User-orientation in public service organizations: making use of value as a thick concept

ABSTRACT

Value is a key concept in public service logic. However, exactly what the concept of value brings to public services, where the value of a service cannot be linked to a cost or a payment, has not received much attention. In this article, examples are shown of how value is expressed empirically by a corpus based on interviews with various stakeholders in a municipal service context. The study presents the value concept as a thick concept, and as a way of approaching user-orientation, but only if several value perspectives and timeframes are included, and if the user’s perspective (not user-perspective) is highlighted.

KEYWORDS:

• The concept of ‘value’
• thick concept
• public service logic
• public service organizations
• user-orientation
• children

Introduction

Over the last ten years, service logic principles have been informing study of public services, and the field of the public service logic (PSL) has emerged (see e.g. Engen et al. 2021; Eriksson et al. 2020; Grönroos 2019; Osborne and Strokosch 2022; Osborne, Radnor, and Nasi 2013; Voorberg, Bekkers, and Tummers 2015). In PSL, the main role of public service organizations (PSOs) is to organize service offerings to improve or help the citizen’s and the service-user’s ability and involvement to make it better than before – to create ‘value’ – in their lifeworlds (Grönroos 2019, 780; Høibjerg 2021, 37; Osborne 2018, 228). Osborne (2021, 133) ascribes PSL with the following meaning: ‘/ … /a focus on value also shifts the fulcrum of attention away from organizations and performance and to citizens and impacts’. In taking the citizen’s value creation as the core of the services offered by a PSO (Osborne, Radnor, and Nasi 2013), PSL embraces user-orientation while simultaneously continuing with the same ambiguities concerning the concept of ‘value’ as the original service logics. Already Brown (2007) critiqued the lack of linguistic clarity concerning key concepts such as value, which he felt ought to be a priority for the field of service studies to define in order to be able to verify and test this theoretical field empirically.

Although studies within PSL have touched on the concept of value, it remains unclear what value consists of (see, for example, Eriksson 2019; Hardyman, Daunt, and Kitchener 2015; Högström et al. 2016; Simmons and Brennan 2017). Value has a vague application and meaning (Dudau, Glennon, and Verschuere 2019; Hodgkinson et al. 2017; Van der Wal and van Hout 2009). Osborne (2018, 228) stresses: ‘The definition of what constitutes value is still embryonic in this literature, for example, and requires urgent consideration’. Researchers have discussed how important it is to explore the concept of value both using a holistic approach, as a service ecosystem (e.g. Osborne et al. 2021; Petrescu 2019), and in detail (e.g. Alford 2016). This remains true even today: In the initial framework for value creation in public services, Osborne (2021, 180) argues that the concept of value – ‘what lies in the word value?’ – needs to be examined further. Unless the concept of value becomes semantically clearer, it will likely pose a challenge as regards PSOs furthering their discussions on a user-oriented approach.

However, the concept of value is not only a key concept but also a ‘thick concept’, in the words of Van der Weele (2021, 1): ‘Thick concepts are concepts that describe and evaluate at once’. This means that the concept must be given a full content, both descriptive and value-laden from a subjective perspective, e.g. democracy, duty and care (Sandman 2007). In other words, value is not simply a common definition, the word is also filled with subjective content and we can assign value with different meanings on the basis of different perspectives (Van der Weele 2021, 8). An estimation of how value is expressed empirically, given a content, is limited (Osborne and Strokosch 2022, 194). Given this, we argue that the concept of value within PSL needs further attention by means of being investigated empirically, and thus offering ‘the potential of empirical material as a resource for developing theoretical ideas through the active mobilization and problematization of existing frameworks’ (Alvesson and Kärreman 2007, 1265).

Much remains unknown about value in PSOs: In particular, we do not know how value is expressed by stakeholders in practice. This study intends to contribute to this knowledge, thus filling a gap in the current research literature illustrating multiple stakeholders’ subjective use of value in service ecosystems, linking the expressions with the key concept of value in PSL. A service ecosystem is a system of different actors, all involved in creating value through the exchange and interaction of resources (Osborne et al. 2022; Petrescu 2019). As such, the study differentiates itself from research contributing taxonomies and knowledge on the basis of a general meaning of value (e.g. Bozeman and Johnson 2015).

This article aims to identify and show how value as a thick concept is expressed in a PSO based on the stakeholders’ day-to-day work and lives. By capturing how value is articulated, and given content by various stakeholders in their practice, we extract how value is expressed and thus identify the characteristic features of each stakeholder’s subjective expression of value. In doing so, we also intend to contribute towards the discussion about a user-oriented approach. To achieve this aim, we develop an analytical approach within the theoretical reference framework based on PSL. There are many actors who are stakeholders in service ecosystems. This study is based on empirical material taken from development work to improve the provision of services aimed at children and it was collected at a PSO: in this case a Swedish municipality. In Sweden the provision of services aimed at children forms a large part of the municipal services, and involves a complex combination of individual, collective and societal benefits (Laing 2003). In the study, we investigate how value is expressed by the following stakeholders: service-users, front-line employees, managers and politicians. The material consists of focus group interviews with these stakeholders at the social services and education departments of the municipality. In addition to this, interviews with service-users (children) and further frontline employees are also included to add empirical material. A corpus (Danielsson 2003; Sinclair 1991) is compiled that consisted of transcribed material, which we analysed in order to discover how the value concept is expressed at this PSO.

The article is structured as follows: In the next section, we present the theoretical frame of reference based on public service logic. We then describe how we conducted the study, who participated in it, and what methods we used. After these introductory sections, we present the empirical corpus findings with regard to how the concept of value is given content and expressed by various stakeholders. In the closing section, we discuss the findings in the light of the issue of a user-oriented approach in the public sector.

Public service logic and user-orientation

Individual value and collective value

Service logic (SL) has its origins in private sector customer orientation (external efficiency), in contrast to the traditional industrial emphasis on internal processes and efficiency (Grönroos 2008; Lusch and Vargo 2014; Normann and Ramirez 1993). The view of value in PSL, taken from SL, is based on the argument that PSOs cannot create value for their service-users, they can only offer services (value propositions) that facilitate their users’ own value creation (Davey and Grönroos 2019; Grönroos and Voima 2013; Osborne et al. 2015; Osborne, Radnor, and Nasi 2013). By focusing on service-users’ value creation and evaluation, rather than on the PSOs, what is done and planned to be done needs to be based on facilitating users to create value. Osborne et al. (2021, 172) express this thus: ‘/—/places the users, not the PSO or public service managers, at the heart of strategic thinking’. In this sense, PSOs’ primary task is bringing together actors and their resources (skills, knowledge, competence, and activities), thus enabling the creation of value together with citizens (Bozeman 2019) and the service-user (Engen et al. 2021; Grönroos 2019). PSOs includes different services (Jung 2010; Osborne, Nasi, and Powell 2021).

During recent years, the service-user’s life experiences or lifeworld during value creation have been implemented as part of PSL (Høibjerg 2021; Strokosch and Osborne 2016). Osborne (2018, 228) formulates this thus: ‘It is how the citizen uses this offering and how it interacts with his/her own life experiences that create value’. The concept of the life experience or lifeworld emphasizes the service-user’s social context, including everyday processes and experiences, as well as how the user’s experiences shape and influence his/her ability to engage in value creation and to create value (Helkkula, Kelleher, and Pihlström 2012; Trischler and Scott 2016). However, it must be emphasized that some services are voluntary while others contain elements of, or are solely, the exercising of authority, often being associated with certain requirements or restrictions placed on the individual, e.g. compulsory schooling, mandatory measures in the social services, etc. (Jos and Tompkins 2009; Osborne, Radnor, and Strokosch 2016; Reitan 2019). This is especially clear when the service-user is, for example, a child. Children rarely get to decide which services they use and can seldom be compared with voluntary users (Lindqvist and Westrup 2020; Tisdall 2017).

Although all children have the same basic needs, there are many other needs that individual children may have, which professionals can only find out about by asking, listening and observing these children where they are (cf. Osborne and Strokosch 2022). When professionals talk about how they view a child’s situation and conditions, and what he/she needs, this is done from a child-perspective (Hilppö et al. 2016). On the other hand, when you strive to gain some insight into how things relate to each other from the child’s point of view, this is about the child’s, or children’s, perspective. Pramling Samuelsson, Sommer, and Hundeide (2013, 42) point out the following: ‘Children’s perspectives represent children’s experiences, perceptions and understanding of their lifeworlds’. Understanding children and their lifeworlds (both physical and mental) requires the professionals around children to have the ability to listen, talk, and interact with them (Seim and Slettebø 2017).

In addition, in public services there is a bilateral effort to improve the value creation in service-users’ lives that simultaneously strives to achieve both collective value, which is accessible to all citizens, or to a (target) group of citizens, and value for the individual (Laamanen and Skålén 2015; Osborne 2021; Osborne, Nasi, and Powell 2021). A value is instantiated by an experience, even in cases where citizens may be unaware of having had an experience at the time. Individual value is value which the service-user (single citizen) creates in order to be better off in his/her lifeworld, and which is of considerable importance to this individual, for example a successful schooling (Eriksson 2019). This is different from collective value, which deals with what citizens, or groups of citizens, jointly experience as something that has improved in their lifeworlds (Skålén et al. 2018). An example of collective value is when strengthened school interventions regarding students from socially-vulnerable areas are experienced, by several students, as leading to more equal schools, increased neighbourhood security, and reduced exclusion from society. Thus, this type of value cannot be created individually, instead prerequiring that several individuals experience it as value. Collective value does not arise by aggregating value for individuals, it arises as something greater than the sum of these individuals’ value (Alford 2016).

At the same time, many researchers argue nowadays that it is unrealistic to expect individual and collective value creation within a service system to only give rise to positive effects (Engen et al. 2021; Järvi, Kähkönen, and Torvinen 2018; Grönroos 2019). Studies show that it is not uncommon for value to be destroyed instead, and that actual value outcomes can be negative and the service-users gets worse or reduced value from using the service offering (Echeverri and Skålén 2011; Laud et al. 2019). This is especially true for services that are aimed at children since a single organization seldom matches either the actual needs of children or their experience of how work needs to be organized to facilitate value creation (e.g. Dudau 2009; Sandin and Halldén 2003). An example of this is when a Swedish school separates asylum-seeking minors from students who are native speakers of Swedish, hindering the asylum-seeking children from acquiring their new language (Espersson and Westrup 2019). Grönroos (2019) and Osborne (2021) emphasize that PSOs need to understand what creates value for the service-user, and to plan the service process on the basis of this insight and to continuously obtain feedback on how citizens respond to opportunities for improvement through action and change (Voorberg, Bekkers, and Tummers 2015).

Intended value and value outcome

The underlying legitimacy of public service offerings is based on the democratic process associated with resource constraints and legal obligations (Alford and Greve 2017) by means of the political process and the assessment of employees and managers that regulates what is on offer. Politicians identify and prioritize societal value with regard to the meaning and provision of public services (Osborne, Nasi, and Powell 2021). This is intentions of value governed and manifested by means of enacting laws, regulations, political goals and plans, and decisions, and by announcing priorities regarding, for example, vulnerable children (Osborne et al. 2021). Policymakers and the implementation of policy provide employees and managers with opportunities and limitations as regards providing service offerings (Strokosch and Osborne 2016; Trischler and Charles 2019). Through their professional actions, intentions of value are implemented in both day-to-day work and preventive or strategic work (Osborne et al. 2021). There is value that professionals aim to achieve, partly based on the political intention to provide value but also based on their professionalism in relation to both what they want from service-users (value which users create in their lifeworlds) and what they can do to facilitate the creation of individual value or collective value, i.e. a value proposal (Alford 2016). Further, in a value proposal there are timeframes that need to be linked to value creation (Heinonen et al. 2010). Osborne, Nasi, and Powell (2021) point out that, for service-users, value can be about short-term satisfaction, medium and long-term service outcomes, and whole-life experience.

In order to understand the intended and expected value, Osborne et al. (2021, 3) highlight the fact that management must acquire knowledge and insight early on during the processes as well as goals of the target groups, and in terms of the value that service-users and service-user groups get. It is also important to use the information that frontline employees have regarding the development needs of the organization’s processes, routines, and competencies. Furthermore, Osborne, Nasi, and Powell (2021) stress the importance of service-users’ commitment to the basic design of public services (co-design) with regard to improving their utility value. This requires the active involvement of employees and service-users during co-creation. This preparatory, or co-design, work can lead to solutions that have a higher level of value creation than would otherwise be the case. At the same time, this type of joint preparatory work marks the beginning of service-users’ value creation, starting value creation for users at an early stage of the service process. According to Grönroos (2012, 2019), Høibjerg (2021), and Osborne, Nasi, and Powell (2021) without preparatory work and constant feedback from both service-users and frontline employees, value destruction is difficult to avoid.

In the theoretical framework presented above, it is visible both that a public service ecosystem contains different actors representing multiple stakeholders, e.g. politicians, employees, service-users (individuals and target groups) and citizens, and that each stakeholder may experience value subjectively despite interactions between them. This theoretical framework helps us to analyse and understand how value is given content and expressed from various stakeholders’ perspectives, and enabling us to discuss the findings in relation to user-orientation.

Method and material

A corpus-based study

To meet the aim of this article, a corpus-based study has been conducted with the intention of identifying value, despite the fact that during dialogues about public services aimed at children, the word ‘value’ is rarely used as a conversational term. The words we have chosen to investigate in the corpus have a connection with (Grönroos 2019) and Osborne’s (2018) description of value in PSL, e.g. improving or increasing the service-user’s ability and involvement in order to create value – to make things better than before – in their lifeworlds. The empirical material used in the corpus was collected at a PSO, i.e. a Swedish municipality. Between 2017 and 2020, several research and development projects were carried out at this municipality with the common aim of improving service processes for children (and their parents) through user-orientation.

To investigate how value was expressed and given content during dialogues, we examined empirical material from a range of stakeholders; i.e. service-users, frontline employees, managers, and politicians. We then proceeded to analyse what the various stakeholders put into words, and what they mean by value based on their own stakeholder’s perspective. The method of empirical material collection consisted of interviews with children, employees working with children (within social services and education), their managers and with politicians. All of our interviews were included as empirical material from various R&D project conducted by the municipality.

Collecting the empirical material

The acquisition of empirical materials, through focus groups, consisted of interviews held within already-existing groups, e.g. management teams, political committees, a social service unit’s development day, and at municipal project meetings with employees. In other words, the groups were not put together by the researchers, instead representing real-world groupings. All the focus group interviews were conducted by the authors, starting off with a brief summary of the logics of service and then focusing the participants’ attention on a more user-oriented approach. As the interviews were centred around user-oriented, without a specific focus on the concept of value, no given definition of value was offered.

The discussions in the focus groups made it possible for us researchers to delimit the concept of value based on the group perceptions of a certain category of stakeholders. One advantage of using material generated by focus group interviews is that this research technique enables the researcher to collect material that emerges during group interactions (Cyr 2019; Morgan 1996), thereby ensuring an interesting group dynamic during the discussion (Wibeck, Abrandt Dahlgren, and Öberg 2007). Our focus group interviews provide access to this (Dahlin-Ivanoff and Holmgren 2017; Morgan and Krueger 1993), thus allowing us to identify traces of tacit, or hidden, knowledge and its use by the professionals and politicians.

At the social services department, the material was collected from focus group interviews with eight social workers (frontline employees) on four occasions (2 hours). The addressed topic, regarding descriptions of working with children, related to an improved process concerning out-of-home placements from the child’s perspective. Additional material was collected from a development day when 92 participants were divided into nine different focus groups (2 hours), with approximately ten social workers in each group, to discuss children who are in contact with social services and how their processes can be improved from their perspective. Another set of materials was collected, whose topic was social work from the user-oriented perspective, from one focus group interview (2 hours) with 15 managers from a management group. To further involve the management level, we conducted one focus group interview (15 minutes) with five managers from social services and education. Two focus group interviews (15 minutes) with seven politicians from the boards of social services and education were conducted.

In order to include the service-users, a number of individual interviews were held with children: Together with these, we also included interviews with other frontline employees within the same project focusing on their experiences of participating in a project concerning the physical activities aimed at increasing their levels of concentration at school. These interviews were conducted by professionals who had initiated and been following this specific project, who had closer relationships with the interviewees, and who had thus been deemed as relevant material for inclusion in our empirical material. In other words, this gave us the advantage of conducting the interviews by professionals with lengthy and deep knowledge of both the project and its aims (cf. Gunnarsson 2016). When a child is interviewed, it is important that the interview be conducted in accordance the individual child’s wishes (Hallin and Helin 2018, 58). This situation precluded the possibility of interviewing children in a focus group. Fontana and Frey (1994, 373) emphasize this as follows: ‘Clearly, different types of interviewing are suited to different situations’. In conjunction with these interviews with children, a further three individual interviews of frontline employees at a school from the same project were also included in the corpus, based on evaluations and follow-ups from the project.

All of the interviews were recorded on a voice recorder, with the consent of the participants. Only the transcripts of the dialogues directly concerning the relevant themes have been included in the corpus data. The corpus material involving the top management and political levels is shorter because these meetings did not focus solely on user-orientation. We have not included any legal documents, policy documents, strategic documents, or other related documents because the purpose of the present study is to identify the concept of value by interpreting how, in practice, value is expressed and meaning is given.

Analysis of the empirical material

The empirical material from the interviews described above has been transcribed, with all personal data being removed and with further analysis performed by the authors based on a corpus. We have used an interpretive approach (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017; Eisenhardt 1989), with our analysis being conducted in five main stages (Dahlin-Ivanoff and Holmgren 2017). During the first stage, the texts transcribed from the interviews were compiled into a spoken corpus, i.e. a body of texts (Sinclair 1991), consisting of 80,945 words. This corpus instantiates a concrete object of study which is used to characterize a specific version of language; in this case, the language of the service-users (children), frontline employees, managers, and politicians.

During the second stage, search words were extracted from the corpus, in context, using the concordance tool WordSmith (Scott 2022). The selection of search words starts with value and Grönroos’ definition of value, i.e. ‘make it better than before’. Using Roget’s Thesaurus of English words and phrases, which groups words according to the ideas that they express, provided us with new search words which were synonyms, e.g. improvement, amelioration and betterment. These words were translated back into Swedish, searched for in our corpus, and then translated back into English, offering a list that included, for example, value, better, progression, repair, advancement, development, and success, where better was the most dominant search word. In our analysis, we have extended the context surrounding these words by up to 200 words, in search of any references to expressions of value.

In stage three, the context around each of the search words was examined, manually analysed, and classified in terms of a number of features relevant to the concept of value. The following questions were used: How is value expressed? Who expresses value? In which context is it used? Which time-frame does it involve? Who is the intended recipient of the value? And who is the intended creator of value? This stage also involved excluding lines where use of the search word was not value-related. Stage four involved searching for recurrent usage of the features concerning each keyword. In the fifth stage, the findings were linked to, and interpreted by, the study’s theoretical framework, enabling us to categorize the findings into distinct types of value and to relate these to each other in an extended conceptualization of value in public services.

In the next section, Findings, we present how value is given content by stakeholders in social services and education, taken from the corpus. As stated before, value is a thick concept and thus it will always have a subjective side to the expression. However, there are features of these expressions that are shared by each stakeholder group. In our findings, we present each stakeholder’s characteristics in separate sections. Our presentation begins with a discussion of value as expressed by the service-users followed by the frontline employees, and then there is a section on how value is expressed by the managers followed by the politicians.

Findings

Expressions of value by service-users

Initially, the focus lies on how service-users (the children) express value. The value creation is a core feature in service logic, and the base assumption is always that the service-user is the creator of value. We examine how a group of service-users (schoolchildren) give meaning to value in the context of a project where schoolchildren were offered physical activities (sports) in response to indications that these children had been suffering from perceived mental health issues, concentration issues in the classroom, or had been overweight. Together, the school and the sports association offer a value proposition based on the child’s wishes. When the service-users, the children, are asked they seem to express the value, succinctly and concisely; the positive changes that happened to their lives after the offered intervention which included new physical activities. In a follow-up study, the children articulate what have become better in their lifeworlds. The children show a remarkable ability to put into words what has become better off than before, as in this example below from a young boy after participating in a new physical activity given by his school:

I’ve become better at running. Before I ran like this [shows] and I was always out of breath so I kind of had to stop and rest my heart. [Laughter]

The value that the child express, namely becoming better at a specific sport and improving fitness levels is the expected outcome of this new activity and the intended value from the employees of the value proposition. Not all value creations are predetermined though, and the children often point to value that are not expected by the employees, as in the words of another child:

I sleep better. Because before I couldn’t sleep, but now I sleep really well. So that’s what has changed. I feel better.

This is an obvious improvement in the child’s life, with a consequent impact on the concentration level at school and energy level in general, although not the expected and initially intended value from this activity. In both examples above, the children put into words what have become better in their lifeworlds. When it comes to the children as stakeholders, they are expressing something that has happened recently: However, they only involve themselves as the creators of the value. They concretely and clearly express examples of individual value creation. In summary, the findings above regarding value highlight the children’s concrete and short-term expression of their perceived value, often referring to value that is experienced in the ‘here-and-now’.

Expressions of value by frontline employees

When turning to the frontline employees, who are asked about the results during the follow-up study relating to the same project as above, it becomes obvious that these employees rarely describe value as concrete as that of the children. In general, the examples given by the employees concerning value may not readily be accommodated within a short statement. For example, a school nurse in the project says that she is quite quickly able to see how this type of intervention ‘makes a difference and I can see results in the child’, while another school nurse says ‘some children feel more active and alert’. The school employees also see value creation relating to their own professional roles, as expressed thus by one teacher:

There are only advantages to it because you [the professional] get closer to the student and you come into closer contact and that spreads to other students in the class and they also get curious about this activity.

When discussing what can improve in the children’s lifeworld, after participating in the project, one school counsellor says the following:

They [the sports activities] can also help in finding a social context in their [the children’s] leisure time. The kind of void that’s there after school, a bit depending on how their family situation looks/ … /an opportunity to meet their peers and to build up other social relationships, and feel better in general, so I see many other benefits than just the physical ones.

In this quote, it is not the physical changes but rather the social aspects of this physical exercise that are highlighted by the employees as a value created and experienced by the children. This may be directly linked to the children talking about getting new friends and feeling happier, but it is not directly comparable as the employees tend to express themselves more abstractly and generally. The employees also note that the children identify their own improvements and are proud of these and want to share what is happening to them, which may be an indication of increased self-esteem.

I feel that the major gain is that they [the children] want to tell us about what they do. That they feel they’re making a change and they want to share it and that they’re undergoing some kind of development and that they’re very proud of it and would like to tell us about their progress.

In comparison with the children, the school’s frontline employees who were involved in the project do not describe the concrete value, instead they describe value from their professional perspectives which here means ‘being given information’. The frontline employees’ ambition to facilitate value is often more abstract, analytical and forward-looking, compared to the children’s individual value, which is ‘here and now’. Although the descriptions of value given above refer to the same activity, they show different perspectives and are not directly comparable.

We continue by presenting how frontline employees in social services give content to value when focusing on preventing out-of-home children’s care in one of the focus group interviews. The frontline employees discuss value in terms of several interrelated parts, where one is the creation of stable and fit parents in order to ensure children can remain in their birth homes. One frontline employee shares the following observations:

How we shape stable parents is the issue here. The fact that you [the parent] must have sufficiently stable finances as a parent and meaningful employment in order to feel better, and so on. You must feel involved in society. You should be in physical and mental good health, and there isn’t much more to it than that.

The example above indicates a professional ambition to achieve value facilitation as regards what the frontline employees would like to be able to give the children in the form of stable parents, instead of what they actually do in reality, in the field. It becomes obvious that what the employees want to achieve concerns ambition that extends over a period of several years and must be divided into smaller parts during the process. In this discussion, the employees also refer to value that is not directly linked to an individual child. An example of such abstract value, formulated by one of the frontline employees, is: ‘parents’ participation in the local community’, which would add value both to the community and the individual parent, who would then feel part of a social context. This is also interesting because the intended service-user is the child, but both the work and the effects involve a larger group of users (i.e. parents and community). In other words, the employees’ ambitions transcends both individual and collective value.

In another focus group interview, we ask what results should be realized during this process, and one frontline employee briefly answers as follows: ‘It’s far too big!’ What this quote exemplifies is that, when frontline employees view value as the end-goal, it often becomes difficult to capture in a word or sentence. In their line of work, they often meet individuals in a situation of life crisis, where their task becomes breaking down the situation into smaller, more achievable activities that may lead to improvements, lining up one activity after another. They rarely specify the value for each activity, and nor do they concretize what will be better for the child in his/her lifeworld. In fact, during several dialogues, the employees question whether or not they are contributing to and facilitating the individual’s value-creation at all in the work they were doing, and they offer examples on where the employees have not contributed to the child’s lifeworld (so to say, value destruction). During one of our interviews, a frontline employee refers back to a project where the project manager proposes the whole project group the following:

So, the project manager said, ‘What are we doing, does it make a difference? At best, we might be making things a little bit better for someone, one child at the moment, but helping with homework, organizing excursions, and arranging activities doesn’t help the basic problems/ … /No, we have to think in a completely different way. If our goal is changing the quality of life of children and young people, then we have to work in a completely different way’/ … /and it must have been very painful for them [the employees working on the project] to realize the fact that ‘we make no real difference’.

Given that users of social services may often be undergoing a life crisis, one complicating factor is that some children may not be at a point in their lives when they are able to express either the changes they want or the value they hope to create in their lifeworlds. In simple terms, they lack the life experience to be able to put into words their need for change. This complication makes it even more important for frontline employees to be able to find out about the child’s own perspective.

In regard to this, frontline employees believe that, even if they work from the child-perspective, they still have a long way to go to approach the child’s perspective on value. The frontline employees’ ambition of contributing to value-creation is also frequently based on policies and observing the law, rather than on engaging with the child’s ability and involvement in order to make things better:

And how will things be better for the child? The child then gets information, which she has a very strong right to, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The child gains an understanding, well hopefully, gains an understanding, of the decision that’s been made. The child is then given the opportunity to ask questions and to feel listened to.

In the above example, we see that legislation underpins how social services should deal with a child in Sweden, and that frontline employees try to interpret and abide by this legislation. This quote also provides us with an example of an employee’s ambition to facilitate value for the individual. In this sense, the quote can be said to show how the employees accentuate the child’s perspective as something extremely important. However, during the discussions, it becomes apparent that the employees seldom ask the children about their experience of this. This conundrum is already well-known in the social services, and thus the social services of the municipality in our study conducted a development day dealing with incorporating the child’s perspective, focusing on increasing the employees’ curiosity concerning the child’s own experiencing of value. This is expressed in several ways by the frontline employees, for example:

The child’s perspective is very important. It’s good to be forced to think like a child, because we think we’re good at it, but it’s still difficult/ … /. Very important to be able to do a better job.

The consensus reached during the development day is that it is important to move forward by approaching value on the basis of the child’s perspective, and that the frontline employees, in their work, need more knowledge of, as well as methods for approaching, the child’s perspective.

In summary, the frontline employees’ expressions of value are more general, abstract and forward-looking than the service-users’. It also becomes apparent that the employees are working towards value creation both for the service-users and for themselves. In other words, for the employees, value can both be facilitated and created. Compared to the children, the employees’ expressions are vaguer because they express ambitions regarding what they hope to achieve. These ambitions are seldom based on the child’s motivations and wishes, instead relating to what the employees themselves believe the children need in terms of value. This is on the basis of their professional competence and knowledge, as well as the laws and regulations that govern their work, with these most often being kept general (collective), forward-looking and involving a medium-duration timeframe.

Expressions of value by managers

While value facilitation and value creation may be more obvious amongst service-users and frontline employees, we also want to investigate whether, and possibly how, managers expressed value. In the following section, they seem to be discussing children as target groups and citizens generally, rather than on the individual level, preferring to talk about necessary conditions and general goals. In one of the focus group interviews held with managers working in social services, they make few references to the value that they are aiming to achieve. Instead, these discussions are driven by very general, overarching concepts, with the participants often referring to making changes for a group of children; target groups. Therefore, at the managerial level, we note a shift in the expressions of value towards ‘an improved life for many users’. Value expressed in connection with the target group is generally collective or societal, e.g. creating change for children departing from a criminal lifestyle. Something several of the managers underline during the other focus group discussion is the fact that it is difficult to reach an entire target group with one and the same solution. This is formulated, for example, as follows:

We talk quite a lot about the fact that children are not a homogenous group, they’re a lot of different individuals with differing needs and circumstances,/ … /so you don’t talk about children as a bunch.

In the case of potential improvements for an entire target group, activities are often distributed between various administrations. Managers are worried about how they can combine different support systems in order to make a successful process for the intended target group’s value creation. During discussions, managers also refer to the number of potential forms of support that can be set up around a target group. They emphasize that many different types of initiatives are available that could be put in place for specific groups of children. They argue that seeing children on the group level can establish ‘successful processes’ aimed at meeting the needs of a particular type of child, e.g. those suffering from a neuropsychiatric disability.

However, several managers identify the problems of the intended value creation by taking, instead, their point of departure in laws, policies, and strategic overall plans, created on the top level of the hierarchy, which have long-term implications such as aiming to create a better society. It often appears to be the case in the dialogues that managers are concerned about value in the long-term perspective, far from the here-and-now seen in the children’s expressions of individual value on this level. When managers discuss the working conditions allowing the employees to enable the children to improve their lifeworlds, they often return to the issues that surround gaining a holistic perspective of the child’s situation. Often, the problems are vast and entail the involvement of several professions and departments, as stated by one manager thus:

We have employees who take a lot on, so imagine being able to get away from this feeling of it being my case, that it’s our case instead. And there I think that us managers must assume a great level of responsibility when discussing cases, to bring in the aspect of: ‘Who else needs to be involved and to work with this family or this child to make things better’?

Just as with frontline employees, managers say there is not much curiosity about what the other perspectives involve. What the managers highlight regularly is the importance of asking the children about their experiences of value during the work processes, which do not seem to take place currently. Therefore, they are not moving towards a user-oriented approach. In the words of one manager:

For three and a half years, we’ve been working with unaccompanied minors and have never really mapped out our efforts: Did they create any benefit for the individual? You have to have that foundation to know what to create. If we don’t have that foundation, then we can start thinking, but it doesn’t matter what we think because the individual’s needs should be in focus, that’s the core of social work. We need to get better at mapping, and asking the individual what she needs?

The quote illustrates that managers can see that their processes do not guarantee value in service-users’ lifeworld. Most managers do not actively refer to the fact that value must be balanced between what is to be achieved using intentions, e.g. laws and regulations, and what the children, de facto, perceive as value. The managers’ ambitions are to improve the lifeworlds of these minors: However, whether this is achieved or not is still unclear.

To sum up, the stakeholders involving managers have a predominant focus on their own organization’s contribution, and do not express clear aims and goals, but instead discuss conditions and prerequisites to run the organization. It also becomes clear that the focus shifted to target groups, in medium to long timeframes.

Expressions of value by politicians

Regarding the politicians’ intention to provide value to the citizenry, references are often made to laws, legal documents, regulations, and objectives as a means of defining the intention underpinning the value that they had hoped to offer. This is not only due to the fact that we have less material available, it also seems to be the case that politicians talk less about value and more about the conditions and intentions surrounding value. During one of the political focus group interviews, a politician highlights the complications of schools being governed by many laws, both at the municipal and national levels in Sweden. One politician from the Board of Education comment thus:

When it comes to the school system, I think it’s probably a bit different/ … /especially because we also have a national governance for parts of our operations and we also have professions that are governed by the Social Services Act, the Health Care Act, and the Education Act, so the task for us politicians, as I see it, is more about creating better conditions that are stable in the long-term.

During the other focus group interview with politicians, it becomes clear that, although the intention is for the organizations to implement the political intention, many of the goals are not quickly achievable, instead spanning over one or several terms of office. As explained by one politician as follows:

We have a goal, extending over four years or several terms of office, of ‘all children succeeding’. And it won’t happen just like this [snapping her fingers].

Making reference to value as responsibility for long-term and stable conditions is a recurrent theme amongst politicians. Political intentions are often wide-ranging, turning into even wider-ranging assignments on the organizational level. Here we find discussions about the importance of including the operational level, expressed as follows by one politician:

It’s easier to think freely when you’re higher up, so to speak, where you still have more structural issues to consider. But, very important that one understands that my own perspective is just one among several. If I don’t add it together with the core operational level, we won’t create any value.

The above quote shows that politicians often view the organization as the core creator of value. What also emerges from the focus group discussions is the fact that the politicians often come back to offer cost-effective solutions, because there are often saving targets in their budgets. One politician expresses this as follows:

You must have a clear vision before you start saving, saving can’t be the reason. But the vision can also be ‘us managing this even better’. But I think the danger is that politicians are under pressure not to raise taxes, we’ve put that pressure on ourselves.

To sum up, the discussions that take place at the level of the politicians as stakeholders, range between discussions about vague intentions of value, via the enactment of laws, regulations, political goals, decisions, and priorities, and discussions about the value proposals aimed at the target groups that include all children and the citizenry in general: However, the politicians see their own organizations as the creators of value. Making reference to value, in terms of being responsible for long-term and stable conditions, is a recurring theme among the politicians.

Discussion

Our findings show that service-users, frontline employees, managers and politicians all subjectively express value as stakeholders. The expression of value ranges between the concrete value creation that children experience, on the one hand, and the strategic discussions about the intended societal value of managers and politicians, on the other. Between these two extremes, frontline employees must simultaneously handle work assigned to them by their managers, combining this with their professional competence in order to enable good conditions where they themselves can create value, or where they can enable the service-users to create value. We note that frontline employees largely focus on their day-to-day work on individual users, and that the managerial and political levels discuss what needs to be done to support improvements to the target groups’ lifeworlds.

In our findings, it also becomes obvious that, apart from it being a matter of subjective value, there is also a timeframe involved. Osborne, Nasi, and Powell (2021) argue, for example, that it can be about short-, medium- and long-term service outcomes, with whole-life experience also being important to consider in this context. The value expressed by the various stakeholders is also expressed in terms of different timeframes. From our findings, we can see that the service-users’ subjective value tends to be short-term, that the frontline employees have a slightly longer perspective (medium), and that the managers and politicians tend to discuss long-term outcomes. For example, when a child says he’s sleeping better now, this is in the here and now. However, the frontline employee views this in a short-to-medium term perspective, i.e. that this will entail positive changes as regards the child’s concentration in the classroom in the foreseeable future. Both managers and politicians often emphasize value in terms of being set within a longer timeframe and associated with restrictions and legal obligations.

Another important result from the findings is the importance of distinguishing between the user-perspective and users’ perspectives. When professionals strive to gain some insight into how things interrelate, from the user’s point of view, this is about the user’s perspective. The users’ experiences can only be captured by professionals by means of asking, listening, and observing these users in-situ (Høibjerg 2021; Osborne 2018). One way or another, value needs to be linked to, and understood with reference to, the service-user’s value-creating or value-destroying process (Alford 2016). An important prerequisite of making users’ perspectives valid, therefore, is the fundamental view that the users themselves can communicate their experiences, needs, and wishes (Pramling Samuelsson, Sommer, and Hundeide 2013). If the aim of the public sector is to be user-oriented, then problems will arise when employees cannot grasp the service users’ perspectives. To be user-oriented, employees, managers and politicians, as stakeholders, must be both interested in and seriously curious about the child’s perspective (Tisdall 2017; Hilppö et al. 2016).

A further important distinction that becomes visible is the one between individual and collective value. The underlying legitimacy of public service offerings is based on the democratic process associated with resource constraints and legal obligations (Alford and Greve 2017), through the political process and the judgement of employees and managers, which regulate what is being offered. Policymakers identify and prioritize societal value with respect to the importance and provision of public services (Osborne, Nasi, and Powell 2021). Alford (2016) highlights the fact that value needs to be differentiated based on the type of value, what we call individual or collective value. These values, in turn, can be seen from two sides; i.e. what the PSO desires from the users (values that the individual and citizens can create) and what the organization can do (i.e. a value proposition), when it comes to facilitating the creation of individual or collective values. Our findings lack examples of what PSOs want from the service-user or the citizen, and the discussion about what value the employees strive for is never linked to any political intention to provide value at the societal level. Thus, our results can provide an empirical contribution that confirms Alford’s (2016) suspicion that the question of what the PSO wants from its service-users remains unasked in day-to-day work. However, user-orientation on the basis of a PSL perspective must be based on reciprocity, as it will always involve the co-creation of value.

Distinguishing between various expressions of value will give PSOs a better opportunity to analyse and evaluate the connections between intentions of value and experiences of value, together with possible tensions, disharmonies or even unwanted conflicts between different kinds of value. In doing so, a better understanding of the actual outcomes may reduce a potential gap between intended and created value (Høibjerg 2021). Such an analysis can form the basis for revising political intentions, or identifying shortcomings in public systems. However, it may also be the case that policy needs to change in order to deal with problems and find possible solutions to societal challenges, or to place ‘the users at the heart of strategic thinking’, as Osborne et al. (2021) put it. As Grönroos (2019), Høibjerg (2021), Osborne (2021) and Osborne, Nasi, and Powell (2021) argue, PSOs need to obtain continuous feedback. Through the employees, managers and politicians obtaining feedback, regarding the experiences and value created by the service-users, the organization will gain important information about how to improve its value proposals, and about which areas need further development. If the concept of value is given a content that includes various stakeholders’ perspectives and different timeframes, this will probably contribute to understanding the premises of user-orientation better.

Conclusion

This study’s empirical clarification of the thick concept of value makes a contribution to the development of the growing theoretical field of PSL. Value as a thick concept contains a descriptive part, which is used in PSL inasmuch as something improves or feels better than it did before: However, the thickness arises in that it also has a subjective side, whereby various stakeholders fill the value aspect with their own content. By showing how value is expressed by PSOs, based on various stakeholders’ realities, we draw the following three conclusions regarding user-orientation: (1) The first contribution is that, on the basis of our empirical study, we can provide the thick concept of value with an illustration of its subjective content as regards intentions, ambitions and creations of value based on the various stakeholders (2): The second contribution is that the study can establish that it is essential to distinguish between the user-perspective and the user’s perspective. Thus, even if the employees’ intention is to be user-oriented, it is still his/her user-perspective, and thus not the user’s perspective, that prevails: (3) The third is a practical contribution, i.e. a better understanding of the thick concept of value may reduce a potential gap between intended and created value. In order to expand user-orientation, we need to include various stakeholders’ subjective value perspectives. Additionally, by showing increased interest in the service-user’s perspective, we move forwards, enabling us to pose the question: ‘What does the PSO want from its users?’

In this article, we discuss and argue in favour of several subjective interpretations of the concept of value needing to be included in PSL. The result of this corpus-based study will hopefully have important ramifications for further discussion about user-orientation. In pointing this out, however, we also call for caution due to this study having its limitations. One limitation, of course, is the fact that we have only collected children’s voices as service-users, and not as citizens. In the study, our aim was not to interview citizens in general in order to capture collective public value: However, as can be seen in our empirical material, collective value is an important part of the value created by public services. In addition, as we know, childhood is a specific stage of life and cannot be compared to adulthood, potentially limiting the transferability of the study to residents in the broader sense. Another limitation of the study is that it has not yet been tested, in any practical sense, on the basis of the concept of value using the PSL approach. Any uncertainty surrounding its usefulness thus remains. A further limitation concerns the fact that the empirical material used is based on excerpts from real discussions compiled into a corpus. Only a few empirical studies of value as a thick concept have been dealt with in practice in the day-to-day work of the public sector. This fact made it difficult for us to relate the present study to previous research. An additional limitation is the fact that the findings presented here are all based on a study of a single PSO, with the examples that we provide being taken exclusively from the context of a Swedish municipal welfare services provider. The findings of this study indicate that there is a need for more empirical research on the concept of the value provided by PSOs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pernilla Danielsson

Pernilla Danielsson has a PhD in computational linguistics and was previously a researcher and Academic Director at the Centre for Corpus Research, University of Birmingham. Today she divides her time between being an innovations manager in the public sector and a doctoral student at the department of Service Management and Service Studies at Lund University.

Ulrika Westrup

Ulrika Westrup is PhD of Business Administration and an associate Professor of Service Studies. Her research interest include service management, service innovations, public management and administration, human service organisations, public service management and inter and intra organisational networking. She has studied public organizations since 1998.