English > Public Value Workshop
The Copenhagen International Public Value Workshop May 28-31, 2008
Public values have become increasingly important for a number of reasons. In the last twenty years experiments and developments have taken place in most Western public sectors which were unthinkable a couple of decades ago. These changes which all raise value questions include phenomenon such as New Public Management, the spread of economic individualism, focus on ethical issues and corruption, increased sympathy for values based management, internationalisation and trans-nationalisation of public organisations, the increasing multi-culturalism in many states and the globalisation of the "good governance" discourse.
Thus, public administration today, has to deal with value pluralism, relativism, as much as with dogmatism. Sometimes this results in denying the possibility of shared values for public administration, to the opposition others call for administrators as the very guardians of public values.
A central concern of the seminar will be the exploration of the elements of a general value discourse which include analytical-methodological issues (e.g. how can values be classified? how do identified values interact?), empirical issues (e.g. which values are actually pursued in the public sector? how are public organisations and policy sectors organized in order to safeguard certain values?), and normative issues (e.g. how can it be argued that some values are more important than others? how can we create instruments that may help in everyday situations to discover what is in the public interest? how and where can a public domain for addressing these questions be constructed?).
The workshop is organized by professor Barry Bozeman, University of Georgia and University of Copenhagen, professor Mark Rutgers, Leiden University, and professor Torben Beck Jørgensen, University of Copenhagen.
Read more in the Call for papers. If you want to know more about the workshop, please contact research assistant Ditte-Lene Sørensen, B.Sc.