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The term “public value” acquired salience with the publication of Harvard professor Mark H. Moore’s now classic Creating Public Value (1995), which addressed itself to public managers in the field of public administration. Creating Public Value sought to offer guidance to those charged with spending public funds, for example in the sphere of education, housing, or public health. Based on insights regarding the successful management of commercial enterprises, Creating Public Value explored the extent to which principles from the commercial sector could be transferred to the public sector. In 2013 Moore pursued his arguments further, publishing Recognizing Public Value, an extended reflection on issues of evidence and accountability, on how public managers are able to demonstrate that their policies and actions actually have the effect of realizing public value. Revisiting the aims of the earlier book in the introduction to the companion volume from 2013, Moore highlights his contention that in devising “value-creating” strategies for public organizations, public managers must make reference to the external environment of their operations.” “Public managers,” he claims, had to learn “to look upward toward the political authorizing environment that both provided resources and judged the value of what they were producing and outward toward the task environment where their efforts to produce public value would find success or failure” (Moore 2013, 7).

An example of the influence of Moore’s concept of public value can be found in the BBC’s adoption of relevant principles in its 2004 “Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a digital world,” a document developed in connection with the organization’s bid for a renewal of its 10-year charter. Richard Collins finds evidence of the “mediation” of Moore’s ideas “to the UK” in the BBC’s adoption of public value as “a regulatory as well as a management doctrine” (Collins 2007, 164). Collins further contends that the concept of public value offered the BBC a means of responding to “critiques of the BBC’s divergence from public service principles in its broadcasting practice” (164). Matteo Maggiore describes the BBC’s mobilization of “the notion of public value to guide” public service broadcasting and “to assess its performance” as a clear and decisive “break with the traditional arguments developed by public service broadcasters in Europe.” A distinctive feature of the BBC’s “Building Public Value” document was its proposal, “for the first time” to make its “plans for new services directly accountable to the public, including the wider media industry” (Maggiore 2011, 229). To this end, the BBC proposed to introduce a “public values test,” assessments of market impact, and a “performance measurement framework” that would be designed to measure the “reach, quality, impact and value for money” of the broadcaster’s programmes (BBC 2004, 15).

Seeking to establish a boundary between the roles and obligations of commercial companies and public service organizations, the BBC’s “Building Public Value” asserts that whereas the former exist to “return value to their shareholders or owners” the latter exist to “create public value” (7). Broadcasting is referred to as a “civic art” that is “never a purely private transaction” (BBC 2004, 6). Described as infinitely shareable by an ever expanding public and as thereby qualifying for the status of a “public good” (7), public broadcasting is seen as offering a “shared experience [that] may itself represent a significant public value” (6). According to “Building Public Value,” the aim is to serve “audiences not just as consumers, but as members of a wider society, with programs and services which, while seeking to inform, educate and entertain audiences, also serve wider public purposes” (7–8). “Public value,” we are told, “is a measure of the BBC’s contribution to the quality of life in the UK” (8). The document goes on to identify five types of public value that the BBC is committed to creating: democratic value (which underpins civic life), cultural and creative value (through opportunities for creativity, the celebration of cultural heritage, and capacious national conversations), educational value (that contributes to a knowledge- and skills-based society), social and community value (that fosters social cohesion and tolerance by capturing commonalities and differences), and global value (“by being the world’s most trusted provider of international news and information, and by showcasing the best of British culture to a global audience”) (BBC 2004, 8).

While Moore’s interventions have inspired an especially influential discourse of public value, there are dissenting voices challenging aspects of the relevant theory and practice. A key figure in this regard is Barry Bozeman, who claims that the standard interpretation of “public value” represents a privatization of earlier notions of public interest and the common good. The problem, as he sees it, is that “market-based philosophies of human behaviour and public policy” (Bozeman 2007, 3) are made a basis for public agencies to adopt practices from the business sector and for private corporations to assume (previously or ideally) “public responsibilities” (Bozeman 2007, 6).

In his alternative approach to public value, articulated, for example, in Public Values and Public Interest (2007), Bozeman revives the notion of public interest, an ideal that he sees as being pursued through the more “tangible concept” (2007, 132) of public value and, more specifically, through the “specific, identifiable content” (2007, 12) of the public values that animate a given nation and its citizens. A key feature of Bozeman’s account of public values, which draws on the communitarian thinking of philosophers such as Michael Sandel, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor, and the pragmatism of John Dewey, is its emphasis on normative publicness (Bozeman 2007, 10):

A society’s “public values” are those providing normative consensus about (a) the rights, benefits, and prerogatives to which citizens should (and should not) be entitled; (b) the obligations of citizens to society, the state, and one another; and (c) the principles on which governments and policies should be based (2007, 13).

Collaborating with Torben Beck Jørgensen, Bozeman offers an inventory of public values based on an examination of about 230 studies (mostly articles) spanning the period of 1990–2003 and with a focus on public administration in the USA, the UK, and Scandinavia (Beck Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007, 357). The empirical data, then, is drawn from societies that “represent very different positions on the spectrum of the welfare state” (357). The researchers’ survey of the literature yields as many as 72 values that can be divided into a number of so-called constellations. In the first constellation, for example, we find values that are linked to the guiding idea that the public sector can and should contribute to society, to “the common good and to the public interest” (361). Based on their empirical survey, Beck Jørgensen and Bozeman conclude that “values are not considered equally important, that some values are so closely related that they seem to form clusters, and that values can be related to one another in a variety of different ways” (369–370). Especially significant is their finding that while government has a special role to play as the “guarantor of public values,” the latter are not in fact “the exclusive province of government” (373).

A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value affirms this latter point about the wider involvement of private actors in the creation of public value, the creation of public value being the responsibility of individuals and groups within both the private and public sectors. With reference, for example, to the actions of film producers, a conception of the causality of public value as encompassing the private sector arguably entails a heightened awareness of the seriousness of producing images for our various screens. As potential contributors to a common good and a good society (Hussain 2018), the decisions and actions of film producers merit assessment in terms of the extent to which they contribute to, or, as the case may be, obstruct the realization of values that are constitutive of our communities’ well-being. Viewers too participate in the realization of public value, for embedded in their responses to films are forms of affirmation or rejection related not only to the values on display but also, at least ideally, to the attitudes and practices underpinning the making of the works. These responses pertain to the creation of public value inasmuch as they have ramifications, for example, for the future scope of agency enjoyed by a given work’s producers. It is not a matter here of denying the reality of private lives, be it with reference to film producers or film spectators. Rather, the point is to foreground the public dimension of film production (including funding) and film spectatorship, the term “public” being an appropriate qualifier for state entities but also, as Jürgen Habermas (1989; Calhoun 1992) taught us, for the activities of individuals who rise above narrow self-interest and personal concern to contemplate, debate, and engage with matters of mutual interest. A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value offers an exploration of seven categories of value, each of them with a clear public dimension. We know that much work remains to be done: a number of key questions have yet to be asked, while others have been only partially answered. Yet, if Motion Pictures and Public Value inspires further research (of significant scope and scale) on how best to theorize, investigate, but also defend the ideally public dimension of screen content in various contexts, the volume will, we believe, have accomplished an urgent task.