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To fill the gap in the literature with regard to public value measurement (PVM) and to provide a model for measuring public value at an individual organizational level, based on managerial control systems (MCS).

This article helps review the literature on PVM and propose a model for measuring the value generated by individual organizations. Measurement challenges and potential solutions are investigated.

Public value generated by an individual organization can be calculated by measuring if and to what extent the organization’s outcomes and objectives have been achieved. Public value production and measurement are part of a wider PVM process, which is congruent with the major elements of MCS, from planning to operations, and measurement to evaluation.

This article provides knowledge to support the measurement of public value produced by public sector organizations. However, the suggested use of MCS for a comprehensive measure of the public value produced by a public body does not allow for a comparison of the public values generated by different organizations, as the value is calculated against the objectives set by that specific organization. More research is needed in order to fully utilize this model in practice.

The findings may help public sector organizations, policymakers and public managers measure the public value produced by a public organization as a whole.

This article may help citizens and other stakeholders understand the public value produced by a public organization.

This article is based on an original research undertaken by the author and faces the relatively neglected issue of PVM. It suggests the use of public value MCS as a model for measuring public value produced by individual organizations.

In his preface Thompson argues that structural, sociological and ideological aspects of the economic “environment” foreclosed on socialism during the period in question. The structural aspect was the increased globalisation of economic activity; the sociological was the “triumph of possessive individualism and the uncritical celebration of private as against social consumption” (p. vi); and the ideological was the ascendancy of the nostrums of the New Right. Given the importance attached to these “environmental” forces one might have expected the author to organise his argument by discussing how and why these forces came to be all-powerful in the last quarter of the 20th century.

What counts as evidence of good performance, behaviour or character? While quantitative metrics have long been used to measure performance and productivity in schools, factories and workplaces, what is striking today is the extent to which these calculative methods and rationalities are being extended into new areas of life through the global spread of performance indicators (PIs) and performance management systems. What began as part of the neoliberalising projects of the 1980s with a few strategically chosen PIs to give greater state control over the public sector through contract management and mobilising ‘users’ has now proliferated to include almost every aspect of professional work. The use of metrics has also expanded from managing professionals to controlling entire populations. This chapter focuses on the rise of these new forms of audit and their effects in two areas: first, the alliance being formed between state-collected data and that collected by commercial companies on their customers through, for example loyalty cards and credit checks. Second, China’s new social credit system, which allocates individual scores to each citizen and uses rewards of better or privileged service to entice people to volunteer information about themselves, publish their ‘ratings’ and compete with friends for status points. This is a new development in the use of audit simultaneously to discipline whole populations and responsibilise individuals to perform according to new state and commercial norms about the reliable/conforming ‘good’ citizen.

Modern mainstream economics is a plurocracy in which there is no orthodoxy of ideas, only an orthodoxy of method. Given the training it provides its students, mainstream economics' natural domain is science. With the mainstream's acceptance of complexity views of the economy, Austrian economist's views can now get a hearing within the mainstream. Thus, within the science of economics, there is no need for a separate Austrian economics. However, there is a need for Austrian economics in political economy, the branch of economics that takes the insights of science and relates them to policy. The paper urges Austrian economics to embrace political economy as its domain and to position its work within political economy.

Purpose – This paper examines Hayek's view of the mind to see if it provides a useful and unifying foundation for understanding both deliberative choices that involve conscious information processing (the ‘economic imagination’) and choices that are not determined by conscious processes such as those involving ‘gut feelings’ or knowledge that the chooser is unable to articulate (the ‘tacit dimension’).

Methodology/approach – The paper analyses Hayek's view of the mind from the standpoint of evolutionary economics and biology. Because of the significance of pattern detection in Hayek's analysis, the paper examines parallels with key ideas in personal construct psychology and artificial intelligence. As well as exploring the evolutionary advantages of behavior based on programmed responses to the detection of particular patterns, it also explores possible evolutionary and neural origins of dysfunctional heuristics and biases.

Findings – Hayek's theory of the mind provides useful foundations for analyzing choice in a evolving, pluralistic and context-based manner rather than seeing all choices as made in much the same way on the basis of ‘given preferences’ that obey the axioms of rational choice theory. His theory complements work in psychological economics based on Kelly's personal construct psychology, cognitive dissonance theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The analysis leads to questions being raised about the conventional faith in the notion of a diminishing marginal rate of substitution.

Originality/value of paper – The paper shows how very different ways of choosing can be understood in terms of Hayek's analysis of the mind.

The chapter presents a short biography of Kalecki, from his early years in Łódź, through his economics research and development of his theory of business cycles, participation in the Keynesian Revolution and work after the Second World War on the economics of socialism and the developing countries. The key role of capital accumulation (investment) in determining levels of employment and total output is put forward as Kalecki's main innovation. There are evident similarities between Kalecki's theory of the business cycle and that of the Austro-Marxist Emil Lederer, as well as in the distributional analysis of Rudolf Hilferding. Kalecki's analysis of monetary circulation, and the centrality of his theory of profits was anticipated by Rosa Luxemburg in her Anti-Critique. But that monetary theory is rooted in a Marxian understanding of money as a means of settlement between capitalists.

Let me begin soon after the beginning of economics: with money. Money is a concept whose centrality to Economics, especially to conventional Economics, is hard to overestimate: Money is the main means by which economists tend to appeal more easily to an alleged scientificity for their discipline, because it so easily lets them ‘Go forth and quantify’.