Search results

Following New Public Management and Reinventing Government reforms, public sector organizations are expected to pursue values such as efficiency, performance, and accountability, reflecting a "hard" identity as managed organizations. By examining the contents of 394 core values retrieved from U.S. federal agencies, this study examines the importance of "hard" values relative to other values reflecting alternative identities. It finds that the agencies prefer to rely on "soft" values such as integrity, respect, openness, and customer orientation to express their identities. The article discusses the implications of these findings for our understanding of organizational actorhood in a public sector context.

While much of our knowledge about public sector values is generated from surveys of public managers, this study explores the official core value statements of 75 U.S. government agencies. These values represent the characteristics with which the agencies want to be associated, rather than the values that guide the administrative behavior and decision making of public officials. A key finding in this study is that values that have been set as standards in many OECD countries, and reiterated in ethical guidelines for the U.S. federal government, are not among the most frequently stated on agency web sites. In light of these findings, the study discusses the role of public sector values in relation to agency identity and image.

This study analyzes the core value statements of 25 regulative institutions located in 11 different OECD countries. Four types of institutions are studied: six tax agencies, six food safety authorities, four environmental protection agencies, and nine supreme audit institutions. The study shows that there is a clear emphasis on people-related and professional values. Based on these findings, I argue that regulative organizations, which we normally would assume need legitimacy for their authoritative role and coercive powers, attempt to become identified with values that imply a more lenient identity, distancing themselves from the more "traditional" authoritative and bureaucratic identity. Potential implications for organizational legitimation are discussed.

This article discusses the potential challenges of introducing corporate branding in public sector organizations. While the corporate branding ideal is to seek a precise and coherent definition of the organizational identity and achieve message consistency in the organization's self-presentation, public organizations are often characterized by contradictory and inconsistent values and multiple identities. This makes the ideal of consistency difficult to achieve. It is argued that public organizations will benefit more from branding on the basis of inconsistent values and multiple identities rather than trying to promote one set of values and one identity at the expense of others.