The destruction of the Covid-19 pandemic has marked every society with deep-seated wounds whose scars have only begun to heal. Yet, even as societies take their first steps away from the trauma of the pandemic, they confront new and perhaps equally daunting challenges in the post-Covid era. These challenges offer a unique occasion to consider how the mechanisms of public value (PV) creation and preservation can be rebuilt and improved, mindful of what has been left in the pandemic’s wake, and of the difficult road that lies ahead. The aim of this book, then, is to examine the forward-looking possibilities of multi-stakeholder value co-creation, which involves the renewed efforts of civil society, public managers, politicians, and society-at-large in a new post-pandemic era. The book examines many different facets that appeal deeply to public value scholarship: value stability & transitions, inequalities within & between publics, necropolitics, disaster preparedness, value measurement, and sustainability, all of which represent important explorations within public value theory, and can greatly enrich PV research going forward. This book will therefore be of use to both academics and practitioners of public administration and public policy, as well as scholars of government, health care policy, and economics.

Widespread crisis-events such as pandemics can impose an immense strain on societies’ multi-stakeholder efforts to preserve and sustain the mechanisms of public value (PV) creation. The global coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic exemplifies this because it has pushed civil society, public managers, politicians, and society-at-large into uncharted waters, and at times brought them under exceptional duress. Then how can public value’s agents attempt to conceive, create, and preserve value under such disruptive circumstances? How could public value theory’s (PVT’s) theoretical precepts be informed by the pandemic? This book seeks to inform the PVT literature by drawing upon interesting lenses that have emerged in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It addresses PVT’s notions of value conflicts, post-Truth politics, multilateral PV, nationalism and the public, comparative PV creation, and PV in developing-country contexts, in order to construct a multi-stakeholder and internationally informed set of analyses on public value’s systems and agents in uniquely distressing circumstances such as pandemics. This book will therefore be of use to both academics and practitioners of public administration and public policy, as well as scholars of government, healthcare policy, and economics.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Situated in an era of low trust in government and a pervasive negativity bias that has shaped the field, this insightful volume examines the foundations, practices and tools of a distinctly positive strand of public administration (PPA). It advocates for a more optimistic approach to the study of what government does, how they do it, and to what effect.

Social equity is a pillar of public service. Thus, social equity should be a central concern in public management in practice and scholarship. However, widespread incorporation and reflection of social equity practices in government and the anticipated public benefits still seem like an elusive goal. The ability to analytically assess social equity is the first step toward prescribing social equity reforms. Public affairs graduate programs, like a master’s in public administration or public policy, often teach public management separately from social equity. This book empirically and theoretically bridges social equity and public management for use in the public affairs graduate classroom. The book highlights international research that leverages public management theory to build reasonable social equity measures and applications. The research highlighted in the text includes studies from across countries in North and South America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia. This is the first book specifically designed for global public affairs classrooms that connects public management theory and practice with social equity reforms.

Contemporary financial markets have been characterized by sociocultural phenomena such as "meme stocks", the Gamestop short squeeze, and "You Only Live Once (YOLO) trading". These are movements led by small-scale retail investors banding together to participate forcefully in financial markets through decentralized but coordinated actions. This book deploys many different subdisciplines to explore the recent ‘power grabbing’ of retail investors and the online environment that enables them to join the ranks of major financial players, and participate in contemporary capitalism. It offers multiple perspectives on the genesis, role, motivations, power, and future prospects of retail investors as a force in contemporary financial markets. Drawing upon the insights of authors hailing from many different countries, the book frames YOLO capitalism through numerous angles that help to explain the context and the importance of activist retail investors in modern financial markets, and thereby explore the possibilities of a transformed financial future with much wider small-scale participation. The book assesses the potential of online - and other - communities in enabling global coordination in impacting or even driving financial and crypto markets, and the challenges that come with it and weighs the competing narratives both positive and negative regarding YOLO capitalism. It strikes a balanced assessment of their legal, cultural, behavioural, economic, and political roles in modern finance. This book will be of interest to a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary audience of scholars in financial markets, financial regulation, political economy, public administration, macroeconomics, corporate governance, and the philosophy and the sociology of finance.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) constitute a comparatively novel area in academic research and scholarship, but the budding interest in this category of digital and algorithmic organization across various disciplines provides an indication of the possibilities that DAOs wield in terms of informing and advancing our understanding of the potentialities of the digital economy's forthcoming iterations. It also points towards practical use cases to solve problems that the increasing decentralization and amorphization of the structures of the digital economy portend. At the same time, DAOs are afflicted by various strands of skepticism that are attributable to their vulnerabilities, subjacent hype, ultimate purpose, and usefulness. This skepticism also requires scholarly attention and careful study through multidisciplinary perspectives, as further research may come to either dispel or confirm the array of concerns that continue to loom large about DAOs as technological, governance, societal, and economic instruments in the future. With all this in mind, the aim of this book is to offer multiple studied perspectives that explore DAOs from a variety of perspectives across several disciplinary prisms. It does not seek simply to weigh the balance of DAO's merits and demerits, but rather to conceive, appreciate, and discover various elements of ultimate import to DAOs over their future evolutionary course. Drawing upon the insights of interdisciplinary subject matter experts, this book allows for a holistic enquiry into the role, potential and limitations of DAOs. The book will thus be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience of scholars in organizational studies, computer science, economics, sociology of technology, philosophy, law, and the governance of innovation.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have blossomed into an area of immense cultural, investment, and academic interest, and this groundswell of fascination with non-fungible digital tokenization has been accompanied by a variety of attitudes towards their function, purpose, and potential. Some advocates perceive NFTs to be revolutionary in character, reshaping notions of the construction and preservation of unique assets in the digital realm. At the same time, a notable number of skeptics and detractors view the NFT movement as a passing and overhyped fad at best, and a disingenuous ploy in the digital economy at its worst. Given the diversity of views that have emerged in a comparatively brief span, this book draws upon rich academic perspectives on NFTs from a variety of disciplines, including: computer science, cultural studies, mathematics, sociology, linguistics, mass communication, economics, and finance. The book teases out nuances in how NFTs can and should operate, while also pointing to the potential that these non-fungible assets wield in the digital sphere, along with countervailing arguments against their conceptual and functional salience, and perhaps some dangers that they pose. The book considers the longevity and viability of NFTs as sociocultural, technological, and economic phenomenon, while offering estimates of future paths that NFTs might take in each domain and weighs the opposing narratives and strikes balanced assessments of the legal, cultural, technological, economic, and political role of NFTs in modern society. With its panoramic display of analysis on NFTs, the book will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers across a wide number of subjects.