A search was conducted in January 2020 on Web of Science for articles with the term ‘Public Service Motivation’ in the article title. A total of n=52 articles were retrieved. Descriptive data were extracted by the author from all n=52 articles: including whether the article was empirical or theoretical in nature; the type of method used; the population sampled in the research; and the focus of the empirical research (whether PSM was considered in the underlying research as an antecedent, consequence, or moderator, and the key research question being considered). The appendix table provides a summary of the extracted descriptive data.

Introduction

In the 30 years since Perry and Wise (1990) first formalised public service motivation, it has become a dominant concept in public administration. Theoretical and empirical research has grown significantly, with hundreds of articles being published in each of the last few years. Indeed, Gene A Brewer recently suggested that public service motivation research has become a cottage industry, and is one of the ‘hottest topics’ in public administration research (Brewer, 2019).

This puts public administration scholarship at odds with wider political science, where rational choice theory has been described as being the dominant paradigm. More importantly, the near hegemonic status of public service motivation in the public administration scholarship raises significant questions about how the concept is defined and understood. Some of these questions have been raised elsewhere, from both within and outside the PSMT community. In this chapter, I explore how the concept has developed over the past 30 years, and some of the current fault lines in how it is understood. In doing so, I argue that it is not a coherent concept; it is not clearly differentiated from other similar ideas, and there are still significant areas of debate around the scope of public service motivation. I am not the first to make such arguments, nor am I alone in arguing that more theoretical work needs to be done before we can hope to understand what the empirical results really mean. But there are several areas of this debate to which this book hopefully contributes.

Public service motivation theory as a middle-range theory

PSMT is not intended to be a complete theory of human social action. It is a middle-range theory, intended to provide specific and testable hypotheses, linking empirical evidence and theory building in practical ways in relation to specific situations or contexts. Indeed, this is one of the undoubted strengths of PSMT. Rather than focusing on endless grand, or post hoc theorising (Green and Shapiro, 1995), PSMT provides concrete and real propositions that could and should make a real-world difference.

PSMT is focused on predispositions and motivations of individuals engaging in public institutions.

Before I entered academia, I was a civil servant in the UK. I spent five years as a policy director in an executive Non-Departmental Public Body that was responsible for regulating a healthcare profession. As I joined this agency, the UK government announced its abolition and transfer of its responsibilities to a successor body.

Rational choice theory predicts that, when faced with the threat of agency death, civil servants will seek to create coalitions with agency beneficiaries to prevent termination. Agency staff will seek to further their own interests – continued employment and pay – regardless of any public interest that might arise from the change. And yet, following some initial hesitation by the agency’s board and significant opposition from professional bodies and service providers, the agency went on to become a keen advocate of, and played an instrumental role in, its own demise.

In public, the agency couched this in terms of the public benefit of improved public protection for patients, and reduced costs to the public purse. It also made clear that there were benefits to the regulated profession. Those opposed to the change also framed their arguments as being in the public interest. At one public meeting I attended to talk through the proposals, one member of the regulated profession commented that the agency was ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ because of its advocacy of its own demise. But while the collective, public account of these changes were always advocated in the public interest, individual staff and board members also saw the benefits to them, individually. The challenges of proposing, managing and implementing policy change that involve closing down a public body, the potential career benefits, as well as what being involved would signal about their values, especially that they put the public interest of abolition ahead of the perceived self-interest of opposing abolition. Those who initially opposed the abolition also had self-interested reasons for doing so, not least because of the greater role that resulted for the professional bodies involved.

This mixture of self- and public interest motives, with individual and collective consequences, fascinated me.

The call of public service

That people are motivated to work for the public interest, for the good of others, for the betterment of society, is a long standing and appealing idea. It has been core to the writings of political philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome, in Medieval times and through to modern times (O’Toole, 2006) This simple proposition is repeated in works as diverse as Plato’s The Republic (1987) and Woodrow Wilson’s The study of administration (1887). This ‘common good’ has a number of different dimensions, in both civil society and in government. It covers volunteering, civic participation, a sense of public duty and public employment. It is this latter aspect of public service that is the focus of this book. It is the idea that public servants will put aside their own interests, motivated by a sense of public service or public duty, and that this is a ‘higher order’ of commitment than to self, tribe or family (Horton, 2008).

But by the middle of the 20th century, the idea that public employees were working in the public interest was increasingly under attack. A wave of academics and others started toquestion what the ‘public interest’ really meant, how it was operationalised and whether other interests might be at play. These views started to influence politicians, particularly with the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK in 1979 (Le Grand, 2003) and Ronald Reagan in the USA in 1980. But it did not take long for public interest fightback to begin. This started with the publication of a highly cited and influential article ‘The motivational bases of public service’ by James Perry and Lois Wise (1990). In this article, the authors asserted that public service motivation is an individual’s ‘predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions or organisations’ (p 368) and included ‘a desire to serve the public interest’ (p 370). Their conception of, and empirical evidence for, public service motivation has since developed to become almost hegemonic in the academic field of public administration, and has considerable real-world impact on the design and delivery of public services.

Introduction

One of the oldest and dominant views of government work is that there is no finer, or more noble, calling than public service. Through public service, individuals put aside their own interests and work to further the greater good. Barry Bozeman (2007) explains that the public interest is a means of ‘conceptualising, explaining, and, sometimes, prescribing collective good’ (p 86), and discussions of the common good, of public values, and of the public interest have been core to political debate for many centuries.

It is also the case that the public interest plays a pivotal role in PSMT. Indeed, for many, the basis of public service motivation is a personal desire to further the public interest. Given this, PSMT should be expected to be able to address some basic questions:

• • How do public servants define and understand the public interest?

• • How do they identify what is in the public interest?

• • How do they test this with the public?

• • How do they respond when their actions are not supported by the public?

This chapter considers these questions. It starts by discussing the concept of the public interest, what it means and how it is understood. It then considers the role that the public interest plays in PSMT. The argument developed here is that it plays a pivotal role, and as such questions about how PSMT specifies how public service- motivated public servants understand, seek to further, make decisions around how to, and know whether they have, furthered the public interest are core to an evaluation of the usefulness and completeness of PSMT.

Defining the public interest

The public interest is the dominant language of public employees, politicians and governments (O’Leary, 2019). It has a long and veritable tradition, and appears in the works of political philosophers from Plato onwards (Held, 1970). While its importance as an academic concept has changed over the last 80 years, the idea of the public interest nevertheless has enduring appeal. It has been core to many debates, within and without academia; politicians, public servants, professions and the courts all draw on the public interest to promote and justify their actions and decisions. It is the ‘first and oldest theory’ of government regulation (Yandle, 2011), a core and significant area of government activity and an area where public interest theory is most developed.

INTRODUCTION

The COVID-19 pandemic has made one thing clear: nothing matters more to people than security in their daily lives. The helplessness and lack of preparedness among individuals, families, communities and governments during the pandemic has underscored the need to focus on human security – an idea first introduced in the 1994 Human Development Report and later articulated in the 2003 Report of the Commission on Human Security, chaired by Sadako Ogata and Amartya Sen (UNDP, 1994; Commission on Human Security, 2003).

This chapter revisits the idea of human security by examining efforts made over the past 25 years by Asian-Pacific nations to promote human development and assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the outcomes. Despite considerable progress, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of the development foundations of most countries in the region. An important lesson emerges: While promoting human development remains essential, it cannot guarantee prosperity unless it also prioritizes human security. Looking ahead, nations need to re-envision their human development strategies to prioritize building resilience and empowerment that can overcome the sense of helplessness – one that not only dominates everyday lives but becomes worse in the event of an unforeseen crisis.

THE IDEA OF HUMAN SECURITY

Human security has many dimensions: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political. Manifestations of insecurity include lacking a steady source of income, suffering from hunger, needing medical attention without the means of paying for it, living in fear of abuse and feeling persecuted for belonging to a particular race or religion. As the 1994 Human Development Report states:

Of the many dimensions and features of human security, four have prescriptive importance and will inform the rest of the discussion. First, human security means an end to deprivations. At a minimum, this requires a guaranteed, steady source of income, freedom from hunger, good quality education and affordable healthcare, prevention of child abuse and domestic violence, and insurance of equal participation and non-discrimination.

With the emergence of modern reorganization law in the 1930s, the absolute priority rule came into being. In contrast to what proceeded it, this priority regime cashed out the value of everyone’s stake in the firm at the time of the reorganization. The fifth chapter shows that this idea emerged in large reorganizations not because of any belief in the intrinsic merit of recognizing absolute priority but only because New Deal reformers thought that such a priority rule best protected passive and unsophisticated investors from insiders. Giving each individual creditor the right to insist on being paid in full before anyone junior received anything, however, proved to be incompatible with achieving the mutually beneficial bargains that justified reorganization law in the first instance.