Introduction

Despite the criticisms set out in the first part of this book, the argument here is not that people are motivated only for instrumentally, self-interested reasons. In our everyday lives, we often see random acts of kindness. Some people are clearly motivated to benefit others, to make a contribution to society, to make a difference to their communities. Rather, the argument put forward is that public service motivation does not provide a convincing or complete explanation for such other regarding motives observed by public employees in their work for government.

Public service motivation proposes that public employees make material sacrifices in order that they can work to further the public interest, and this is a higher order, a quality shared mostly by those ‘who accept the call’. And, importantly, that this is not consistent with rational choice theory. But there is a fundamental issue that PSMT does not address. This gap – and the other issues with the theory and empirical research set out in the first part of this book – means that PSMT does not provide a satisfactory explanation of other regarding motives of public employees.

This fundamental issue is the lack of explanation of how public employees understand the public interest, understand how to further the public interest and know when they have made a contribution to the public interest. This issue is discussed in detail in Chapter Three. If the common good is so fundamentally important to public service-motivated public employees and is core to PSMT, these questions should have been addressed in the literature or be seen as important.

This chapter sets out an alternative explanation of the motivation and behaviours of public employees to the one offered by PSMT. This explanation is consistent with an understanding of human rationality and agency, but it takes a wider view of our utility function to include other regarding and expressive goals. Importantly, it addresses the fundamental issue with how public employees discern the public interest. Because it is rooted in rational choice theory, it is consistent with other middle-range theories in public policy, political science and the wider social sciences. As such, this explanation sees observed other regarding motives and behaviours as consistent with, not an alternative to, rationality.