Public value and public sector accounting research: a structured literature review

Public Value research in public administration has increased in the last 20 years, showing a huge interest around that topic between both scholars and practitioners. Despite that important number of contributions, a deeper... [ view full abstract ]

Public Value research in public administration has increased in the last 20 years, showing a huge interest around that topic between both scholars and practitioners. Despite that important number of contributions, a deeper understanding of Public Value still lacks because of different issues concerning its core components. The multiple perspective arose in the definition of its concept, the different settings where it is created and co-created and the scientific challenges to its measurement are the main issues to deal with if we want to shed light on this phenomenon.

A lot of Authors in different fields tried to define the knowledge level reached on the topic, with the introduction of conceptual frameworks for its management and measurement in order to account Public Value. However, the public sector accounting literature seems sparse and not reflecting the potential contribution it can deliver in public value theoretical and empirical research. Through the means of a Structured Literature Review (Massaro, Dumay and Guthrie, 2016), we aim at shedding some light on the contribution to the of the accounting research and proposing which core component of the theory should be investigate thoroughly in the future.

This research wants to extend previous work on public value literature review (Williams, Shearer, 2011) using the SLR methodology evidencing how accounting could contribute to multidisciplinary works on Public Value. This research wants also to make evidence of the lack of contributions about public value in accounting literature, to broader the compass of previous research agendas (Hartley, Alford, Knies, Douglas, 2017).