Making value manageable: A systematic literature review of management control tools which capture, convert and craft public value

The advent of new paradigms in public management, such as New Public Governance and Public Value Management, brings new challenges for the management control of public sector organizations. The performance aim of these... [ view full abstract ]

The advent of new paradigms in public management, such as New Public Governance and Public Value Management, brings new challenges for the management control of public sector organizations. The performance aim of these organizations is increasingly defined as public value creation, going beyond organizational and financial parameters, undermining the consensus between stakeholders on ‘what the numbers mean’, and side-stepping the neatly organized process of the management control cycle.

Although New Public Management may have overemphasized the importance of financial or quantitative controls, public value paradigms still require instruments to enable the assessment of value creation, facilitate decision-making between stakeholders and stimulate a cycle of planning and improvement. Yet in order to become relevant for value creation, the management control toolkit will have to be adapted and expanded.

This paper presents a systematic literature review of recently published management control tools which could contribute to capturing value beyond its traditional confines, converting value to meaningful insights for multiple stakeholders, and aid the crafting of value creation through continuous learning cycles. These new tools will be categorized using the classic taxonomy of control levers as developed by Simons (1994), allowing us to identify continuities and changes in comparison to the current management control toolkit.

Adhering to the PRISMA-methodology for a systematic review of articles, this papers extracts the relevant tools, insights, and findings from 107 articles published between 2006 and 2015. [Currently 25 reviewed in-depth for this IRSPM conference paper.] The literature review captures tools from both public and private sector studies, as both sectors struggle with capturing, converting, and crafting value in an era of shared value creation.

The review provides three key insights: Firstly, we gain an overview of the tools which have been developed already and the remaining lacunas in the toolkit. Secondly, we gain an understanding of the interdependence between the tools, emphasizing the importance of integrated management control systems in the age of public value. Thirdly, this paper highlights which unintended consequences these new tools may have beyond their direct purpose, issuing a pre-warning that a new generation of management tools may give birth to a new generation of perverse effects.