Progressing the Conceptualization of Value Co-creation in Public Service Organizations

Value and how it is produced/created in public service organizations (PSOs) represents a current and significant issue for those researching and working in public sector management as well as public service users. Recently it has been suggested that value in PSOs is created rather than co-produced through a relationship between the service user and the service provider based on the service user's wider life experience. Importantly, this definition shifts the emphasis from the PSO (the focus of value co-production) to the PSO service user and their wider life experience. This is by no means an agreed conceptualization; there are many and varied definitions of value and its creation process. In this article, we develop a philosophical foundation for the value creation process in PSOs, something we argue is fundamentally missing from current conceptualizations. To do this, we draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, repositioning the basis of value co-creation from a service logic to a logic of assemblage. We then apply this framework to a practical example of public service use to show how it can be used to make sense of reality.