Swedish study finds media pressure doesn't actually shift public servants' values
A survey of local government officials in Sweden challenges the assumption that media attention reshapes how public workers think about their jobs. Despite widespread concerns about 'mediatization,' researchers found no link between exposure to media pressure and shifts in professional values — suggesting the real threat to public service may lie elsewhere.
Originaltitel: Public Servants’ Values and Mental Mediatization: an Empirical Study of Swedish Local Government
<p>Public servants’ value dispositions is a central theme of inquiry in Public Administration research. Various trends and reforms in the public sector, New Public Management, the audit society, marketisation and mediatization, for example are expected to affect these values. This article analyses whether, and in what ways, mediatization affects public servants’ values. Drawing on survey data from local government officials, we explore the mediatization thesis at the level of individual public servants using the concept of mental mediatization. Regarding their values, we empirically establish a dominance of organizational professionalism rather than democratic professionalism among local government public servants. We then analyze mediatization at the level of individual public servants in local government, in contrast to previous research which has focused on the mediatization of politics and central government. While finding an interesting gap between strong beliefs in, but little self-assessed impact of, mediatization, the article rejects an expected correlation between mental mediatization and public servants’ value dispositions.</p>