Value Conflict Management Of Local Government Performance Evaluation

Since the reform and opening-up, many local governments have developed various forms of government performance evaluation. The government performance evaluation has played an important role in improving the administrative efficacy, putting the Scientific Outlook on Development into practice, building a service-oriented government, and implementing the five-in-one overall layout which is proposed by the 18th CPC National Congress. Now the government performance evaluation has been an important tool to promote the reform of administrative system and government innovation. However, local government performance evaluation encounters a lot of problems during years of practice:from the macro-level perspective, considerable value conflict problems exist in local government performance evaluation, such as the conflict between economic development and equity, between democracy and order, between official standards and people-centeredness, between regulation and service and so on; from the micro-level perspective, in the process of government performance evaluation, the public managers are often trapped into moral dilemmas because they have to make a choice among multiple and competing values. The very reason causing the problems mentioned above is the value conflicts existing in local government performance evaluation. Because of the big difference in culture and political system between China and western countries, our country can't directly use the theory of value conflict management of local government performance evaluation which was born in western society to explain the specific problems and phenomena China faces. Therefore, the primary objective of the research is to explore the causes leading to value conflicts and management methods of value conflicts in the context of China by using empirical study.Therefore, to answer the questions such as how to manage the value conflicts existing in local government performance evaluation, with the guidance of qualitative research methodology, this paper chooses Z County in Sichuan Province as the research object, collects related data by in-depth interview and focus groups, and codes the data, analyzes the data and report the data analysis results by applying the data analysis strategies origination from grounded theory and content analysis method with the assistance of the software such as Nvivo8 and Mindjet MindManager2012.First, this paper argues that, government performance evaluation of Z County chooses not only instrumental values containing quality, responsibility, efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, probity, control, economic development, responsiveness, innovation, and equity, but also objective values including stability, sustainability and public interest. Of all these values, stability, and livelihood value which reflects public interest, embody the features of value selection in the context of China. Based on this, this paper uses content analysis to discuss the value preferences and value orders of government performance evaluation of Z County. It finds that government performance evaluation of Z County prefers instrumental values over objective values, and the value orders from high preference to low preference are:economic development, responsiveness, public interest, control, efficiency, stability, effectiveness, quality, responsibility, probity, sustainability, equity, innovation and transparency.Second, this paper finds that, public managers often face the conflict between economic development and stability, the conflict between legal rules and stability, and the conflict between economic development and sustainability. More interestingly, there also exist the conflicts between the values in the same category, such as law rules and service, efficiency and equity, efficiency and effectiveness, which are instrumental values. The paper defines the value conflicts between the values in the same value category and the value conflicts in the different value category as "the conflicts between value orientations". With the further development of the research, this paper also finds the conflicts between value supply and value demand, and the time tag of value realization, which are defined as "the conflicts between value supply and value demand"Third, this paper also finds that, there are three causes leading to the value conflicts of government performance evaluation of Z County:the lack of value consensus, the displacement of value goals, and the finiteness of public resources and the inadequacy of value supply ability. The lack of value consensus is caused by misaligned value cognitions of stakeholders of local government performance evaluation and the lack of interaction mechanism between stakeholders, and specifically speaking, the misalignment of value cognitions is the necessary condition of the lack of value consensus, while the lack of interaction mechanism is sufficient condition of it; the displacement of value goals is caused by the selfishness of government, the synergy of control and response, and the insufficient technology and ability of constructing indicators; the finiteness of public resources and the inadequacy of value supply ability can cause the undersupply of value to the public demands, with the result that triggers value conflict between supply and demand.Finally, there are three strategies of managing value conflicts in government performance evaluation of Z County:value conflict management based upon public resources, value conflict management based upon interest, and value conflict management based upon consensus. Specifically, value conflict management based upon public resources mainly deal with the value conflicts caused by scarcity of public resources, and it can be achieved by fostering resource guarantee and defining properly the functions of all departments; value conflict management based upon interest focuses on meeting the pursuit of interests, and it can be achieved by good leadership, sound performance evaluation system, training and case study, exerting the creativity, and adopting informal means; value conflict management based upon consensus mainly deals with the value conflicts caused by the lack of value consensus, and it advocates to resolve the conflicts so as to achieve the consensus by reasserting or introducing new values, promoting value leadership or constructing interaction mechanism of government performance evaluation.The innovation of this paper is mainly embodied in the three aspects as follows:First, in this paper the value conflict management of local government performance evaluation is seen as a systemic issue, which not only contains the strategy and means of value conflict management but also includes the value selection, the forms of value conflicts and the causes of value conflicts. Based on this, this research tries to investigate the above problems by using qualitative research method. In the case of Z County, we analyze the value preference and priority by combining the data analysis method of grounded theory and the content analysis method, which is not only a beneficial trial and exploration for qualitative analysis methods, but also lays a good empirical foundation for the theoretical research about value conflict management in local government performance evaluation.Second, this paper reveals the value goal displacement caused by the synergy of control and response by empirical research. This finding transcends the current research on the existence of value goal displacement in the process of government performance evaluation, and more importantly, it re-examines the causes of value conflicts of local government performance evaluation, and expands the previous research based upon the perspective of value competition.Third, this paper analyzes the three types of value conflict management strategies which are revealed by qualitative research methods from four aspects:value conflicts which these strategies deal with, the applicable conditions of these strategies and approaches to achieve these strategies, the stage of resolving the value conflicts, and the comparative analysis between the set of strategies and current theory about value conflict management. In doing so, the paper tries to develop a set of value conflict management strategies which can be used by practitioners. The set of strategies not only provides a way to decrease the performance loss which is caused by the instrumental values' erosion to objective values, but also make public managers consider and response efficiently the moral dilemma caused by being forced to make a choice among multiple and competing values in the process of implementing performance evaluation.