A commentary on “Different strokes for different folks? The translation of public values into official meanings”

Abstract

This commentary on the article “Different strokes for different folks? The translation of public values into official meanings” considers the merits of the authors’ arguments and offers several recommendations for researchers interested in public values.

Introductory words

Methodological controversies are commonplace in public administration research, including the long running debate over qualitative vs. quantitative methods. This controversy has been debated exhaustively over the years with little resolution, other than encouraging researchers to employ multiple methods to cover all bases. But this option is rarely feasible in a field that is chronically under-resourced and overwhelmed by the need for modernized public services. The controversy therefore persists. The following research article and commentary speak to this issue. The article was submitted to IRAS and went through the standard review process. The commentary was written by a blind reviewer who provided several reviews of the article. The actual back-and-forth exchange between the parties occurred during the review process, and while both sides moderated their positions, their underlying difference of opinion over the use of qualitative or quantitative methods in public values research was irreconcilable. In keeping with the journal’s policy of blind review, the identities of the authors and the reviewer were kept confidential until now. It is our hope that publishing this article and commentary will prompt readers to weigh in on this important issue.

Gene A. Brewer, IRAS deputy editor, The University of Georgia, School of Public and International Affairs, Department of Public Administration and Policy, 204 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA 30602-1615, USA.

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Introduction

Public affairs scholars and practitioners have long argued that economic and market-based perspectives only partly explain the nature, conduct, and activity of public organizations and their employees, especially in democratic systems of governance. Not only do economic justifications for public organizations fail to meaningfully capture many of the underlying rationales (e.g., political, social) for government engagement and intervention, but, as several decades of research on public service motivation and altruism have now clearly demonstrated, these perspectives also miss the full range of motives and motivations that drive public sector employees and shape how employees actually make decisions on behalf of citizens and political representatives. In this sense, public organizations exist precisely because they possess and pursue the realization of some subset of values that are distinct from those typically held by private and nonprofit organizations.

Given the apparent significance of public values to, and as a justification for, public organizations, it is unfortunate that so little attention has been devoted to this important topic. For this reason, the authors’ efforts to more fully unpack and better situate organizations’ core value statements into existing public values research marks an important, laudable step in the development of this research stream. As the authors noted, we still know little about whether and how organizations’ official (generic) value statements are translated into specific values that, in turn, drive employee behavior. That the authors have opted to address this research gap is wise and novel, possessing the potential to open new streams of research. Yet, significant shortcomings exist in the authors’ approach that warrant more care and attention. The balance of this commentary offers several counter-perspectives, organized broadly by theme, that researchers should consider before embarking on future public values studies.

How important are value statements and to whom are they important?

On the face of it, the authors’ article is motivated by a seemingly simple but important question: “What are official agency core values intended to mean?” (p. 1). Because this is a fairly broad question, the authors have opted to explore, more narrowly, how official value statements are translated into context-specific, “localized” meanings that, in turn, are presumed to guide administrative behavior. Stated differently, the authors are interested in trying to understand two overlapping issues: (1) how do organizational leaders translate public values into formal guidelines for employee behavior; and (2) how do employees understand, prioritize, and navigate different public values found in official value statements as communicated by organization heads?

The authors further suggest that such efforts are necessary for three overarching reasons: (1) because the field has been slow to consider the role official value statements play in shaping administrative behavior generally; (2) existing public values studies have been subject to significant empirical challenges (e.g., (how) should values be prioritized?); and (3) the preponderance of evidence on public values derives from “large N studies … examined out of their empirical context” that effectively “rob” researchers of an understanding of the specific meaning of such values (p. 2).

Each of these critiques is significant and poses real challenges—both theoretical and empirical—for public values researchers. However, whether the authors’ own approach corrects for problems in existing research requires careful consideration of the relative merits and demerits of existing approaches balanced against the authors’ efforts. To this end, it seems necessary to first consider whether official value statements drive employee behavior in the ways implied by the authors (particularly since the authors assume rather than test for this relationship).

Unfortunately, there are good reasons to be skeptical that value statements are as impactful on employees as the authors assert. I raise this point not to suggest that value statements are unimportant, but rather to question whether the information distilled by the authors from value statements is consistently superior to, for example, direct surveys or interviews of employees. Stated differently, value statements serve multiple roles for organizations. Without having a clear sense of how, by whom, and why a value statement was constructed as well as how important a value statement is to a particular organization, it would be shortsighted to assume value statements drive employee behavior in consistently predictable ways. Why?

First, while value statements are important internal guiding documents, they also serve other externally oriented purposes. For example, value statements can be used as a recruitment tool for potential employees. Likewise, value statements are often created through political processes or in concert with agency leaders, employees, politicians, and other external stakeholders. Researchers rarely know how engaged, if at all, employees were in developing their organization's value statement and even less about whether such statements are an accurate reflection of actual organizational norms, behaviors, and activity. Consider, for example, McCubbins et al.'s (1987) work on deck-stacking, Carpenter's (2002) work on bureaucratic reputation, Thompson's (1967) work on building task and domain consensus, or even DiMaggio and Powell's (1983) work on isomorphism. Each of these perspectives illustrates how powerful and important external pressures are for public organizations and, simultaneously, how public organizations navigate the presence of these external pressures by engaging with external publics (e.g., signaling, professional norms, cooptation). One way that organizations navigate these external pressures and build coalitions of support is by using tools like value statements to signal to external publics what the organization represents and aims to accomplish. Unfortunately, without a clear sense of the primary “target” of any given value statement (e.g., employees vs. stakeholders vs. politicians), we should be cautious in drawing assumptions about the role value statements play in shaping the day-to-day experiences of public employees.

Second, built into the authors’ approach is the presumption that, within a given organization, value statements matter to employees equally and uniformly. Here, the research on goals and goal ambiguity is beneficial for appraising value statements. Rainey (2009) has argued that one can think of mission and value statements as akin to “official goals.” Official goals and values are inherently vague and often intentionally aspirational (for many of the same reasons articulated above). However, because they tend to be lofty, official goals must be converted into smaller, realistically attainable goals, which Rainey refers to as “operative goals.” Further, he notes that operative goals are often nested within other operative goals and that, at times, operative goals may conflict with one another.

Rainey's arguments are relevant because they illustrate three important points that are useful in evaluating the merits of the authors’ study. First, official goals and values are often too broad to be practically useful to organizations on a daily basis. Second, the current study fails to provide any meaningful information regarding how public values are actually operationalized at the “local” level (i.e., the level of the employee); we only have information on official values. Finally, the authors’ approach presumes values—operationalized or not—matter equally to employees and across units within a given organization. Unfortunately, ample research exists demonstrating this assumption itself is problematic. Consider, as a relatively simple example, street-level bureaucracy research, which has long illustrated the tensions that exist between organizational leaders and frontline employees with respect to goals and values (Lipsky, 1987). If values worked as seamlessly as the authors suggest, then we would not see the types of tensions Lipsky pointed to nearly 40 years ago.

In sum, we don’t know (1) who created the value statements considered in this study, (2) the reasons for the inclusion or exclusion of specific values in any given organizational value statement (e.g., an internal organizational strategy vs. mimicry, cooptation, and coalition building), (3) how values have been operationalized and communicated (formally and informally) to employees, and (4) whether the local context articulated in value statements matters generally or in predictable ways to aggregates of employees (e.g., subsets of employees, across offices).

To be sure, there is considerable merit in exploring whether value statements drive and shape administrative and employee behavior. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing through the current study whether these value statements meaningfully influence employees. Consequently, it is impossible to know whether the value statements considered actually function as expected by the authors.

Whose context?

A second, but related concern, involves the authors’ assertion that existing public values studies have “robbed” researchers of any meaningful “local” understanding of values. In essence, the authors assert that methodological challenges and large-N studies have largely prevented researchers from truly understanding how and in what ways values matter at the local level. They claim to have corrected for these challenges by inductively considering how values have been socially constructed and translated into something useful for employees. The application of inductive approaches and of social constructionism and translational theories certainly has the potential to inform and expand existing public values research and should be one of many tools used to explore this important topic. Yet, again, the authors’ own approach in this piece sets significant and substantial limitations on the conclusions that can and should be drawn from study findings.

One such limitation stems from the authors’ assertions that they themselves are able to understand the local context of employees and, even more narrowly, how public values have been socially constructed and translated to, for, and presumably by employees. Yet, in practice, the authors have simply reviewed values and value statements from several organizations and grouped them according to patterns of meaning identified/constructed by the researchers themselves. This approach is, in many ways, akin to Jørgensen and Bozeman’s (2007) early efforts to develop lists/inventories of public values, and such efforts have been profoundly important for the study of public values. However, in the case of the current paper, the authors have—unlike Jørgensen and Bozeman—carried their own claims and critique of existing studies a “bridge too far.”

Many large-N public values studies ask, in various ways, employees to specify which values matter for their jobs, in their units, or as they make decisions and implement programs. In other words, these large-N studies provide direct evidence from employees about the importance of different public values. Admittedly, such efforts have their own limitations (e.g., did researchers present the “right” list of values to the employees, are interview/survey items appropriately constructed, was the appropriate analytical tool applied?) and, consequently, should be approached with care. However, the authors have framed their approach as a corrective to the problems inherent in existing studies, problems that they claim have robbed researchers of a deeper, local understanding of how employees understand public values.

Given that readers have no mechanism for evaluating who created organizations’ value statements, why they were created (e.g., the primary target), and how they are actually experienced by employees, it's difficult to view the current piece as—in any way—correcting for the problems found in large-N studies. In fact, there is a good case to be made that the socially constructed reality “captured” by the authors better reflects how they themselves have constructed meaning around organization value statements than it does about either how agencies treat public values in practice or how workers understand and experience public values in their jobs and offices. Stated more bluntly, it is difficult to see how the authors, from a distance, are better equipped to understand and interpret the local context of public values than the employees themselves. Consequently, it may very well be that the authors have committed the same foul (i.e., robbing values of their local context) for which they critique existing public values research.

A second concern in the piece involves the issue of whether local values are really so “unique” that any effort to understand them through more generic or generalizable values, such as those found in existing public values studies, is likely to miss or overlook more than it captures. Unfortunately, the authors fail to provide any meaningful evidence that large-N studies and interviews are actually missing more than they are capable of capturing. Readers are simply expected to accept that this is true. However, again, there are good reasons to question the authors’ assertions on this point. First, on the face of it, it is difficult to see how well-structured qualitative interviews of employees would fail to capture the local context of public values. Such interviews are designed precisely to provide a level of depth not found in other research methods, including that utilized by the authors of this study.

Second, without direct evidence to the contrary, most large-N studies presume that (1) public values matter to organizations and employees (albeit in different ways based on contextual factors), (2) many organizations and employees share similar values, and we can learn something about these values by exploring general patterns in data, and (3) well-designed survey items will capture much, but not all, of the relevant contextual information found in organizations (hence, error terms). True, these assumptions mean large-N studies are unlikely to fully capture the local context of public values. However, the authors themselves have provided no evidence—theoretical or empirical—that their approach better explains how, when, and why organizations’ public values are relevant to employee behavior. In fact, a good deal of theory omitted from this study provides ample evidence that existing empirical approaches/studies may sufficiently and substantially explain when and how values matter for employees.

Consider, again, DiMaggio and Powell's (1983) work on institutional isomorphism. The promulgation of professional norms through associations, formal and informal networks, training and education, and codes of conduct exert powerful homogenizing effects on organizations and often go a long way toward explaining why organizations “choose” to value certain things over others. Given this, it would seem shortsighted to presume, without evidence to the contrary, that we are losing more than we gain through existing large-N studies of public values.

A third and final concern here is somewhat more semantic, but nonetheless warrants consideration. If public values have little or no shared meaning outside of their local context, then it is impossible to draw any meaningful generalizations across organizations (or, even more likely, across employees/offices). Essentially, we have no basis for providing management prescriptions to organizations and employees or for developing a shared, generalizable body of scholarly knowledge around public values. This, though, also does not seem to make sense intuitively. Two broad points help illustrate this reasoning.

First, consider the term “professionalism.” Dictionaries define the term somewhat differently; yet, each dictionary definition ultimately conveys a central, shared set of ideas/themes about what the term means in practice. So, what matters here? Is it the divergence between how each dictionary precisely defines professionalism or, instead, that, despite any divergence across definitions, the core idea of each definition is generally the same? As alluded to above, we can think of public values in much the same way. Should we be more concerned with (1) how each organization uniquely characterizes professionalism or (2) with how important “professionalism” as a generalized concept or value might be to public organizations and their employees? In practice, both approaches are likely to be relevant. However, we have no basis, given the authors’ approach in their paper, to determine just how relevant unique local characterizations of public values are for employees. As it stands, these local characterizations may matter significantly, moderately, or not at all.

Second, that the authors have reviewed value statements from 240 organizations and grouped the values referenced into several shared categories clearly indicates that they believe there is something generalizable across value sets. As such, it seems the authors are less concerned with fully capturing the localized context of public values and, instead, are more concerned with existing inventories of public values, which they appear to find wanting. In fairness, public values are unlikely to be stable, meaning (1) any given value may matter more or less at particular moments in time, (2) new values may be introduced into organizations, and (3) old values may be discarded. In this sense, there is merit in occasionally reconsidering and revising values and value inventories. However, there should also be a firm basis for doing so as well as evidence that any modifications will better capture organizational realities than past approaches. No such evidence exists in the authors’ article, nor is it clear why the authors’ grouping mechanisms are less likely than other previously validated approaches to “rob” researchers of important contextual factors.

An outline for advancing public values research

Given the critiques levied in this commentary, how might we approach public values scholarship in the future? First, rather than pit different research methods and methodologies against one another, we should instead recognize the strengths, weaknesses, and tradeoffs in using different approaches to explore public values. Approaches such as those used by the authors are powerful tools for identifying values that researchers may have overlooked. Likewise, large-N studies allow for consideration of how widespread, important, and generalizable public values are across broad swaths of public sector organizations (or even within large organizations), and interviews provide an opportunity to delve deeply into the importance of any specific value. Employing different and multiple approaches allows researchers to triangulate findings to produce actionable recommendations for managers and politicians. Triangulation advances research whereas methodological critiques that criticize particular approaches often needlessly stall research.

Second, as a research community, we must not forget that public organizations exist in inherently political environments. Efforts to understand public values and the role they play in shaping employee behavior must account—theoretically and empirically—for (1) the links between the context in which values are developed and (2) how they are communicated to and experienced by employees (to the extent that researchers explore how public values matter internally to organizations rather than externally to attentive publics). Absent such context, we risk both over- and under-emphasizing how important public values and value statements are to and for employees.

Third, we need better ways of evaluating when and how values matter in practice, with the aim of providing actionable advice to practitioners. While there are many ways researchers might approach measuring the impact of public values, two overarching approaches seem especially fruitful as potential avenues. First, we should consider relying more heavily on approaches that consider how employees actually prioritize public values, particularly when (1) making important job-related decisions, (2) confronted with scarse resources, and (3) operating in different environments (e.g., politically contested spaces vs. relatively stable environments, when citizen animus is high).

Second, as decades of research now demonstrate, any understanding of public values and their importance to organizations, citizens, and political bodies is likely to be woefully incomplete without also exploring when and under what circumstances values are treated seriously by the employee. For example, value congruence and person–environment fit studies (e.g., Kristof-Brown, 1996) clearly demonstrate that employees are far more likely to be positively engaged with their jobs and to pursue organizational aims when they believe their own personal values align with those of their organization, supervisors, and coworkers. However, we still know relatively little about whether the relationships between employee behavior and specific public values demonstrate any consistent or coherent overarching structure or pattern. Likewise, we have much to learn about other factors that might moderate the relationships between employee behaviors and public values. For example, research outside of public administration suggests that professional, office, and organizational norms can meaningfully alter value–behavior relationships and, in turn, employee motivation and engagement.

Simply, when employees view their organization's values as congruent with their own values, they are more likely to engage in (motivated) behavior that aligns with organizational interests (e.g., Kristof-Brown, 1996). However, value alignment itself is insufficient. Employees must also have the personal, on-the-job “resources” (consider, for example, job demands–resources models) necessary to pursue value attainment (Bakker et al., 2014). In short, what, if anything, can organizations do to foster value alignment and how do value statements fit into this broader picture?

Finally, public values also involve tradeoffs. Consider, for example, public service motivation (PSM) research, which assumes altruism and altruistic behaviors are generally good for organizations and citizens. Yet, as several researchers have now demonstrated, there is also a “dark side” to PSM—one where highly altruistic individuals may be less likely to “blow the whistle” when they spot organizational wrongdoings, where public goods may be “over-produced” relative to what the public wants, or where employees may have overly strong expectations that they will be recognized for their altruism. Applying this logic to the current discussion, researchers may want to consider if/when a pronounced public values focus may be suboptimal for an organization or its constituents.

Ultimately, this topic is of considerable import and much work remains to be done. Efforts to consider when, how, and which values matter are central to advancing scholarship. Yet, we remain limited in our ability to evaluate values, precisely because they are complex, changing, and otherwise notoriously difficult to pin down. To build an actionable body of research on public values, we must start by applying what we know about public organizations, their political environments, and the employees who are responsible for actually pursuing public values if we hope to glimpse through the dim glass of public values.