The digital era and public sector reforms: Transformation or new tools for competing values?

Abstract

This article considers the tools and management approaches associated with the “digital-era” public sector reform, which many observers suggest has supplanted or should supplant previous reforms such as those associated with the New Public Management. This article levers and adapts the Competing Values Framework to categorize various public service reform movements—Traditional Public Administration, New Public Management, Public Value Management, and New Public Governance—and associated value systems and cultures. It argues that not only do these prior reform movements persist as values and repertoires in public service systems, but they are also each variously receiving oxygen from “digital” as the latest wave of technological innovation affecting societies, markets, and governments. It calls for more systematic empirical work to gauge how digital tools have been affecting the mix and balance of values and repertoires associated with these reform movements in different parts of public service systems in Canada and beyond.