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Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. By Mark H. Moore. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 402p. $45.00.
Eugene Bardach, University of California at Berkeley
Although this book was not written to prove that public administration can be intellectually interesting, surely this is one of its most valuable accomplishments on a list of many such. Page one invites the reader to join Moore in thinking about some difficult subjects: the ethical responsibilities of public managers, the "diagnostic frameworks" they are to apply to settings in which they must execute their responsibilities, and the "particular kinds of interventions" that can "exploit the potential" latent in their varied settings. It turns out that the invitation is to join in a brisk climb from one well-argued paragraph to another with no let-up for 309 pages. Fortunately, because Moore is a systematic, lucid, and courteous writer, the pace is agreeable. And the view from the top is exhilarating.
Moore is not writing for academics but for practicing managers-though I address below some ways in which academic social science can profit from the analysis-and in particular for the sort of public-spirited and results-oriented managers who have participated in the executive training programs run by the Kennedy School of Government over the last twenty-plus years and in which Moore has been an active teacher. His arguments on the ethical responsibilities of managers are, in the main, not intended to give them responsibilities they have not owned up to but to legitimate their acting as creatively as they may have long wished to do. Their responsibility is to "create public value," says Moore, because their angle...