Communication between Citizens and Public Organizations as a means of Public Value Co-creation.

ICT mediated online or offline communication can lead to public value co-creation if citizens' input is taken into account by the government to improve its services. Since existing studies have looked into the co-creation process holistically, there are calls for an in-depth understanding of the role of communication whilst offering conceptual clarity to the co-creation process. This study aims to fill these gaps by employing the grounded theory literature research, to analyse and define co-creation in terms of its properties and relationships to communication and public value concepts. The subsequent conceptual framework integrates all the identified concepts to represent co-creation as the functional relationship between the adjustable communication concepts and the public value responses, which are conceptualized as independent and dependent variables respectively. The enablers and constraints emerged through the analysis are aligned with the co-creation properties and correspond to the initial impeding or facilitating conditions of the co-creation process. The results provide a concise and clear, structured representation of the co-creation process in terms of its interacting concepts and relate the co-created public values to crisp communication properties facilitating the validation and refinement of the derived framework by further empirical research. Amidst contemporary socioeconomic challenges, this study could be used to optimize the co-creative potential of public services in terms of existing enabling-disabling conditions and public value requirements.