A study of public values in Kazakhstan

Project: Social Policy

Project Details

Grant Program

Social Policy Grant

Project Description

There has been a rise of interest in the study of values in public sector organisations worldwide. This was influenced by the rise of ‘corporate culture’, which asserts that an organisation’s success is primarily dependent on the ability of management to build and promote the ‘right’ corporate culture. Secondly, there was a rise of the New Public Management (NPM) with its emphasis on running public sector organisations as private companies and focusing on efficiency and delivering results. All this gave an impetus for the increased attention on building and nurturing values within public sector organisations.

Although public policy design is to a large extent value-driven, the research on values that influence policy-making is limited, especially in the context of developing countries such as Kazakhstan. It was pointed out that the research on public values has been largely monocultural, focusing mainly on studies of organisational values in Western societies. With few exceptions, the existing research clearly lacks reports on public values in non-Western developing countries. This study aims to fill this gap and explore what and how public values influence public policy design and choices in Kazakhstan.

This study will employ a range of methods including content analysis (organisational codes of conduct), surveys and interviews. Our approach in this study would be to explore individual public manager’s value sets. To identify sets of values possessed by an ‘ideal civil servant’ we plan to conduct a content analysis of Kazakhstan’s codes of conduct for public sector employees. At the next stage, surveys and interviews will enable to use pattern-matching to analyse how organisational values (as identified through the content analysis) commensurate with individual values of public servants. Incompatibility and incommensurability of values was the subject of previous studies. Therefore, the survey will pay special attention to prioritisation of values and value trade-off mechanism by the public managers.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date7/1/186/30/20

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