Reimagining Public Managers Delivering Public Value

Public value theory speaks to the co-creation of value between politicians, citizens, and public managers, with a focus on the public manager in terms of her contributions, initiatives, and limitations in value creation. But just who are public managers? Public value regularly treats the "public manager" as synonymous with bureaucrat, government official, civil servant, or public administrator. However, the categories of public managers represent a more versatile and expansive set of agents in society than they are given credit for, and the discourse of public value has typically not delved sufficiently into the variety of possible cadres that might comprise the "public manager." This book seeks to go beyond the assumed understandings of who the public manager is and what she does. It does so by examining the processes of value creation that are driven by non-traditional sets of public managers, which include the judiciary, the armed forces, multilateral institutions, and central banks. It applies public value tools to understand their value creation and uses their unique attributes to inform our understanding of public value theory. Tailored to an audience comprising public administration scholars, students of government, public officials, practitioners, and social scientists interested in contemporary problems of values in society, this book helps to advance public administration thought by re-examining the theory’s ultimate protagonist: the public manager. It therefore constitutes an important effort to take public value theory forward by going "beyond" conceptions of the public manager as she has thus far been understood.

About the Author Acknowledgements Introductory Quote List of Tables List of Figures List of Acronyms & Abbreviations Preface Chapter 1: Introduction The Public Manager as Protagonist The Ambiguities of PVT The aim of this book The Structure of this Book Chapter 2: The Judiciary as Public Manager Public Value and the Judiciary Judicial Performance The Strategic Triangle Judicial Activism and Politics-Administration Dichotomy Judicial Value Creation Conclusion Chapter 3: The Armed Forces as Public Managers Introduction Defense & Security as Public Goods Collective Security & PV Destruction as Creation Armed forces in non-defense value creation The Strategic Triangle Legitimacy and Recognition Operational Resources Armed Forces as Arbiters of Value Conclusion Chapter 4: Multilateral Public Managers Introduction The IMF as institution of multilateral public managers Who creates value for whom? The Strategic Triangle Legitimacy: reciprocal legitimation Recognition of value: the urgent and the important Operational resources: surrender and obsolescence Multilateral PV Problems Leadership of a World Public Rhetoric Value Destruction Conclusion Chapter 5: Central Banks as Public Managers Introduction The Value Creation of Central Banks Central Bank Independence the Politics-Administration Dichotomy The Arbiters of Value? Strategic Triangle for Central Banks Legitimacy Recognition of Value Operational Resources Measuring the Value of Value The Rhetoric of Central Banks Conclusion Chapter 6: Conclusion: The Kaleidoscope of Public Managers Strategic Triangle Approaches Recent Questions in Public Value Lessons for NTMs Interplay between NTMs Macro-micro Outfield Value Politics-Administration Dichotomy Limitations & Future Research So who are the Public Managers? Index

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