Aim of the study/relevance: to problematize rival assumptions concerned with the duality of public value creation and accounting devices, especially to generate research questions with interesting prospects for public value accounting research.
When taking the relationship of public value creation and accounting as a critical point of departure, theorizing of public value accounting in practice is primarily challenged by its deontological ‘a priori’: the constitution of fairness and the pursuit of justice within public service delivery.
Based on this, the search for a philosophical and normative basis of what constitutes public value is intriguing. The exploration introduces the duality of utilitarian (efficiency, effectiveness) and deontological values (fairness, justice) as a critical juncture in exploring the valuation of government activities, particularly by spotting the contradictory yet interrelated nature of both elements. The implication is that, in practice, performing tensions are created by each condition that is faced as a social (or moral or polity) problem by individuals, politicians or the citizenry. It is the concrete-contingent situation that shapes the opportunity to develop a public value account which is, then, activated by the multiplicity of actors who (per)form the public interest. The exploration of such practices, especially by conceptualizing the institutional and organizational logic of recognizing mechanisms of designing public value, is considered to be a trigger in framing the duality of public value creation and the role of accounting therein, given its relational nature and performativity.
Uncovering the concept of multiple-agency and its contribution to refining our understanding of how ideas of fairness and justice are reflected in public vale accounting may be treated as a specific argument within that debate. When embracing an ideal of democratic governance as the framework for public vale recognition, the argument is associated with societal institutions that justify the inclusion of a multiplicity of actors, networks, and politics with interests affected by the social problem and whether competing values and compromises are mutually constitutive and play a salient role in territorializing the calculable spaces of public value formation. As an initial claim, the paper aims to mobilize insights from complementary research areas, e.g. the paradoxical nature of ‘competing values’ or the intuition of ‘multiple-agency conflicts’ in governance research, to problematize the multiple-agency of public value governance and the contribution of this intuition for exploring relationships between public value creation and accounting in practice.
Research design: The study is based on an integrative literature review and uses problematization as a methodological approach to challenge field-based assumptions about public value accounting practices. Due to the challenge of substantiating the concept of multiple-agency the analysis enables a critical synthesis of divergent streams of reasoning and aims to visualize multiple-agency as a theoretical template that gives direction to new research inquiries and their positioning within the research field.
Discussion:The prospective outcome state is the generation of ‘that’s (now) interesting’-areas for public value accounting research. Forcing our knowledge on rival, perhaps complementary frames may be positioned within an ongoing debate due to the disciplinary prospects of public sector accounting research.
Accounting and accountability of value creation in innovative public service delivery arra
