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TopCore Publicness: Publicness As Ownership, Funding Or Mode Of Social Control
Bozeman and Straussman first proposed the concept of publicness as a way of looking at issues such as the increasing diversity of organizational types, and particularly the blurring of the distinction between public and private organizations, in a chapter entitled ‘organization publicness and resource processes’ in Hall and Quinn’s (1983) seminal edited volume Organization Theory and Public Policy.Bozeman (1987) later developed the concept in his book All Organizations are Public: Bridging Public and Private Organization Theory. Since then extensive empirical and theoretical work has been carried out in the field of organizational publicness. Organizational studies of public/private differences in organizations have evolved rapidly, from an emphasis on generic approaches, through to a focus on core, dimensional, empirical, normative, and most recently on integrative publicness.
The rationale for comparing public and private organizations is the supposition that public organizations are different from business firms, and that different factors might therefore be important in optimising performance. A large body of research has now compared public and private organizations, using a variety of approaches, the purpose of which has been to consider whether one type of organization is more effective than others in delivering certain outcomes. Some studies have examined the extent to which particular organizational attributes are specific to one sector or are shared across several. Scott and Falcone (1998) reviewed the underlying conceptual frameworks used in these studies, and concluded that all could be reduced to one of three types; the generic, core and dimensional approaches.