singh,
2015, p. 734). It is therefore important to examine how the theorization
of the digital economy has been undertaken within the public administra-
tion discipline thus far.

Public Administration Theories and the Digital Economy

Scanning some of the most prominent public administration discourses
leads one to infer a mixed degree of responsiveness among their schol-
ars to the advent of the digital economy. Andrews acknowledges that
“public administration scholarship has to a significant degree neglected
technological change” (2019, p. 296), while Dunleavy remarks that “suc-
cessive waves of administrative and organizational theory have down-
played the role of administrative technologies and technological change
affecting government organizations” (2009). Pollitt echoes this in noting
that “technological change has been a somewhat neglected, or at the least
esoteric, topic within the academic field of public administration” and
that this “neglect is damaging for the [public administration] community,
because technological change is actually fundamental to developments in
public administration, in a variety of ways” (Pollitt, 2010, p. 31).
Callen and Austin also observe that “a common thread through [pub-
lic administration literature] suggests that the early optimism about the
promise of digital technology in public administration has given way to a
more structural and conceptual examination of its limits” (2016, p. 20),
while Hofmann, Sæbø, Braccini, and Za posit that “in recent years, the
processes of the digital transformation have challenged the public sector
to respond to the evolution of a more digital society” (2019, p. 101). An
4 Introduction
assessment of three major theories’ approach to the digital economy is
summarily presented in Table 1.1.
The theory that has perhaps most boldly sought to incorporate the dig-
ital economy into its fold would be network governance (Kitsing, 2019;
Semlinger, 2008).1 The network governance literature in fact finds paral-
lels in its conceptual formulation with the nodes and networks that com-
prise the unseen architecture of the digital economy (Sørensen, 2002).
However, even within the network governance literature, there has been
far more emphasis on digitalization’s democratic (Sørensen, 2002), legal-
istic (Carlsson & Sandström, 2008), and crisis-response (Moynihan,
2009) elements than on its economic ramifications (see exceptions in
Semlinger, 2008; Yoon & Hyun, 2010).
In other words, the digital economy does not feature as prominently
within the networked governance ethos as other elements do in the act
of “governing by networks” (Goldsmith & Eggers, 2004). This implies
that even the networked governance literature leaves room for explora-
tions that situate the digital economy more resolutely in its research.
Besides networked governance’s interest, there are two other public
administration theories of prominence where one must consider the
emphasis that they lay on digital economic life: new public management
(NPM) and PVT.

Table 1.1 Public Administration Discourses and Their Dispositions Toward the

Digital Economy

Theory Observation Example Authors

Networked Shares similar Semlinger, 2008; Yoon &

Governance fundamental
conceptions (networks)
New Public Either: Stagnation in the
Management literature and reversal of
new public management
(NPM) policies breaks
connection
Or: digital economy offers
efficiency, effectiveness
and accountability
Public Value Either: Focus on
e-government literature
and case studies
Or: Compartmentalizes/
categorizes values in a
digital context
Hyun, 2010
Dunleavy, Margetts,
Bastow, & Tinkler,
2006; Bonina &
Cordella, 2009
E-Government: Luna-
Reyes & Chun,
2012; Harrison et al.,
2012; Castelnovo &
Simonetta, 2007
Values: Bannister &
Connolly, 2014;
Hofmann et al.,
2019; Ingrams, 2019;
Andrews, 2019
 Introduction 5
For NPM, some scholars argue that the point is moot because NPM’s
adoption has largely stalled in advanced economies, which have a larger
reliance on the digital economy, while the laggard countries which are
being made to consider NPM are those where digitization processes trail
behind (Bukht & Heeks, 2016; Dunleavy et al., 2006). This is somewhat
ironic given that NPM was also at one time referred to as “progressive”
public administration (PPA) (Hood, 1994), and it still retains the term
“new” in its title, even as it is seen to have largely stagnated (Scott, 1998;
Savoie, 1995) and likely unamenable to the proactive treatment of the
digital economy (Dunleavy et al., 2006).
When looking at NPM as a comparator, Alford and Greve suggest that
“public value framework is considerably better suited to these distinc-
tive realities than any other model of strategic management” (Alford &
Greve, 2017, p. 41). However, a contrasting analysis is presented by
other scholars (see Bonina & Cordella, 2009) which broadly argues that
NPM’s focus on “efficiency, effectiveness and accountability” can be
enhanced through information and communications technologies (ICT).
Bonina and Cordella, whose work serves as a sort of bridge between
NPM and public value for an ICT context, nevertheless nuance their cen-
tral argument in this case that “while ICT can help to achieve the main
NPM values, e-government initiatives do not guarantee to have a positive
effect on broader public values” (2009, p. 3).
For public value theory, by contrast, a nuance must be struck: there
is a strong interest in the digital economy, but it takes two forms. The
first is an e-government literature that is practitioner-oriented and case
study based (see Harrison et al., 2012; Castelnovo & Simonetta, 2007)
while the second is a set of value-categorization exercises that put public
values into an inventory of different compartments (see Ingrams, 2019;
Andrews, 2019). For the former, there are echoes in Prebble’s observation
that PVT in general has been directed toward public service practitioners
(2016, p. 114), so that public managers could act as “producers of real
material value” (Moore, 2014, p. 465). Hartley et al. remark that PV
emerged “in the context of executive education for public sector manag-
ers,” i.e. individuals “who face problem-centred challenges calling for
interactive and practice-oriented pedagogy and inductive theory,” which
would be “supported in particular by teaching cases” (2017, p. 670).
Works of this e-government vintage can be found in journals such as
Information Polity, which issued a special issue on the topic (see Luna-
Reyes & Chun, 2012). These case studies have their own merits in pro-
viding evidence of the practical or proposed value in e-government and
open government projects (see Harrison et al., 2012; Castelnovo &
Simonetta, 2007), but their limitation is in not informing public value
as a theory. In other words, the e-government literature, valuable as
it may be in supporting the implementation of practitioner programs,
does not adequately cover value co-creation (VCC) and still leaves much
6 Introduction
room for theoretical enrichment in a bidirectional manner: public value’s
frameworks can help contextualize the digital economy while the digital
economy can help advance the discourse of public value.
In addition, e-government approaches are centered around public
managers in and of themselves, which restricts the rich PV approach of
studying the relationships among the agents of VCC. This resonates with
Hartley et al.’s observation that “scholars who take a single public man-
ager’s vantage point risk unwittingly placing that manager at the heart of
the system(s) in which they are operating,” even though the reality may
be that “other players in those systems may also be in a position to ‘man-
age’ and exercise leadership” (2017, p. 673).
This is equally true in the latter case of inventory-categorization exer-
cises as well, because they generally fail to consider the agency of citizens,
politicians, and the private sector within value co-creating dynamics,
centered as they are around governments themselves. As Hartley et al.
contend, “public value in its original conceptualization (about public
managers) is primarily a theory about human agency” (2017, p. 674).
They also do not treat the digital economy as the driving force but rather
view ICT transformations as adaptations themselves, which leaves an
important gap in the study of socioeconomic value(s) created by and for
the public. There is thus much to be done to mobilize PV scholarship
toward innovation (Alford, Douglas, Geuijen, & Hart, 2017), especially
in the context of the digital economy.
Part of the reason for the aforementioned gap also lies in the timing
mismatch between the introduction of PVT in the early 1990s and the
rise in notability and influence of the digital economy in the 2000s. At
the time that its early advocates were contemplating how public manag-
ers could respond to the values of the public and then create value for the
public based on those values (Moore, 1994, 1995), the centrality of the
digital economy was not entirely evident to most academics outside of a
few specialized Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM)
domains. As such, the digital economy has remained largely outside the
purview of PVT, and even as the digital economy has risen in importance
over the years, the thrust of PV research has not sought to engage with it
except in the limited context discussed above.
That gap appears wider than ever, since there has been a burst of
innovations, often citizen-driven or private sector-oriented, that are not
considered at all in the PV literatures, including cryptocurrencies, digital
taxation policy, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).
This citizen-driven innovation contrasts with what PVT has thus far
examined in public managerial or public sector innovation (see review
in Crosby, Hart, & Torfing, 2017). Because of this, without the recon-
ciliation of public value considerations with the emergence of the digital
economy, there is risk of an inadequate treatment of the public manager’s
role in contemporary socioeconomic life. In fact, the impact of the digital
 Introduction 7
economy has only shown itself to increase by leaps and bounds during
the coronavirus pandemic and its concomitant lockdowns, which rear an
ugly shadow at the time of this writing (Chohan, 2020c).
This resonates with Pollitt’s assertion that “technological change has
been a somewhat neglected, or at the least esoteric, topic within the aca-
demic field of public administration” and that this “neglect is damag-
ing for the [public administration] community, because technological
change is actually fundamental to developments in public administration,
in a variety of ways” (Pollitt, 2010, p. 31). Innovation can and should
remain an important feature of PVT’s ethos (Alford et al., 2017), since
the theory itself seeks to go “beyond policy implementation to the more
proactive exercising of creativity and entrepreneurialism” (Williams &
Shearer, 2011, p. 1372) and should reflect the fact that “the public sec-
tor is neither static nor monolithic; it is constantly changing, pushed by
its tasks, its environment and the capacities it needs” (Alford & Greve,
2017, p. 38).
After all, “the public value doctrine has been supplemented by newer
interpretations and applications and, in the process, commentators (not
least Moore himself) have reworked the themes and concepts involved”
(Williams & Shearer, 2011, p. 1367). The digital economy, as an emer-
gent space of public value creation, serves as a test for what has been
hailed as PVT’s “non-didactic flexibility of application” (Williams &
Shearer, 2011, p. 1374). It should offer “concrete managerial settings”
(Meynhardt, 2009, p. 214) where public value can be examined while
serving scholars with compelling studies to “structure thinking” about
what ought to be the case, as well as to “diagnose the existing situation”
(Meynhardt, 2009, p. 174). It is in that context that I foresaw the need
for this book.

Existing Efforts to Study the Question

Given that there has been a vociferous call by some PV scholars to incor-
porate innovation into public value enquiry (see Alford et al., 2017), it is
worth noting that there are a handful of exceptions where a few scholars
have sought to engage with the digital economy in a public value sense,
but they have only done so as part of incipient efforts that require a much
more rigorous examination. They are also largely confined to the value-
categorization exercises mentioned earlier. Bannister and Connolly have
recognized the transformative effect of information technology on value
systems (2014) and therein point to the commonality among terms used
for transforming government and for subjacent social values, by provid-
ing a taxonomy to that effect. This echoes Beck Jorgensen and Bozeman’s
efforts to taxonomize public values across 72 different line items (2007).
The three main categories within which Bannister and Connolly’s tax-
onomy of values for information technology lie are duty orientation,
8 Introduction
service orientation, and social orientation (2014). Meanwhile, Bonina
and Cordella argue that “ICT intervention in the public sector faces the
challenge of balancing competing public values” (2009, p. 4), therein
citing examples such as the trade-off between customer orientation and
government legitimacy or between automated efficiency and accountabil-
ity displacement.
Andrews considers the public values of technological change, first not-
ing that “public administration scholarship has to a significant degree
neglected technological change” (2019, p. 296), and then adding that
many facets of the digital economy, including big data and algorithms,
are also wicked problems. The strength of using PVT for digital concepts,
Andrews argues, derives from the perception that “it provides a dynamic
legitimizing framework for the development of public value objectives,
the gaining of support from the authorizing environment of the public
sphere, and the development of the necessary capacity to act” (2019,
p. 298). Andrews keenly observes that “just as public value was being
developed before Moore constructed PVT,” so too are the “data scien-
tists, ethicists, lawyers and public leaders are creating public value in a
new field of governance, even if [PVT] is not explicitly cited as underpin-
ning their work” (2019, p. 305). However, without explicitly deploying
PV frameworks, Andrew’s work only sets the stage and makes a call to
action for future research to incorporate PVT approaches into digital
wicked problems.
Ingrams considers public values in the context of big data (2019),
arguing that there is a tension between technocratic values and citizen-
related values such as participation and openness. Although big data
offer the possibility of tapping into citizen choices for policymakers’
decision-making inputs, the current bent of big data leans heavily toward
technocratic values (Ingrams, 2019). This work also highlights conflicts
between values (see also Chohan & Jacobs, 2018; De Graaf, Huberts, &
Smulders, 2016), such as privacy vs. transparency (see also Janssen &
van den Hoven, 2015) or expert-driven vs. citizen-driven policymaking
(Dahl, 1994); in addition to the conflict between the personalization of
services to each citizen, while also using technology to create machine-
driven equal treatment of citizenry (Ingrams, 2019, pp. 129–130). In both
Ingrams’ (2019) and Bannister and Connolly’s (2014) work, the contrast
is set between “citizen” (or “societal”) values and “technological ones.”
Hofmann et al. examine the sharing economy, a subset of the digital
economy, in terms of its relationship to public values (2019). They argue
that the sharing economy “represents a transformative agent for the pub-
lic sector,” allowing managers to act not just as regulatory agent but also
capable of adorning “the roles of customer, service provider, and plat-
form provider” (2019, p. 101). By employing a hermeneutical literature
review method, they consider how a diverse range of engagements within
the sharing economy for addressing various values.
 Introduction 9
The foregoing works hint toward the fact that there are wider avenues
to be explored within the realm of the digital economy, not least in the
relationships between public value agents as they co-create value. How-
ever, in having laid out the public administration interest, and more pre-
cisely the PV interest, in the digital economy, it is worth taking a step
back and discussing just what is meant by the digital economy and why
it would be important to treat the subject more proactively within the
public value literature. The next section lays appropriate emphasis on
some necessary considerations in proceeding toward an understanding of
PV in the digital economy’s context.

What Is Digital Economy and Why Does It Matter?

The digital economy is a seemingly omnipresent phenomenon and has
impacted countless lives that might otherwise not have had access to a
virtual realm of information, entertainment, exchange, thought, con-
nection, debate, innovation, and consumption (Tredinnick, 2008; John-
son & Markey-Towler, 2020). It has ushered profound cultural and social
transformations (Russell & Vinsel, 2018), in addition to fostering greater
economic connectivity and exchange. Yet the term “digital economy”
suffers from significant definitional ambiguities that are not dissimilar to
the ambiguities found in PVT itself.
Hartley et al. express the concern that public value is “bedevilled by
multiple, different, conflicting or obscure definitions” (2017, p. 676).
PVT is characterized either by a multiplicity of hybrid definitions (van
der Waal & van Hout, 2009) or as an “umbrella concept that is still being
typologized” (Alford & O’Flynn, 2009, p. 187), and it therefore needs to
be “rescued from ambiguity” (Prebble, 2012, p. 392). This is true of the
digital economy as well (Yildiz, 2007). The European Commission [EC]
notes that “defining what constitutes the digital economy has proven
problematic,” above all due to “the ever-changing technologies of the
ICT sector and the widespread diffusion of the digital economy within
the whole economy” (EC, 2014, p. 9).
Bukht and Heeks conduct a comprehensive review of the various
definitions that the literature has attempted to offer and remark that
“the meaning and metrics of the digital economy are both limited and
divergent” (2016, p. 2). They disaggregate the concept into three tiers:
a “digital sector,” a “digital economy,” and a “digitized economy.”
The first phase of the digital sector refers to the most rudimentary
aspect, i.e. the ICT production of goods and services. The second tier
of “digital economy” adds to the digital sector a few important layers
such as emerging digital and platform services. Meanwhile, the third
tier of “digitized economy” refers to the implementation of digital
technology across all economic spheres, even those not immediately
related to ICT.
10 Introduction
For the purposes of this book, it is the second tier of “digital economy”
that is of immediate interest (see also Narasimhan, 1983), but the greatest
reason why the digital economy matters is the third “digitized economy”
tier, wherein the entirety of an economy veers toward the digital format,
therein making it difficult to disentangle what is “digital” from what is an
“economy” (OECD, 2014). The attempts to define the digital economy
are nevertheless characterized by “fuzzy boundaries,” and Bukht and
Heeks highlight at least four perspectives for the digital economy: as a set
of structures, as a set of processes, as a set of resources, and as a type of
business model (2016, p. 12).
With that in mind, the most concise definition for the purpose of this
book is that of Bukht and Heeks, who describe the digital economy as
“that part of economic output derived solely or primarily from digital
technologies with a business model based on digital goods or services”
(2016, p. 8). Definitional issues notwithstanding, there are common the-
matic elements which help to characterize the digital economy as a dis-
tinct economic phenomenon: mobility, network effects, and the usage of
data (Knights, Noble, Vurdubakis, & Willmott, 2007; Chohan, 2020b;
EC, 2014).
Mobility refers to the rapid transfer, storage, and replication of infor-
mation (as well as goods and services) in multiple locations around the
world at lower (or even negligible) costs. Because of the exponential
improvements in mobility that the digital economy has ushered, value
creation is in large part a function of the locations of intangibles such as
schemas, blueprints, codes, and other intellectual property.
Network effects refer to the increase in value of a platform or service
due to increased consumer usage of the platform (Katona, Zubcsek, &
Sarvary, 2011; Chohan, 2020b). As more and more users use a plat-
form or service, they add data that helps to improve the quality of their
consumption algorithmically, but it also creates incentives for new users
to participate, thus snowballing into ever richer and larger networks
(Ganne, 2018; Katona et al., 2011).
With respect to the usage of data, there are in fact several processes
that accompany the digital economy which public managers must con-
tend with, including datafication, digitization, generativity, and virtual-
ization (Lavrov et al., 2020; Sadowski, 2019). Datafication involves the
growth in the amount of data held about all things (Sadowski, 2019).
Virtualization refers to the “de-materialization or de-physicalization”
of processes in the sense of transferring them to a virtual field (Knights
et al., 2007; Heeks, 2016). Digitization refers to the conversion of an
increasing amount of analog information into digital formats along the
value chain of information. Generativity refers to the reprogramming or
modification of data and technologies for newer purposes (Lavrov et al.,
2020; Heeks, 2016).
 Introduction 11
With the foregoing discussion of the amorphous nature and defini-
tional ambiguities rightly considered, it is worth proposing that there
are some merits in leaving the contours of the digital economy some-
what open in this introductory chapter. This is because different areas of
the digital economy are explored in subsequent chapters. In Chapters 2
and 4, the ambit of the digital economy centers around what the public
might immediately understand as the mainstream of the digital economy,
including the silicon valley firms that include behemoths of social media,
search engines, e-commerce, and so forth. Chapters 3 and 5, however,
delve into the ambit that might not immediately occur to the public as
circumscribed by the digital economy: cryptocurrencies and DAO, which
are nevertheless part of the digital economy when understood in a more
comprehensive sense.
There is no need, I contend, to further fixate on the definitions of the
digital economy’s scope, beyond the discussion above, for the purpose
of public value analysis. After all, thirty years of research on “public
managers” has taken place in PVT without explicitly describing who
these people are (see Chohan, 2020a), and indeed, a rich literature on
public value has emerged without much consensus on what the subject
itself means (see also Alford & Greve, 2017; Alford et al., 2017; Prebble,
2012, 2016).
It must be emphasized that the size and salience of the digital economy
in contemporary economic life is no trifling matter (Johnson & Markey-
Towler, 2020). According to the EC, the last phenomenon to approximate
the digitalization of the economy was electrification, which occurred in
the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (EC, 2014, p. 5). The
digital economy represents an ever-growing proportion of the wider
economy, and some earlier estimates had put it at 5% of global GDP and
3% of global employment (Bukht & Heeks, 2016). One estimate has sug-
gested that a 10% increase in a country’s “digitalization score” improves
GDP per capita by 0.75% (El-Darwiche, Friedrich, Koster, Sabbagh, &
Singh, 2013).
Numerous authors therefore argue that the digital economy shall
portend “life-changing economic upheavals” (Brynjolfsson & Kahin,
2000) and “profound regional implications on businesses, jobs and
people” (Bahl, 2016). However, such estimates are contested due to the
amorphous nature of digital economic life, such that measurements of
the digital economy using conventional economic tools are “not just
unknown, but unknowable” (Sheehy, 2016). It should also be pointed
out that the distribution of the digital economy is uneven around the
world, as the Global North dominates in terms of output and infra-
structure (for the moment), but the anticipation is that the rapid rate of
the digital economy’s growth in the Global South will allow it to catch
up (Heeks & Bukht, 2018).
12 Introduction
It is also frequently argued that the Global South has much to gain
from adoption of and integration into the digital realm, as it shall serve
as “one of the main drivers of sustainable growth” (EC, 2014, p. 8).
Some merits include economic growth, labor and capital productivity,
falling transaction costs, and greater international market access (Dahl-
man, Mealy, & Wermelinger, 2016). However, it is also cautioned that
the publics of the Global South can be made more vulnerable if they fall
prey to adverse power relationships, greater security threats, economic
vulnerabilities (Manyika & Roxburgh, 2011), and even to a possible
“premature deindustrialization” (Rodrik, 2016).
This is important to mention because of the increasing calls for research
into public value in developing country contexts (Samaratunge & Wijew-
ardena, 2009; Chohan, 2019). Nevertheless, for both the Global North
and South, there is scant dispute regarding the proposition that the digi-
tal economy is a fast and rapidly growing area of socioeconomic engage-
ment for the public, and so it behooves public value scholars to accord
the subject greater treatment and attention in theorizations of how public
managers can co-create value with other agents of society in order to
serve the wider public.
In terms of Bryson, Sancino, Benington, and Sørensen’s framework for
the center of the strategic triangle (2017, p. 6), the digital economy’s PV
context can be posited as follows. The main actors in the digital economy
include public managers, the private sector, civil society (as a group and
as individual citizens), and politicians. Its practices include the develop-
ment, promotion, improvement, oversight, regulation, transfer, and com-
mercialization of many new elements within an economic architecture
that is both connected and yet decentralized, so as to integrate people and
organizations within a network that wields both tangible and intangible
socioeconomic components, such as ideas, services, and goods, which
can be transferred through the worldwide web.

Table 1.2 Centre of the Strategic Triangle

Elements Description

Actors Public agencies, private sector, civil society (group/

individuals), and politicians
Practices Development, promotion, improvement, oversight,
regulation, transfer, and commercialization of a large
number of new digital elements within an economic
architecture
Sphere Virtual and real: the individual, organizational, local,
national, and global levels
Public Problem Oversight/control, security, equity/equality, development,
prosperity, empowerment/monopolization, and
independence/freedom
Source: Framework from Bryson et al. (2017)
 Introduction 13
Its sphere includes levels of analysis at the individual, organizational,
local, national, and global levels both in the virtual realm and in the real-
material domain. The digital economy brings to the fore public prob-
lems such as oversight/control, security, development, prosperity, equity/
equality, empowerment/monopolization, and independence/freedom.
Bryson et al.’s recent framework is useful in situating some of these con-
cerns and serves as a useful point of departure for the VCC framework
that is to be discussed in the next section.

Co-Creation: The Lens of This Book

PVT rests on the idea that public managers should work in concert
with other social agents, and particularly with politicians and civil soci-
ety, to create value for the broader public (Moore, 1994, 1995, 2003).
Moore’s assertion was that public managers, as agents effectuating public
administration, should be “orchestrating the processes of public policy
development, often in partnership with other actors and stakeholders”
(Benington & Moore, 2011, p. 4). This speaks to the multidisciplinary
notion of VCC, which has been aptly described by Gummesson et al. as
the “joint, collaborative, concurrent, peer-like process of producing new
value, both materially and symbolically” (2014, p. 643).
Gummesson et al. also claim that, within the wider management lit-
erature (i.e. beyond public administration itself), “co-creation has spread
swiftly through theoretical essays and empirical analyses, challenging some
of the most important pillars of capitalist economies” (2014, p. 643). Ran-
jan and Read define it as a form of coproduction that “consists of direct
or indirect coworking with customers” through collaboration and dia-
logue, to then integrate mutual resources into value configuration (2016,
p. 292). McColl-Kennedy et al. offer a definition of VCC as the “benefit
realized from integration of resources through activities and interactions
with collaborators in the customer network” (2012, p. 370).
VCC represents the distinct approach employed in this book to exam-
ine the digital economy. In terms of Hartley et al.’s three conceptions
of public value—(1) contributing to the public sphere, (2) adding value
through organizational or partnership settings, and (3) the strategic tri-
angle heuristic—the agent co-creation approach lies predominately in
the second category of adding value through partnerships. However, it
corresponds visually to the strategic triangle framework (Moore, 1994,
1995) in terms of replacing the primary nodes with PV’s agents and then
studying the relationships between them. This approach, like the stra-
tegic triangle, helps to “structure thinking” about what ought to be the
case, as well as to “diagnose the existing situation” (2009, p. 174). The
difference from the strategic triangle in the VCC formulation is that the
nodes are the agents themselves rather than Moore’s attributes of value
creation (legitimacy, operational resources, and recognition of value; see
Moore, 1995).
14 Introduction
The basis of the VCC approach is in examining the relationships of
co-creation between public managers and other agents of society. The
key actors selected in this book who are examined for VCC with public
managers are politicians, civil society, and the private sector, in addition
to public managers themselves. This can be depicted visually (see Fig-
ure 1.1) as a sort of Venn diagram with circles representing the agents as
they intersect with public managers, who are situated at the center, echo-
ing Bryson et al.’s observation that PVT “tends to be public manager-
centered” (2017, p. 2). Each chapter of this book studies an intersection
between public managers and these various agents, with the exception
of the penultimate chapter that looks at two types of public managers
(human and algorithmic).
This reflects Bryson et al.’s contention that we must take PVT and
“adapt it to an emerging world where policy makers and managers in
the public, private, voluntary and informal community sectors have to
somehow separately and jointly create public value”(2017, p. 2). In
this manner, the co-creation of agents helps address what Hartley et al.
have recommended in “mapping concepts and constructs [within public
value], so that they are ‘positioned’ in relation to each other and other
relevant concepts in a nomological network” (2017, p. 676). The VCC
approach further recognizes “a world where elected officials and actors
from many other sectors are called upon to take the lead in, or otherwise
help in, producing public value” (Bryson et al., 2017, p. 3). The specific

Regulating Civil
Virtual Assets Society Public–Private
Partnerships
Parliamentary Digital Taxation
Technology Policies
Offices
Public
Managers
Private
Politicians
Sector

Decentralized
Autonomous
Organizations

Figure 1.1 Public Value Co-creation in the Digital Economy

 Introduction 15
intersections are of great interest in and of themselves and warrant a brief
mention here before they receive further treatment in a later section of
this chapter.
At the intersection of public managers and politicians lies the notion of
parliamentary technology offices (PTOs), in the sense that they bestride
the space between democratic representation in policy decisions (politi-
cians) and technical expertise over complex phenomena (public manag-
ers). PTOs are thus a lens to study the politics-administration dichotomy
(Roberts, 1995; Chohan, 2017a) in a digital economy context (Chapter 2).
At the intersection of public managers and civil society lies the need
for regulation of virtual assets such as cryptocurrencies. Public managers
face an interesting dilemma in balancing two different values articulated
by the public—innovation and accountability—and must strike a balance
between both when attempting to regulate cryptocurrencies and other
virtual assets, which are in large part the product of innovations created
by ordinary citizens in a manner that deliberately avoided public mana-
gerial engagement (Chapter 3).
At the intersection of public managers and the private sector (Chap-
ter 4) are two interesting lenses: one that is in-line with PVT’s attitudes
toward VCC and another that takes a critical approach toward private
interest in PVT. The former lens is that of public–private partnerships
(PPPs) in the digital economy, which shows clearly delineated co-creation
in the digital economy’s context along the lines generally articulated in
PVT. The latter lens is that of digital taxation policy, which represents
an ongoing effort by nation-states to bring the digital economy into the
standards and practices of traditional taxation, with considerable dif-
ficulty (Chapter 4). Taking this dual approach within a single chapter
allows for both a conformist and a critical perspective in exploring the
interplay between public and private power within the digital economy’s
context through PVT.
The penultimate chapter offers an example of two different types of
public managers and their relative position in co-creating value: human
(traditional) public managers and virtual “public managers” in the form
of DAOs as a prelude to our conceptions of public managers evolving
beyond their assumed forms (Chapter 5).
As Osborne contends, value is perceived in terms of its connection to
the life experiences and societal context of members of the public (i.e.
“value-in-context”) (Osborne, 2018). This book will look at this in sev-
eral ways to elucidate the perspectives of agents driving the value creation
processes in their own specific context. As but one example, cryptocur-
rency regulation (Chapter 3) examines the conflicting citizen values of
protection (from fraud) and independence (financial autonomy), both of
which represent legitimate perspectives in their respective contexts but
nonetheless pose a challenge for public managers seeking to strike a bal-
ance between “innovation” and “accountability.”
16 Introduction
It is important to be mindful of such relational contexts because, as
Vargo argues, “VCC requires an understanding of this broader relational
context in which stakeholders [go about creating] value” (2009, p. 374).
The VCC approach used in this book also helps to infer how public man-
agers prioritize among competing values and to consider what Mitchell
et al. have called stakeholder salience, which they define as “the degree
to which managers give priority to competing stakeholder claims” (1997,
p. 854). Examples of this that emerge in the book include regulation vs.
freedom (Chapters 3 and 4), proactive engagement vs. professional neu-
trality (Chapter 2), and fairness vs. competition (Chapter 4).
Noting that public sector and private sector VCC are inherently dif-
ferent (Osborne, Radnor, & Nasi, 2013; Farr, 2016), this book takes
a greater interest in the cross-domain interplay between public manag-
ers and private interest, a point that is not often highlighted in the PVT
literature itself, most notably due to the recognition of their different
(Best, Moffett, & McAdam, 2019) but perhaps also similar (Dahl &
Soss, 2014) logics. This is most evident in the chapter on public value
and private interest in the context of digital taxation policies (Chapter 4),
where the supranational and international efforts of public managers (see
supranational in Chohan, 2019) seek to implement measures to counter
tax base erosion in the digital economy.
The VCC approach also sheds light on Benington’s contention that
public value is a “contested democratic practice” (Benington, 2015,
p. 29) and highlights the multiple tensions in a multidirectional manner
that speaks to Hartley et al.’s keen observation that “rigorous attention
[must be paid] to the views, values, aspirations and actions of a wider
range of stakeholders” beyond public managers alone, including “citi-
zens, elected politicians, special advisors, policy analysts, corporations
and even trouble-makers” (Hartley et al., 2017, p. 674).
VCC equally seeks to both emphasize and contend with the reality of a
new and amorphous, but equally visceral space in which socioeconomic
life grows and expands by the day. This speaks to Bryson et al.’s obser-
vation that the “new world is a polycentric, multi-nodal, multi-sector,
multi-level, multi-actor, multi-logic, multi-media, multi-practice place,”
for value creation, and it is “characterized by complexity, dynamism,
uncertainty and ambiguity in which a wide range of actors are engaged
in public value creation, and do so in shifting configurations” (Bryson
et al., 2017, p. 2).
In addition, the VCC approach also takes into consideration what Bry-
son et al. term the “competing logics” of multi-actor frameworks, which
might include “the only partially overlapping logics of the market, busi-
ness, government, nonprofit, media and civil society sectors,” and the
same may be true within “the more specific within-sector logics of fund-
ing, service delivery, regulation, enforcement, conflict management and
so on” (2017, p. 7). The logics of the market (service delivery and profit
 Introduction 17
motive) and the government (regulation and enforcement), and civil soci-
ety (protection, quality, innovation, and freedom) all contend in the con-
text of the large digital conglomerates, as well as cryptocurrencies.
On this point, the logics of efficiency and autonomy are pitted against
those of control and oversight in DAOs (Chapter 5). The logic of demo-
cratic preeminence and that of technical expertise clash in the context
of technology assessment (TA) done by PTOs (Chapter 1). As such, the
approach of co-creation also raises questions about competing (and con-
flicting) logics as enunciated by Bryson et al. (2017) when looking at
multi-actor engagement in PV.
One limitation of the diagrammatical presentation which is worth men-
tioning is that it simplifies the relationships among agents to two-sided
(dyadic) interactions. As the chapters of this book will show, however,
even in the case studies and lenses chosen, there is room to draw further
multidirectional interconnexions among agents. This speaks to Pinho
et al.’s contention on “the need for designing and managing services to
co-create value, not only by enabling dyadic interactions between the
customer and the service provider, but also by supporting and enabling
value co-creation interactions among different actors in the network”
(2014, p. 470, emphasis added). An example of this is PTOs (Chapter 2),
which for the purposes of the diagram is an interlinkage between public
managers and politicians, but certain forms of PTOs do also have a direct
engagement with civil society in soliciting inputs and raising agenda
items. Nevertheless, for the purposes of focus and simplicity, the diagram
is relegated to the primary co-creation relationships.

Outline of This Book

With the foregoing considerations of treating VCC between various
agents in the digital economy, it is possible to present an outline of the
chapters as they seek to tease out relationships between public manag-
ers and various PV agents through compelling digital economy contexts.
The summary of those relationships, as explored in each chapter, is also
presented in Table 1.3. Following the extensive discussion of this intro-
ductory chapter, and having presented a VCC approach to looking at
engagements between PV agents in service of the public, it helps to dis-
cuss the reasoning and ambition behind the specific lenses chosen to dis-
cuss VCC.
Chapter 2 seeks to examine the relationship between politicians and
public managers, as two of the most extensively studied agents in PVT
(see review in Chohan & Jacobs, 2017) and whose relationship forms the
basis of what is termed “the politics-administration dichotomy” (Rob-
erts, 1995), which remains a central question in the public administra-
tion literature more broadly (Chohan, 2017b). The lens chosen is that of
PTOs, which are a type of institution that offers technology assessment
Table 1.3 Outline of This Book

# Subject Exploratory Questions Thematic Elements Chapter Discussion/Solutions

18

1 Chapter 1: Introduction: What do public administration theories say about the digital economy? How much has public value theory
(PVT) engaged with the digital economy? What is the digital economy and why does it matter? How does value co-creation (VCC)
offer a newer/better lens for examining public value in the digital economy? What are the connections between the different agents of
public value in the digital economy’s context?
2 Chapter 2: Co-creating - How can public - Parliamentary - Public managers and politicians can co-create
value with politicians: managers support Technology Office value in the digital economy by building a socio-
Introduction

Legislative Technology politicians in the - Producing value by technological architecture that creates value for
Office digital economy? informing politicians the public
- What sort of model impartially about - Democratic politicians face limitations in their
can be deployed for technological issues knowledge base regarding the digital economy
co-creating value - Co-creating a - An expert office of public managers informing
between politicians socio-technological politicians dispassionately about technological
and public managers? architecture for the issues can bridge the knowledge gap
- How is responsible public - Parallel is drawn with Legislative Budget Offices
innovation connected (LBOs), and cases are considered
to PVT? - There are limitations to the PTO model
3 Chapter 3: Co-creating - How can public - Civil society-driven - International law-enforcement responses to civil
value with civil society: managers create value innovations society-driven innovations seek to strike a balance
International law- in collaboration with - Balancing innovation between fostering innovation and preserving
enforcement responses civil society a digital and accountability oversight and accountability
to citizen-driven economy? - Coordinating of - The contradictory values of the public (financial
innovations - How can they multinational public freedom vs financial protection) force managers to
facilitate civil society- managers with muster a nuanced response
driven innovations multinational civil - Multinational coordination efforts are required to
while maintaining society target an international public managerial response
degrees of oversight - Strategic triangle: co-created with civil society.
and accountability? legitimacy issues, - The amorphous nature of the digital economy
- What are the recognition of value, complexifies this initiative while civil society
challenges to working and operational continues to innovate and create value
with civil society resources - New trends of convergence among international
given its conflicting regulatory bodies and frameworks
public values?
4 Chapter 4: Co-Creating - What is PVT’s stance - PVT’s - Grappling with private interest in public value
value with the private on private power? accommodationist theory (significant gap)
sector: PPPs and digital - How can public stance toward private - PPPs as a conformist lens to PVT attitudes
taxation policy managers harness power - Digital taxation policies and their emergence as a
value from the - PVT’s superposition critical lens toward private power
profits of the digital of public energy on a - Responding to public’s value for greater fairness
economy? market logic - Focusing on operational resources and PV’s
- What sorts of - PPPs expenditure focus over revenue
multinational - Digital Taxation - Digital taxation requires public managers to
coordination is Commission (EU) orchestrate a process of value creation that
required by public - Dealing with private responds to public values
managers to grapple interest in public
with large private value
power? - Addressing the
values of the public
regarding fairness

5 Chapter 5: The digital - Must we assume that -
public manager: humans will be the
Decentralized only public managers?
Autonomous - What does it mean for -
Organizations (DAOs) algorithms to act as
public managers?
- What are the - post-human public
limitations of
algorithms acting as
public manager?
Decentralized - Public value assumes that public managers will
Autonomous naturally be humans, but the digital future offers
Organizations (DAO) something different: algorithmic protocols for
Algorithms as DAOs to manage tasks
public managerial - This challenges a core assumption of human
institutions agency in public administration
- Yet there are limitations to conferring powers
managers to digitalized, decentralized, autonomous
organizations to act in value creation
- This raises questions about efficiency, democracy,
and the public manager herself in the digital
Introduction

economy
8 Chapter 6: Conclusion: the digital economy brings new possibilities that can be informed by the lenses of PVT. For its part, PVT may
19

be reimagined given the amorphous and dynamic nature of the digital economy. VCC serves as an important approach, based on its
emphasis on relationships among agents
20 Introduction
(TA) to parliaments, who otherwise do not possess much wherewithal
in terms of technical or scientific expertise to grapple with the digital
economy’s challenges.
PTOs are an ideal lens to study the possibilities of VCC in a digi-
tal economy context because they are constituted of public managers
(technology experts) who provide TA to parliamentarians (politicians).
In informing the legislative and oversight functions of politicians, PTOs
create value in a variety of ways that are discussed in the chapter. There
is also a parallel to be drawn between PTOs and parliamentary budget
offices (PBOs, see Chohan & Jacobs, 2017, 2018; Chohan, 2013), which
perform an analogous value-creating role in the budgetary sphere and
have been shown to be extremely useful lenses through which to study
“public value in politics” (Chohan & Jacobs, 2017).
The chapter also draws a comparison between PVT and another dis-
course known as responsible innovation (van Oudheusden, 2014), since
both explore similar territory in terms of technology and the public’s
values but which have not received adequate comparative treatment (but
see Taebi, Correlje, Cuppen, Dignum, & Pesch, 2014). This chapter thus
also provides a degree of comparative analysis between two separate lit-
eratures that share common ambitions while also presenting a useful lens
for VCC between public managers and politicians.
Chapter 3 seeks to examine the relationship between public managers
and civil society, a question that has remained somewhat underexplored
in the PV literature (Benington, 2009; Chohan, 2019). It draws upon
the regulation of virtual assets (cryptocurrencies) as its lens, since these
are largely citizen-driven innovations constructed almost intently with
the notion of remaining aloof from government (public managers). Yet
changes in the cryptocurrency landscape have shown that citizens con-
tinue to value public managerial roles, in terms of protection, regulation,
and oversight, even as these values come into conflict with the independ-
ence and freedom that virtual assets actively espoused and continue to
espouse.
The challenge of reconciling conflicting values (Chohan & Jacobs,
2018; Thacher & Rein, 2004; De Graaf et al., 2016; Bryson et al., 2017)
thus resurfaces in a digital economy context, since civil society does yearn
for financial autonomy and freedom (especially when the times are good)
but then harkens back to values of government protection, regulatory
vigilance, and safety (especially when times get tougher). The chapter
explores the emergence of public managerial responses to cryptocurren-
cies, including their efforts to strike an appropriate regulatory and over-
sight balance.
It then considers how international regulatory standards are being
formulated as form of “supranational public value” (Chohan, 2019),
which may help national-level public managers grapple with the value
conflicts that correspond to the citizen-driven innovations that represent
 Introduction 21
an important part of the digital economy. In considering alternative mod-
els of virtual asset regulation, the chapter also frames the notion of cen-
tral bank digital currencies (CBDCs) as a departure from citizen-driven
innovation toward one led by public managerial (central bank) initiative.
Although CBDCs resolve the value conflict of security vs. freedom decid-
edly in favor of security, the chapter finds that this is also in-line with
traditional PVT understandings of public managerial value production
and citizens as the collective customer (Benington & Moore, 2011).
Chapter 4 seeks to examine VCC between public managers and pri-
vate interest, even as private sector agents are generally omitted from
public value’s early discussions (Moore, 1994, 1995), and particularly
since PVT superimposed public managerial actors onto a market’s value
creation logic. This omission is unwarranted, given that, for one, PPP can
lead to VCC (Hartley et al., 2017; Bryson et al., 2017) and certainly so
in the case of the digital economy. In fact, Chapter 4 most readily tackles
the digital economy in the sense described in this introductory chapter,
where large technology giants have woven a digital architecture that pro-
vides them with immense profits and power, even as many members of
the public have come to question the fairness of such a structural asym-
metry in the gains from the digital economy.
The lenses chosen for this chapter are in fact PPPs and the digital taxa-
tion policies of sovereign nations. The former speaks to a logic of VCC
that conforms with PVT’s expectations of public and private power har-
monizing toward value creation in the digital sector. However, the latter
lens draws attention to the public managerial effort to appropriate the
disproportionate power and profitability of the digital economy’s tech
giants (Bauer, 2018). The contrasting use of two opposing lenses enriches
the exploration of public value and private interest considerably, by refus-
ing to confine the chapter’s exploration to a single underlying attitude.
The chapter also uses taxation to highlight PVT’s focus on the expenditure-
side of government, in the sense of public managers expending resources
to create value for the public, without PVT paying sufficient heed to the
harnessing and generation of resources by public managers, which is a
revenue-side question. In terms of the strategic triangle, this also draws
attention to the operational resources node (Alford & O’Flynn, 2009).
In designing and executing stronger digital taxation policies, the chapter
argues, national-level public managers can address the public’s value of
fairness, generate operational resources when private monopoly power is
becoming excessive, and offer a counterweight in the digital economy to
the monopolization of private interest.
Chapter 5 looks at public managers in two different forms, and in an
entirely different light, in a manner framed by rapid advances in the digi-
tal economy as manifested by what are called DAOs (see DuPont, 2017;
Chohan, 2017c). Public value rests upon the assumption that human
public managers co-create value for the public, and yet the next few
22 Introduction
phases of the digital era risk transferring greater duties of public manag-
ers to DAOs that will use protocols, programming code, and blockchain-
related technologies to perform such duties independently.
Chapter 5 aims to view the DAO as a possible surrogate, collaborator,
or complement to the human public manager, and lens of this chapter is
deliberately forward-looking to help discuss how fundamental assump-
tions of public value may need to be reconsidered as digital technologies
progress, not least in our understanding of the public manager.
It applies the public value framework of the strategic triangle to discuss
questions of legitimacy, operational capabilities, and recognition of value
creation. It argues that PV must be thought of differently without public
managers, since DAOs may face various challenges including those of
security, legitimacy, and rigidity, but they may enhance value creation
through greater efficiency, increased transparency, and equity-focused
outcomes. This chapter may ultimately portend the largest shift in public
managerial conceptualization caused by the digital era, because it asserts
that the human preeminence in public value is by no means a fixture of
the future in practice, and nor should it be in theory.

Concluding Remarks
It can be seen from this lengthy introductory chapter that the scope for
PVT’s exploration of truly contemporary problems is immense, and
while some scholars have drawn attention to the changing nature of
e-government and values in the digital era, there is a significant theoreti-
cal gap in terms of understanding the relationships between the agents
who must co-create public value. This is where a VCC approach stands
out, in offering a more deliberate emphasis on the relationships between
public managers, politicians, civil society, and private interest.
There are any number of elements in the digital economy that might
serve as adequate lenses to examine these questions, but the lenses chosen
for this book help to provide a rich articulation of the challenges and
possibilities for VCC as they stand today and are likely to emerge later
on. There is also an examination of how the digital economy itself offers
transformative long-term possibilities for agents of public value, notably
public managers.
Each of the chapters within this book covers a separate dyadic rela-
tionship and can therefore be read as a standalone work. When taken
together, however, the various chapters of this book help to show not
just that PVT wields great explanatory and explorative capabilities in the
21st-century context of the digital economy but also that the novelty and
zest of the digital economy help PVT theorists to examine the tenets of
their theory with greater alacrity.
By no means could any single PVT-oriented book cover the entirety
of issues subsumed within the digital economy, especially since it is
 Introduction 23
increasingly difficult to separate what is “digital” from what is “the
economy.” Instead, carefully selected lenses can help to illustrate the
possibilities to fellow PV scholars of a more proactive engagement with
21st-century technological and socioeconomic realities. It is my hope that
these explorations, and the VCC approach, offer other scholars of PV a
useful indication of how public value can be deployed toward an intel-
lectual grappling with the pressing problems of the 21st century.

Note
1 It has been argued that PVT is a theory that confirms to the conditions of net-
worked community governance and that PV might be a “new narrative” for it
(Stoker, 2006). However, this chapter treats them as two separate approaches
to public administration despite their overlaps, since scholars of administra-
tion exploring one theory through various lenses do not necessarily draw upon
the other theory. A PV-oriented approach does not require drawing upon net-
worked community governance and vice versa.

References
Alford, J., Douglas, S., Geuijen, K., & Hart, P. (2017). Ventures in public value
management: Introduction to the symposium. Public Management Review,
19(5), 589–604.
Alford, J., & Greve, C. (2017). Strategy in the public and private sectors: Simi-
larities, differences and changes. Administrative Sciences, 7(4), 35–51.
Alford, J., & O’Flynn, J. (2009). Making sense of public value: Concepts, cri-
tiques and emergent meanings. International Journal of Public Administration,
32(3–4), 171–191.
Andrews, L. (2019). Public administration, public leadership and the construc-
tion of public value in the age of the algorithm and “big data”. Public Admin-
istration, 97(2), 296–310.
Bahl, M. (2016). The work ahead: The future of businesses and jobs in Asia
Pacific’s digital economy. Chennai: Cognizant.
Bannister, F., & Connolly, R. (2014). ICT, public values and transformative gov-
ernment: A framework and programme for research. Government Information
Quarterly, 31(1), 119–128.
Bauer, M. (2018). Digital companies and their fair share of taxes: Myths and
misconceptions. ECIPE Occasional Papers. Paper No. 03/2018. Brussels: Euro-
pean Centre for International Political Economy.
Beck Jorgensen, T., & Bozeman, B. (2007). Public values: An inventory. Admin-
istration & Society, 39(3), 354–381.
Benington, J. (2009). Creating the public in order to create public value? Interna-
tional Journal of Public Administration, 32(3–4), 232–249.
Benington, J. (2015). Public value as a contested democratic practice. In J. M.
Bryson, B. C. Crosby, & L. Bloomberg (Eds.), Creating public value in prac-
tice. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and Francis.
Benington, J., & Moore, M. H. (2011). Public value: Theory and practice.
Houndmills and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
24 Introduction
Best, B., Moffett, S., & McAdam, R. (2019). Stakeholder salience in public sector
value co-creation. Public Management Review, 21(11), 1707–1732.
Bonina, C. M., & Cordella, A. (2009, August 6–9). Public sector reforms and the
notion of “public value”: Implications for e-government deployment. Proceed-
ings of the 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems, San Francisco,
CA. Retrieved February 12, 2013, from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/43672/
Bovens, M., & Zouridis, S. (2002). From street-level to system-level bureaucra-
cies: How information and communication technology is transforming admin-
istrative discretion and constitutional control. Public Administration Review,
62(2), 174–184.
Brynjolfsson, E., & Kahin, B. (2000). Introduction. In E. Brynjolfsson & B.
Kahin (Eds.), Understanding the digital economy (pp. 1–10). Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Bryson, J., Sancino, A., Benington, J., & Sørensen, E. (2017). Towards a multi-
actor theory of public value co-creation. Public Management Review, 19(5),
640–654.
Bukht, R., & Heeks, R. (2016). Defining, conceptualising and measuring the
digital economy. In Development implications of digital economies. Working
Paper No. 68. Economic and Social Research Council. Retrieved from https://
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3431732
Callen, J. C., & Austin, E. K. (2016). Deterritorializing Utopia: The possibility of
techno-Utopias in societies of control. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 38(1),
19–36.
Carlsson, L., & Sandström, A. (2008). Network governance of the commons.
International Journal of the Commons, 2(1), 33–54.
Castelnovo, W., & Simonetta, M. (2007). The evaluation of e-government pro-
jects for small local government organisations. The Electronic Journal of
e-Government, 5(1), 21–28.
Chohan, U. W. (2013). Canada and the global network of parliamentary budget
officers. Canadian Parliamentary Review, 36(3), 17–20.
Chohan, U. W. (2017a). Independent budget offices and the politics—administration
dichotomy. International Journal of Public Administration, 41(12), 1009–1017.
Chohan, U. W. (2017b). Legislative oversight of the bureaucracy. In A. Faraz-
mand (Ed.), Global encyclopedia of public administration, public policy, and
governance. Cham: Springer.
Chohan, U. W. (2017c). The decentralized autonomous organization and gov-
ernance issues. Critical Blockchain Research Initiative (CBRI) Working
Papers. Paper No. 003. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publica
tion/321953954_The_Decentralized_Autonomous_Organization_and_Gover
nance_Issues
Chohan, U. W. (2019). Public value and budgeting: International perspectives.
London: Routledge.
Chohan, U. W. (2020a). Reimagining public managers: Delivering public value.
London: Routledge.
Chohan, U. W. (2020b). Some precepts of the digital economy. Critical Block-
chain Research Initiative (CBRI) Working Papers 013. Islamabad: CBRI.
Chohan, U. W. (2020c). A post-coronavirus world: 7 points of discussion for a
new political economy. CASS Working Papers on Economics and National
 Introduction 25
Affairs. Working Paper ID EC015UC. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/
sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3557738
Chohan, U. W., & Jacobs, K. (2017). Public value in politics: A legislative budget
office approach. International Journal of Public Administration, 40(12),
1063–1073.
Chohan, U. W., & Jacobs, K. (2018). Public value as rhetoric: A budgeting
approach. International Journal of Public Administration, 41(15), 1217–1227.
Crabtree, J. (2004). The revolution that started in a library. The New Statesman,
17(826), 54–56.
Crosby, B. C., Hart, P., & Torfing, J. (2017). Public value creation through col-
laborative innovation. Public Management Review, 19(5), 655–669.
Dahl, R. A. (1994). A democratic dilemma: System effectiveness versus citizen
participation. Political Science Quarterly, 109(1), 23–34.
Dahl, R. A., & Soss, J. (2014). Neoliberalism for the common good? Public value
governance and the downsizing of democracy. Public Administration Review,
74(4), 496–504.
Dahlman, C., Mealy, S., & Wermelinger, M. (2016). Harnessing the digital econ-
omy for developing countries. Paris: OECD. Retrieved from http://www.oecd-
ilibrary.org/docserver/download/4adffb24-en.pdf
De Graaf, G., Huberts, L., & Smulders, R. (2016). Coping with public value
conflicts. Administration & Society, 48(9), 1101–1127.
Dunleavy, P. (2009). Governance and state organization in the digital era. In C.
Avgerou, R. Mansell, D. Quah, & R. Silverstone (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of
information and communication technologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dunleavy, P., Margetts, H., Bastow, S., & Tinkler, J. (2006). New public manage-
ment is dead—long live digital-era governance. Journal of Public Administra-
tion Research and Theory, 16(3), 467–494.
DuPont, Q. (2017). Experiments in algorithmic governance: A history and eth-
nography of “the DAO,” a failed decentralized autonomous organization. In
Bitcoin and beyond (pp. 157–177). London: Routledge.
El-Darwiche, B., Friedrich, R., Koster, A., Sabbagh, K., & Singh, M. (2013).
Digitization for economic growth and job creation—regional and industry per-
spectives. New York: Booz & Company.
European Commission [EC]. (2014). Commission expert group on taxation of
the digital economy. Brussels: European Commission.
Farr, M. (2016). Co-production and value co-creation in outcome-based con-
tracting in public services. Public Management Review, 18(5), 654–672. doi:1
0.1080/14719037.2015.1111661
Ganne, E. (2018). Can blockchain revolutionize international trade? Geneva:
World Trade Organization.
Geuijen, K., Moore, M., Cederquist, A., Ronning, R., & Van Twist, M. (2017).
Creating public value in global wicked problems. Public Management Review,
19(5), 621–639.
Goldsmith, S., & Eggers, W. D. (2004). Governing by network: The new shape of
the public sector. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Gummesson, E., Mele, C., Polese, F., Galvagno, M., & Dalli, D. (2014). Theory
of value co-creation: A systematic literature review. Managing Service Quality,
24(6), 643–683.
26 Introduction
Harrison, T. M., Guerrero, S., Burke, G. B., Cook, M., Cresswell, A., Helbig,
N., & Pardo, T. (2012). Open government and e-government: Democratic
challenges from a public value perspective. Information Polity, 17(2), 83–97.
Hartley, J., Alford, J., Knies, E., & Douglas, S. (2017). Towards an empirical
research agenda for public value theory. Public Management Review, 19(5),
670–685.
Head, B., & Alford, J. (2015). Wicked problems: Implications for public policy
and management. Administration & Society, 47(6), 711–739.
Heeks, R. (2016). Examining “digital development”, development implications
of digital economies. Economic and Social Research Council. Working Paper
No. 64. Manchester: University of Manchester.
Heeks, R., & Bukht, R. (2018). Digital economy policy in developing coun-
tries. Development Implications of Digital Economies. Economic and Social
Research Council. Working Paper No. 6. Retrieved from https://www.oecd-
ilibrary.org/sites/bbd35cb9-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/
bbd35cb9-en
Hofmann, S., Sæbø, Ø., Braccini, A. M., & Za, S. (2019). The public sector’s
roles in the sharing economy and the implications for public values. Govern-
ment Information Quarterly, 36(4), 101–121.
Hood, C. (1994). Explaining economic policy reversals. Buckingham: Open Uni-
versity Press.
Ingrams, A. (2019). Public values in the age of big data: A public information
perspective. Policy & Internet, 11(2), 128–148.
Janssen, M., & van den Hoven, J. (2015). Big and open linked data (BOLD) in
government: A challenge to transparency and privacy? Government Informa-
tion Quarterly, 32(4), 363–368.
Johnson, N., & Markey-Towler, B. (2020). Economics of the fourth industrial
revolution: Internet, artificial intelligence and blockchain. Routledge.
Katona, Z., Zubcsek, P. P., & Sarvary, M. (2011). Network effects and personal
influences: The diffusion of an online social network. Journal of Marketing
Research, 48(3), 425–443.
Kitsing, M. (2019, February). The road not taken: From digital networks to net-
worked governance. In 2019 IEEE 4th international conference on computer
and communication systems (ICCCS) (pp. 457–462). IEEE. Retrieved from
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Road-Not-Taken%3A-From-Digital-
Networks-to-Kitsing/15b58a77a7a14e575e660ff3ec6681e01a36d804
Knights, D., Noble, F., Vurdubakis, T., & Willmott, H. (2007). Electronic cash
and the virtual marketplace: Reflections on a revolution postponed. Organiza-
tion, 14(6), 747–768.
Lavrov, R., Burkina, N., Popovskyi, Y., Vitvitskyi, S., Korniichuk, O., & Kozlovs-
kyi, S. (2020). Customer classification and decision making in the digital econ-
omy based on scoring models. Методичні рекомендації, 11(2), 131–138.
Lindblom, C. (1959). The science of “muddling through”. Public Administration
Review, 19(2), 79–88.
Luna-Reyes, L. F., & Chun, S. (2012). Open government and public participa-
tion: Issues and challenges in creating public value. Information Polity, 17(2),
77–81.
Manyika, J., & Roxburgh, C. (2011). The great transformer: The impact of the
internet on economic growth and prosperity. New York, NY: McKinsey Global
Institute.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
cycles identically. This cast to their religion is so strong that it looks to be fairly
ancient. The beginnings of this local type of religion may therefore be set in the
Third Period. As for the Fourth Period, it may be inferred that this chiefly
accentuated the tendencies developed in the Third, the dream basis augmenting
as ceremonialism dropped away.

161. Northwestern California: World-renewal and

Wealth Display
The Third and Fourth periods are also not readily distinguishable in
Northwestern California. Yet here the rooting of these two eras in the Second is
clearer. We have seen that all through northern California there exists the First-
salmon Rite conducted by a prominent medicine-man of each locality; and we
have referred the probable origin of this rite to the Second period. The modern
Indians of Northwestern California consider their great dances of ten or twelve
days’ duration as being essentially the showy public accompaniment of an
extremely sacred and secret act performed by a single priest who recites a
magical formula. His purpose in some instances is to open the salmon season, in
others to inaugurate the acorn crop, in still others to make new fire for the
community. But whatever the particular object, it is always believed that he
renews something important to the world. He “makes the world,” as the Indians
call it, for another year. These New-year or World-renewing functions of the rites
of the modern Indians of Northwestern California thus appear to lead back by a
natural transition to the First-salmon Rite which is so widely spread in northern
California. Evidently this specific rite that originated in the Second Period was
developed in the Northwest during the Third and Fourth eras by being broadened
in its objective and having attached to it certain characteristic dances.
These dances are the Deerskin and Jumping Dances. They differ from those of
the Central and Southern tribes in that every one may participate in them. There
is no idea of a society with membership, and hence no exclusion of the
uninitiated. In fact the dances are primarily occasions for displays of wealth,
which are regarded as successful in proportion to the size of the audience. The
albino deerskins, ornaments of woodpecker scalps, furs, and great blades of flint
and obsidian which are carried in these dances, constitute the treasures of these
tribes. The dances are the best opportunity of the rich men to produce their
heirlooms before the public and in that way signalize the honor of ownership—
which is one of the things dearest in life to the Northwest Californian.
Another feature of these Northwestern dances which marks them off from the
Central and Southern ones is the fact that they can only be held in certain spots.
A Kuksu dance is rightly made indoors, but any properly built dance house will
answer for its performance. A Yurok or Hupa however would consider it
fundamentally wrong to make a Deerskin Dance other than on the accepted spot
where his great-grandfather had always seen it. The reason for this attachment to
the spot seems to be his conviction that the most essential part of the dance is a
secret, magical rite enacted only in the specified place because the formula
recited as its nucleus mentions that spot.
In the Northwest we again seem to be able to recognize, as in the Central and
Southern regions, an increasing contraction of area for each successively
developed ritual. Whereas the First-salmon Rite of the Second Period covers the
whole northern third of California and parts of Oregon, the Wealth-display dances
and World-renewing rites of the Third and Fourth Periods occur only in
Northwestern California. The Jumping Dance was performed at a dozen or more
villages, the slightly more splendid Deerskin Dance only in eight (Fig. 32). This
suggests that the Jumping Dance is the earlier, possibly going back to the Third
Period, whereas the Deerskin Dance more probably originated during the Fourth.

162. Summary of Religious Development

The history of religious cults among the Indians of California seems thus to be
reconstructible, with some probability of correctness in its essential outlines, as a
progressive differentiation during four fairly distinct periods. During these four
eras, the most typical cults gradually changed from a personal to a communal
aim, ceremonies grew more numerous as well as more elaborate, influences from
the outside affected the tribes within California, and local differences increased
until the original rather close uniformity had been replaced by four quite distinct
systems of cults, separated in most cases by transitional areas in which the less
specialized developments of the earlier stages have been preserved. This history
may be expressed in visual form, as on page 314.

Periods of Religious Development in and about Native California.

 Periods of Culture Development in Native California.

163. Other Phases of Culture

A natural question arises here. Does this reconstructed history apply only to
ritual cults, or can a parallel development be traced for other elements of religion,
for industries, inventions, and economic relations, for social institutions, for
knowledge and art? The findings are that this history holds for all phases of
native culture. Material and social development progressed much as did religion.
Each succeeding stage brought in new implements and customs, these became
on the whole more specialized as well as more numerous, and differed more and
more locally in the four sub-culture-areas. Thus the plain or self bow belongs
demonstrably to an earlier stratum than the sinew-backed one, basketry
precedes pottery, twined basketry is earlier than coiled, the stone mortar
antedates the slab with basketry mortar as the oval metate does the squared
one, earth-covered sweat houses are older than plank roofed ones, and totemism
may have become established before the division of society into exogamic
moieties. It would be a long story to adduce the evidence for each of these
determinations and all others that could be made. It will perhaps suffice to say
that the principles by which they are arrived at are the same as those which have
guided us in the inquiry into religion. It may therefore be enough to indicate
results in a scheme, as on page 315. It will be seen that this is nothing but an
amplification of the preceding table. The framework there constructed to
represent the history of native rituals has here been further filled with elements of
material and social culture.

164. Outline of the Culture History of California

In general terms, the net results of our inquiry can be stated thus.
First Period: a simple, meager culture, nearly uniform throughout California,
similar to the cultures of adjacent regions, and only slightly influenced by these.
Second Period: definite influences from the North Pacific Coast and the
Southwest, affecting respectively the northern third and the southern two thirds of
California, and thus leading to a first differentiation of consequence.
Third Period: more specific influences from outside, resulting in the formation of
four local types: the Northwestern, under North Pacific influences; the Southern
and Lower Colorado under stimulus of the Southwest; and the Central, farthest
remote from both and thus developing most slowly but also most independently.
Fourth Period: consummation of the four local types. Influences from outside
continue operative, but in the main the lines of local development entered upon in
the previous era are followed out, reaching their highest specialization in limited
tracts central to each area.
This summary not only outlines the course of culture history in native
California: it also explains why there are both widely uniform and narrowly
localized culture elements in the region. It thus answers the question why from
one aspect the tribes of the state seem so much alike and from another angle
they appear endlessly different. They are alike largely insofar as they have
retained certain old common traits. They are different to the degree that they
have severally added traits of later and localized development.

165. The Question of Dating

A natural question is how long these periods lasted. As regards accurate
dating, there is only one possible answer: we do not know nearly enough.
Moreover modern historians, who possess infinitely fuller records on chronology
than anthropologists can ever hope to have on primitive peoples, tend more and
more to lay little weight on specific dates. They may set 476 A.D., the so-called
fall of Rome, as the point of demarcation between ancient and mediæval history
because it is sometimes useful, especially in elementary presentation, to speak
definitely. But no historian believes that any profound change took place between
475 and 477 A.D. That is an impression beginners may get from the way history
is sometimes taught. Yet it is well recognized that certain slow, progressive
changes were going on uninterruptedly for centuries before and after; and that if
the date 476 A.D. is arbitrarily inserted into the middle of this development, it is
because to do so is conventionally convenient, and with full understanding that
the event marked was dramatic or symbolic rather than intrinsically significant. In
fact, the value of a historian’s work lies precisely in his ability to show that the
forces which shaped mediæval history were already at work during the period of
ancient times and that the causes which had molded the Roman empire
continued to operate in some degree for many centuries after the fall of Rome.
Nevertheless there is no doubt that occasional dates have the virtue of
impressing the mind with the vividness which specific statements alone possess.
Also, if the results of anthropological studies are to be connected with the written
records of history proper, at least tentative dates must be formulated, though of
course in a case like this of the periods of native culture in California it is
understood that all chronology is subject to a wide margin of error.
History provides a start toward a computation, although its aid is a short one.
California began to be settled about 1770. The last tribes were not brought into
contact with the white man until 1850. As early, however, as 1540 Alarcón rowed
and towed up the lower Colorado and wrote an account of the tribes he
encountered there. Two years later, Cabrillo visited the coast and island tribes of
southern California, and wintered among them. In 1579 Drake spent some weeks
on shore among the central Californians and a member of his crew has left a brief
but spirited description of them. In all three instances these old accounts of native
customs tally with remarkable fidelity with all that has been ascertained in regard
to the recent tribes of the same regions. That is, native culture has evidently
changed very little since the sixteenth century. The local sub-cultures already
showed substantially their present form; which means that the Fourth Period
must have been well established three to four centuries ago. We might then
assign to this period about double the time which has elapsed since the explorers
visited California; say seven hundred years. This seems a conservative figure,
which would put the commencement of the Fourth Period somewhere about 1200
A.D.
All the remainder must be reconstruction by projection. In most parts of the
world for which there are continuous records, it is found that civilization usually
changes more rapidly as time goes on. While this is not a rigorous law, it is a
prevailing tendency. However, let us apply this principle with reserve, and
assume that the Third Period was no longer than the Fourth. Another seven
hundred years would carry back to 500 A.D.
Now, however, it seems reasonable to begin to lengthen our periods
somewhat. For the Second, a thousand years does not appear excessive:
approximately from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. By the same logic the First Period
should be allowed from a thousand to fifteen hundred years. It might be wisest to
set no beginning at all, since our “First” period is only the first of those which are
determinable with present knowledge. Actually, it may have been preceded by a
still more primitive era on which as yet no specific evidence is available. It can
however be suggested that by 2000 or 1500 B.C. the beginnings of native
Californian culture as we know it had already been made.

166. The Evidence of Archæology

There is left as a final check on the problem of age a means of attack which
under favorable circumstances is sometimes the most fruitful: archæological
excavation, especially when it leads to stratigraphic determination, that is, the
finding of different but superimposed layers. Unfortunately archæology affords
only limited aid in California—much less, for instance, than in the Southwest.
Nothing markedly stratigraphical has been discovered. Pottery, which has usually
proved the most serviceable of all classes of prehistoric remains for working out
sequences of culture and chronologies, is unrepresented in the greater part of
California, and is sparse and rather recent in those southern parts in which it
does occur.
Still, archæological excavation has brought to light something. It has shown
that the ancient implements found in shellmounds and village sites in Southern
California, those from the shores of San Francisco Bay in Central California, and
those along the coast of Northwestern California, are distinct. Certain peculiar
types of artifacts are found in each of these regions, are found only there, and
agree closely with objects used by the modern tribes of the same districts. For
instance, prehistoric village and burial sites in Northwestern California contain
long blades of flaked obsidian like those used until a few years ago by the Yurok
and Hupa. Sites in Southern California have brought to light soapstone bowls or
“ollas” such as the Spaniards a century ago found the Gabrielino and Luiseño
employing in cooking and in jimsonweed administration. Both these classes of
objects are wanting from the San Francisco Bay shellmounds and among the
recent Central Californian tribes.
It may thus be inferred (1) that none of the four local cultures was ever spread
much more widely than at present; (2) that each of them originated mainly on the
spot; and (3) that because many of the prehistoric finds lie at some depth, the
local cultures are of respectable antiquity—evidently at least a thousand years
old, probably more. This fairly confirms the estimate that the differentiation of the
local cultures of the Third Period commenced not later than about 500 A.D.

167. Age of the Shellmounds

Archæology also yields certain indications as to the total lapse of time during
the four periods. The deposits themselves contribute the evidence. Some of the
shellmounds that line the ramifying shores of San Francisco Bay to the number of
over four hundred have been carefully examined. These mounds are refuse
accumulations. They were not built up with design, but grew gradually as people
lived on them year after year, because much of the food of their inhabitants was
molluscs—chiefly clams, oysters, and mussels—whose shells were thrown
outdoors or trodden under foot. Some of the sites were camped on only
transiently, and the layers of refuse never grew more than a few inches in
thickness. Other spots were evidently inhabited for many centuries, since the
masses of shell now run more than thirty feet deep and hundreds of feet long.
The higher such a mound grew, the better it drained off. One side of it would
afford shelter from the prevailing winds. The more regularly it came to be lived
on, the more often would the inhabitants bring their daily catch home, and,
without knowing it, thus help to raise and improve the site still further.
Some of these shellmounds are now situated high and dry, at some distance
above tide water. Others lie on the very edge of the bay, and several of these,
when shafts were sunk into them, proved to extend some distance below mean
sea level. The base of a large deposit known as the Ellis Landing mound, near
Richmond, is eighteen feet below high tide level; of one on Brooks island near by,
seventeen feet. The conclusion is that the sites have sunk at least seventeen or
eighteen feet since they began to be inhabited. The only alternative explanation,
that the first settlers put their houses on piles over the water, is opposed by
several facts. The shells and ashes and soil of the Ellis Landing mound are
stratified as they would be deposited on land, not as they would arrange in water.
There are no layers of mud, remains of inedible marine animals, or ripple marks.
There is no record of any recent Californian tribe living in pile dwellings; the shore
from which the mound rises is unfavorably situated for such structures, being
open and exposed to storms. Suitable timber for piles grows only at some
distance. One is therefore perforce driven to the conclusion that this mound
accumulated on a sinking shore, but that the growth of the deposit was more
rapid than the rise of the sea, so that the site always remained habitable.
How long a time would be required for a coast to subside eighteen feet is a
question for geologists, but their reply remains indefinite. A single earthquake
might cause a sudden subsidence of several feet, or again the change might
progress at the rate of a foot or only an inch a century. All that geologists are
willing to state is that the probability is high of the subsidence having been a
rather long time taking place.
The archæologists have tried to compute the age of Ellis Landing mound in
another way. When it was first examined there were near its top about fifteen
shallow depressions. These appear to be the remains of the pits over which the
Indians were wont to build their dwellings. A native household averages about 7
inmates. One may thus estimate a population of about 100 souls. Numerous
quadruped bones in the mound prove that these people hunted; net sinkers, that
they fished; mortars and pestles, that they consumed acorns and other seeds.
Accordingly, only part of their subsistence, and probably the minor part, was
derived from molluscs. Fifty mussels a day for man, woman, and child seem a fair
estimate of what their shellfish food is likely to have aggregated. This would
mean that the shells of 5,000 mussels would accumulate on the site daily.
Laboratory experiments prove that 5,000 such shells, with the addition of the
same percentage of ash and soil as occurs in the mound, all crushed down to the
same consistency of compactness as the body of the mound exhibits, occupy a
volume of a cubic foot. This being the daily increment, the growth of the mound
would be in the neighborhood of 365 feet per year. Now the deposit contains
roughly a million and a quarter cubic feet. Dividing this figure by 365, one obtains
about 3,500 as the presumable number of years required to accumulate the
mound.
This result may not be accepted too literally. It is the result of a calculation with
several factors, each of which is only tentative. Had the population been 200
instead of 100, the deposit would, with the other terms of the computation
remaining the same, have built up twice as fast, and the 3,500 years would have
to be cut in half. On the other hand, it has been assumed that occupation of the
site was continuous through the year. Yet all that is known of the habits of the
Indians makes it probable that the mound inhabitants were accustomed to go up
into the hills and camp about half the time. Allowance for this factor would double
the 3,500 years. All that is maintained for the computed age is that it represents a
conscientious and conservative endeavor to draw a conclusion from all available
sources of knowledge, and that it seems to hit as near the truth as a calculation
of this sort can.
One verification has been attempted. Samples of mound material, taken
randomly from different parts, indicate that 14 per cent of its weight, or about
7,000 tons, are ashes. If the mound is 3,500 years old, the ashes were deposited
at the rate of two tons a year, or about eleven pounds daily. Experiments with the
woods growing in the neighborhood have shown that they yield less than one per
cent of ash. The eleven daily pounds must therefore have come from 1,200
pounds of wood. On the assumption, as before, that the population averaged
fifteen families, the one-fifteenth share of each household would be eighty
pounds daily. This is a pretty good load of firewood for a woman to carry on her
back, and with the Indians’ habit of nursing their fires economically, especially
along a timberless shore, eighty pounds seems a liberal allowance to satisfy all
their requirements for heating and cooking. If they managed to get along on less
than eighty pounds per hut, the mound age would be correspondingly greater.
This check calculation thus verifies the former estimate rather reasonably. It
does not seem rash to set down three to four thousand years as the indicated
age of the mound.
This double archæological conclusion tallies as closely as one could wish with
the results derived from the ethnological method of estimating antiquity from the
degree and putative rapidity of cultural change. Both methods carry the First
traceable period back to about 1,500 or 2,000 B.C. After all, exactness is of little
importance in matters such as these, except as an indication of certitude. If it
could be proved that the first mussel was eaten by a human being on the site of
Ellis Landing in 1724 B.C., this piece of knowledge would carry interest chiefly in
proving that an exact method of chronology had been developed, and would
possess value mainly in that the date found might ultimately be connectible with
the dates of other events in history and so lead to broader formulations.

168. General Serviceability of the Method

The anthropological facts which have been analyzed and then recombined in
the foregoing pages are not presented with the idea that the history of the lowly
and fading Californians is of particular intrinsic moment. They have been
discussed chiefly as an illustration of method, as one example out of many that
might have been chosen. That it was the California Indians who were selected, is
partly an accident of the writer’s familiarity with them. The choice seems fair
because the problem here undertaken is rather more difficult than many. The
Californian cultures were simple. They decayed quickly on contact with
civilization. The bulk of historical records go back barely a century and a half.
Archæological exploration has been imperfect and yields comparatively meager
results. Then, too, the whole Californian culture is only a fragment of American
Indian culture, so that the essentially local Californian problems would have been
further illuminated by being brought into relation with the facts available from
North America as a whole—an aid which has been foregone in favor of compact
presentation. In short, the problem was made difficult by its limitations, and yet
results have been obtained. Obviously, the same method applied under more
favorable circumstances to regions whose culture is richer and more diversified,
where documented history projects farther back into the past, where excavation
yields nobler monuments and provides them in stratigraphic arrangement, and
especially when wider areas are brought into comparison, can result in
determinations that are correspondingly more exact, full, and positive.
It is thus clear that cultural anthropology possesses a technique of operation
which needs only vigorous, sane, and patient application to be successful. This
technique is newer and as yet less refined than those of the mechanical
sciences. It is also under the disadvantage of having to accept its materials as
they are given in nature; it is impossible to carry cultural facts into the laboratory
and conduct experiments on them. Still, it is a method; and its results differ from
those of the so-called exact sciences in degree of sharpness rather than in other
quality.
It will be noted that throughout this analysis there has been no mention of laws;
that at most, principles of method have been recognized—such as the
assumption that widely spread culture elements are normally more ancient than
locally distributed ones. In this respect cultural anthropology is in a class with
political and economic history, and with all the essentially historical sciences such
as natural history and geology. The historian rarely enunciates laws, or if he
does, he usually means only tendencies. The “laws” of historical zoölogy are
essentially laws of physiology; those of geology, laws of physics and chemistry.
Even the “laws” of astronomy, when they are not mere formulations of particular
occurrences which our narrow outlook on time causes to seem universal, are not
really astronomical laws but mechanical and mathematical ones. In other words,
anthropology belongs in the group of the historical sciences: those branches of
knowledge concerned with things as and how and when they happen, with events
as they appear in experience; whereas the group of sciences that formulates
laws devotes itself to the inherent and immutable properties of things, irrespective
of their place or sequence or occurrence in nature.
Of course, there must be laws underlying culture phenomena. There is no
possibility of denying them unless one is ready to remove culture out of the realm
of science and set it into the domain of the supernatural. Where can one seek
these laws that inhere in culture? Obviously in that which underlies culture itself,
namely, the human mind. The laws of anthropological data, like those of history,
are then laws of psychology. As regards ultimate explanations for the facts which
it discovers, classifies, analyzes, and recombines into orderly reconstructions and
significant syntheses, cultural anthropology must look to psychology. The one is
concerned with “what” and “how”; the other with “why”; each depends on the
other and supplements it.
 CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN NATIVE
AMERICA

169. Review of the method of culture examination.—170. Limitations on

the diffusion principle.—171. Cultural ranking.—172. Cultural
abnormalities.—173. Environmental considerations.—174. Culture-
areas.—175. Diagrammatic representation of accumulation and
diffusion of culture traits.—176. Representation showing
contemporaneity and narrative representation.—177. Racial origin of
the American Indians.—178. The time of the peopling of America.—
179. Linguistic diversification.—180. The primitive culture of the
immigrants.—181. The route of entry into the western hemisphere.—
182. The spread over two continents.—183. Emergence of middle
American culture: maize.—184. Tobacco.—185. The sequence of
social institutions.—186. Rise of political institutions: confederacy and
empire.—187. Developments in weaving.—188. Progress in spinning:
cotton.—189. Textile clothing.—190. Cults: shamanism.—191. Crisis
rites and initiations.—192. Secret societies and masks.—193.
Priesthood.—194. Temples and sacrifice.—195. Architecture,
sculpture, towns.—196. Metallurgy.—197. Calendars and astronomy.
—198. Writing.—199. The several provincial developments: Mexico.
—200. The Andean area.—201. Colombia.—202. The Tropical
Forest.—203. Patagonia.—204. North America: the Southwest.—205.
The Southeast.—206. The Northern Woodland.—207. Plains area.—
208. The Northwest Coast.—209. Northern marginal areas.—210.
Later Asiatic Influences.

169. Review of the Method of Culture

Examination
In a previous chapter (VII) it has been shown that culture cannot
be adequately explained either by the innate peculiarities of racial
stocks nor by the influences of geographic environment; that the
factors to be primarily considered in the interpretation of civilization
are cultural or social ones.
In a subsequent chapter (VIII) it was made clear that civilization is
to a great extent the result of accretion. New elements are handed
down in time or passed along in space by a process which
psychologically is one of imitation and in its cultural manifestations is
spoken of as tradition or diffusion. The chapters on the arch and the
week, and the alphabet (X, XI) serve as exemplifications that the
principle holds with equal validity in the domains of mechanical,
institutional, and intellectual activity. It must be accepted therefore
purely as the consequence of an objective or behavioristic
examination of human civilization, that while the element of invention
or creative progress remains unexplained, the factor of diffusion or
imitation is the one that is operative in the majority of cultural events.
As contrasted with it, instances of the principle of independent origin
or parallel development prove to be decidedly rare, and tend to be
illusory on searching analysis or to dissolve into only partial
similarities.
In the analysis of the growth of religion in native California
(Chapter XII), the attempt was made to apply an assumption derived
from the diffusion principle—the assumption that normally the more
widely spread element would be the more ancient—to the unraveling
of the growth of a civilization which on account of its poverty has left
no chronological records; in short, to reconstruct the tentative history
of a field lacking ordinary historical data, by converting elements of
space into elements of time.
It may now be worth while to apply this method on a larger scale
and endeavor to outline the pre-Columbian history of the western
hemisphere, which, with some brief and late exceptions in Mexico
and Peru, is equally dateless. The cultural connections of native
America with the Old World are generally conceded to have been
slight: its civilization represents the most important one that in the
main developed independently of the Eur-Asiatic nexus.

170. Limitations on the Diffusion Principle

 To essay, by the mere principle of converting spatial extent into
temporal duration, an accomplishment of such magnitude and
ultimately of such complexity as this, may seem simplistic; and it
would be. The distribution principle may be the most useful of the
weapons in the ethnologist’s armory. But it requires supplement and
qualification.

Fig. 33. Schematic illustration of distributions of culture traits as

indicative of their history. A, distribution corresponding to one
by accident, and suggesting that each occurrence is
independent of the others. B, distribution by contiguous
occurrences, strongly suggesting a single invention and
subsequent diffusion. C, distribution interpretable as due either
to independent, parallel origins; or to a single origin, diffusion
over the whole area, and subsequent loss of the trait in most
parts, with survival only in marginal tracts. The loss in the
central area might be due to the growth of a supplanting trait,
whose later diffusion had not yet penetrated to the farthest
ends. D, distribution suggesting a single origin old enough for
 its diffusion to have become extensive, but checked in certain
directions by adverse conditions in nature, communications, or
cultural preoccupation. The specific demonstration of such
adverse factors would substantiate the interpretation.

First of all, it is obvious that spatial extension must not be

measured mechanically. To work on the assumption that a custom or
art practised over a million square miles was a third as old again as
one practised over seven hundred and fifty thousand, would be too
often contrary to the evidence of known history as well as the
dictates of reason. Culture traits do die out, from inanition, from
sterility of social soil, through supplanting by more vigorous
descendants. Continuity is therefore not a necessary ingredient of
geographical range. An ancient trait may have been displaced in all
but a few remote peripheral tracts. The areas of these may
aggregate but little. Yet the distances between them are likely to
remain greater than the longest range of a later trait which has
replaced the earlier one over most of its original territory.
Thus, alphabetic writing is more recent than the ideographic and
rebus methods, but in the year 1500 A.D. was in use over a larger
area in Europe, Africa, and Asia than the surviving Chinese and
Mexican systems occupied. Yet these two outlying systems enclosed
between them a larger tract than those over which the alphabets had
diffused.
So, at the same period, was agriculture practised by peoples
holding more area than was occupied by non-agricultural ones. But
the former constituted two great and continuous groups, one in each
hemisphere, to which the non-agricultural peoples in the north of
Asia, the south of Africa, the remote continent of Australia, the north
of North America, and the south of South America were obviously
peripheral. Agriculture being of necessity later than the non-
agricultural state, and there being thus no doubt that the marginal
hunting peoples represent the remnant of a condition that was once
world-wide, it appears that there must be a presumption of validity in
favor of reckoning the extent of a scattered custom by its included
rather than its actual area.
 Of course, the situation is not always so simple. There may exist
the possibility of two or more marginal areas sharing a trait as the
result of parallelism. Half-hitch basketry coiling in Tasmania and at
Cape Horn might logically be the last survival of a very ancient
world-wide diffusion, or the product of two thoroughly independent
inventions, or of parallel processes of degeneration in isolated and
culturally unstimulated nooks. The last two interpretations in fact
seem more conservative than the first. If half-hitch coiling were as
antecedent in its nature to other coiling and to weaving as wild foods
are to cultivated ones; or if the Old Stone Age remains showed it to
have been actually so; or if it were practised by a considerable
number of tribes in four or five rather large marginal areas instead of
two quite narrow ones, diffusion, and the consequent antiquity of the
trait, could be inferred with high probability. In short, the periphery
argument must not be stretched too thin.
Obviously, too, comparables must be compared: coiling with
twining, hand-weaving with loom-weaving; not, however, the very
special variety of half-hitch coiling with the entire array of weaving
techniques. Nor would it be fair to balance the whole group of true
alphabets in the year 500 B.C. against the particular rebus system of
Egyptian hieroglyphs from which they were possibly derived but
which they had already much exceeded in their diffusion. Yet the
distribution of all alphabets as against that of all ideographic and
rebus systems would lead, at that date as two thousand years later,
to the same interpretation that the facts of history actually give.

171. Cultural Ranking

Consideration must also be allowed, within certain limits, to
cultural superiority and inferiority. This is a criterion that has been
abused in the earlier anthropology, but it is usable with caution,
especially where a measure of experience confirms the grading that
seems rational. A machine process would normally be later than a
manual one: cloth, for instance, subsequent to basketry. The
antiquity of both these products happens to be so great that little or
no direct historical evidence exists, and their perishability precludes
much help from archæology. Yet there is this indirect evidence: there
are peoples that make baskets only, others that make baskets and
cloth, none that make cloth only. Cloth thus is something
superadded, which, not coming into competition of utility with
basketry, coexists with it.
Where two devices serve the same end and come into full contact,
the issue is even simpler, because the better crowds out the worse.
There is no record of any people, once able to produce metal axes
or knives, reverting to or inventing stone ones. An adequate system
of recording events has always maintained itself. Literacy may have
become less frequent, now and then, under economic or military
stress, and literature poorer, but no recording culture has ever gone
back wholly to oral tradition. Specific systems of records have indeed
died out—witness Egyptian and Cuneiform: but only because they
were rendered useless by more efficient systems of pure phonetic
writing. These, on the other hand, have never been known to yield to
non-phonetic systems.
It is very different with culture phenomena whose ranking is based
solely on the operation of our imaginations. In such cases judgment
should if possible be wholly suspended until evidence is available.
For fifty or sixty years it has seemed eminently plausible and natural,
even inevitable to most people, that matrilinear institutions preceded
patrilinear ones, because a man must know his mother, but in a
condition of promiscuity would not know his father. Yet
incontrovertible historical evidence of a change is conspicuously
deficient, so that the belief in the antecedence of the matrilineate has
remained founded solely in hypothesis. As has been indicated above
(§ 110) and will be shown more in detail below (§ 185), the indirect
evidence of distribution indicates rather that definitely matrilinear and
patrilinear institutions have tended to be closely associated, and that
among exogamous and totemic peoples the matrilineate has usually
been the later phase.
In fact, one important stimulus to belief in matrilineal priority has
been the awareness that the most advanced cultures of the recent
period have inclined to count descent from the father. But it is
obviously unfounded to deduce from this that ancient and primitive
nations favored mother-reckoning. It would be equally logical—or
illogical—to infer that what is had always been since institutions
arose, as to argue that because a thing is now it must formerly not
have been.
This points to a further limiting consideration: that it is dangerous
to argue from a fraction of culture history to the whole. Particularly
dangerous is it to infer from the last four centuries to all that went
before. In the present era distant communications have become
infinitely more numerous and rapid. Space has in one sense been
almost abolished. Diffusions that now encircle the planet in a
hundred years would in previous ages often have required a
thousand to cross a continent by halting steps from people to people.
Similarly, the results of the diffusion principle may be vitiated by an
arbitrary bounding of the spatial field of investigation. A review of
African distributions by themselves, for instance, would lead to many
misleading conclusions, because it is obvious that African culture
has evolved not integrally but as a part of the larger complex
Europe-Asia-Africa. What from the angle of Africa thus appears
central, like iron, may really be peripheral; what appears marginal,
like Islam, is often actually central. By comparison America is so
discrete from the Old World, both geographically and historically, that
an analogous attempt is far more justifiable. Yet even here, as will
appear, some influences from the Old World have operated, whose a
priori elimination would lead to false conclusions.
As regards what is high and low, whole cultures as well as culture
elements must be considered. Between two civilizations, it is fair to
assume that the more advanced will normally radiate, the retarded
one absorb. It is known that the drift of diffusion was from western
Asia to Greece in 800 B.C., from Greece to western Asia in 300 B.C.
In the case of a still unexplained trait common to the two areas and
limited to them, the presumption of origin would thus lie in one or the
other tract according to whether its appearance fell in the period of
Asiatic or Greek culture domination. So in America, loom weaving is
shared by Mexicans and Pueblos. If nothing else were known of
them except that the former but not the latter had passed from oral
tradition to visible records, there would be justification for belief in the
probability of importation of the loom from Mexico into the adjacent
Southwest. Since this one item of Mexican superiority is reinforced
by the facts that the Mexicans cultivated a dozen plants to the
Pueblos’ three; that they were expert in several metallurgical
processes and the Pueblos at best, and rarely, hammered native
copper; that the Mexicans alone carried on elaborate astronomical
observations, computed with large figures, and had established an
intercommunal dominion, the probability of their priority in loom
weaving becomes so strong as to serve as a fairly reliable working
basis. Still, it is important to remember that in the absence of the
direct testimony of history or archæology such a probability does not
become a certainty. The Greeks were without writing, metal working,
successful astronomy, or empire while these already flourished in
Egypt and Asia and were later carried to Greece. Yet in this general
period the Greeks developed metrical poetry and vowel signs for the
alphabet.
Another limitation to the regularity of the diffusion process is to be
found in the inability or unreadiness of undeveloped culture to accept
specialized products of more advanced civilizations; and of any
culture to accept traits incompatible with its existing customs, except
on severe or long continued pressure. A backward tribe might adopt
a simple iron-working technique quite avidly, yet find the
manufacture of sewing machines beyond its endeavors and wants.
Among a people owning little property and no money and therefore
not in the habit of counting, and indifferent to their ages or the lapse
of time as expressed in numbers of years and days, a calendar
system like that of the Babylonians or Mayas would certainly not
become established merely because of contact. They might adopt
and make use of the knowledge that there are some twelve moons in
the round of the seasons, and that the solstices furnish convenient
starting points for the count within each year. But generations and
centuries of gradual preparation through acceptance of such
elementary fragments of the elaborate calendrical scheme would
ordinarily precede their ability to take the latter over in completeness.
So with a religion like Christianity or Buddhism carried by a lone
missionary, or shipwrecked sailors, to a people as simple in their life
as the Indians of California. The religion would be too abstract, too
remote, too dependent on unintelligible preconceptions, to be
embraced. A particular Christian or Buddhist trait, say a symbol like
the swastika or cross, might conceivably be taken over and
perpetuated as a decorative motive or as a magical charm. True, if
the missionary came in the company of troops and settlers, and
introduced cattle, regular meals, comfortable clothing, intertribal
peace, new occupations and diversions, the old simple culture would
often crumble rapidly, and the higher religion be adopted as part of
the larger change, as indeed happened in California when the
Franciscans entered it. But one would not argue from the
convertibility of the Indians under such circumstances to their equal
readiness to accept Buddhism from sporadic East Asiatic castaways.

172. Cultural Abnormalities

Now and then a condition of cultural pathology must be
discounted. About 1889 a messianic religious movement known as
the Ghost-dance fired half the Indian tribes of the United States for a
few years. In 1891 this had a wider diffusion than any ancient cult. It
represented something struck from the contact of two culture
systems: it was not of pure native evolution. A point had been
reached where the old cultures felt themselves suffocated by the
wave of Caucasian immigration and civilization. And in a last
despairing delirium they flung forth the delusion of an impending
cataclysm that would wipe out the white man with his labor,
penalties, and restrictions, bring back the extinct buffalo, and restore
the old untrammeled life. Such a cult could not of course have
remained permanently active. If analogous excitements occurred in
the prehistoric period, they died away without a trace and may
therefore be disregarded in a view of long perspective. Or at most
they served as ferments productive of other and more stable culture
growths. Even if all knowledge of American religion were blotted out
except its condition in 1891, the careful investigator would stand in
no serious danger of inferring a high antiquity from the broad extent
of the Ghost-dance cult, because of the conspicuous elements which
it purloined from that very Christianity and Occidental civilization
whose encroachments gave it birth.

173. Environmental Considerations

Two other qualifications on the distribution method must be
observed, although they are sufficiently obvious to carry no great
danger of oversight. The first concerns gaps or bounds due to
physical environment. Metallurgy will not be practised on an isolated
coral island. Snowshoes cannot be expected in equatorial lowlands.
The spread of the cultivation of a tropical plant like manioc is
necessarily restricted no matter how great the antiquity of its use.
Limitations of diffusion, or breaks in the continuity of distribution, thus
do not count as negative evidence if climate or soil suffice to explain
them. This is in accord with what has been previously formulated (§
83) as to environment being a limiting condition rather than a cause
of cultural phenomena.
Secondly, a marginal area need not be literally so. It may actually
be nuclear. Thus in the Philippines, older elements of culture are
best preserved in the interiors of the larger islands. The coasts show
many more imported traits. Communication in the archipelago is by
sea, internally as well as in foreign relations; resistance to travel,
conquest, intercourse, or innovation is by land. The remote area as
regards time may therefore be a mountain range fifty miles inland,
while a coast a thousand miles away is near. So a rough hill tract in a
level territory, a desert encircled by fertile lands, sometimes remain
backward because they oppose the same obstacles to diffusion as
great distances.
It is thus evident that valuable as the distribution principle is,
perhaps most important of all non-excavating methods of prehistoric
investigation, it can never be used mechanically. It must be applied
with common sense, and with open-mindedness toward all other
techniques of attack. With these provisos in mind, let us approach
the problem of American culture.