Toward a micro‐level perspective of organizational publicness: Felt organizational publicness in the eyes of state government employees
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| Author | Naon Min,Kaifeng Yang |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12877 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Toward a micro-level perspective of organizational
publicness: Felt organizational publicness in the
eyes of state government employees
Naon Min
1
|Kaifeng Yang
2
1
Department of Public Administration,
Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul,
Korea
2
School of Public Administration and Policy,
Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
Correspondence
Kaifeng Yang, School of Public Administration
and Policy, Renmin University of China,
202 Qiushi Building, 100872 Beijing, China.
Email: rucyang2013@outlook.com
Funding information
National Natural Science Foundation of China,
Grant/Award Number: 71633004
Abstract
Organizational publicness is a foundational construct for
public administration. It has largely been conceptualized
deductively and focuses mostly on the macro- and meso-
levels of analysis, leaving under-explored how public
employees perceive it at the micro-level. Through a
grounded theory analysis of state government employees'
interview data, this study aims to uncover public officials'
perceptions about organizational publicness. We find that
participants' perception of organizational publicness is a
composite of five themes: four represent the core meanings
of felt organizational publicness, essentially reflecting a
cultural/ethical perspective (purpose, value, behavior, and
outcome), and one represents the context of the meanings
(external environment). Linking the dimensions with the lit-
erature and publicness at other analytical levels, we discuss
the findings' implications. We emphasize that employee
perceptions of organizational publicness play an important
role in achieving realized publicness.
“Publicness”underscores the nature of public organizations and has become a fundamental concern to publicadmin-
istration scholars and practitioners (Frederickson, 1997; Haque, 2001). The intellectual curiosity is partly driven by
the desire to identify the unique characteristics of public organizations and to establish public administration as a
field distinct from business administration. This has motivated scholars to explore its conceptualization
(Bozeman, 1987), dimensions and attributes (Antonsen & Jørgensen, 1997; Bozeman, 1987,2007; Bozeman &
Bretschneider, 1994; Bozeman & Moulton, 2011; Moulton, 2009), and outcomes (Feeney & Welch, 2012;
Heinrich & Fournier, 2004; Miller & Moulton, 2014). More generally the concept goes beyond public organizations,
as private businesses have a certain level of publicness as well (Bozeman, 1987; Bozeman & Moulton, 2011). It also
Received: 3 August 2021Revised: 21 June 2022Accepted: 7 July 2022
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12877
Public Admin. 2023;101:1247–1271. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.1247
goes beyond the organizational level and can be used to talk about political regimes, societies, and markets
(Arendt, 1968; Habermas, 1992).
Despite the copious literature, including extensive empirical studies, a “grounded”understanding of publicness
is missing (Merritt, 2019). The theorizing has been primarily normative and deductive. Few scholars have studied
how ordinary individuals think of “publicness.”Public administration scholars have theorized organizational public-
ness by engaging neighboring concepts such as public goods, public interest, public ownership, citizenship, and public
(Bozeman & Bretschneider, 1994; Frederickson, 1997), which has laid a solid foundation for our inquiry but also
brought considerable confusions and ambiguities. Without knowledge about how administrators on the job perceive
organizational publicness, our understanding of organizational publicness is incomplete: while a social science con-
cept is a social construction created by scholars, its value should be anchored to ordinary people's existence. A theo-
retical or scientific term may be understood by practitioners very differently, and it is practitioners' own (as opposed
to researchers') understanding that determines their attitudes and behaviors. If we want to ensure organizational
publicness can shape administrative behaviors, we must know how administrators' understanding of organizational
publicness is influenced by the organizational attributes and, in turn, affects individual choices. Administrators' per-
ceptions about organizational publicness are an important intermediate construct that links institutional/
organizational publicness with individual actions producing desirable public outcomes.
This article explores what being “public”organizationally means to public administrators by conducting in-depth
interviews with employees of a U.S. state government. The first section reviews existing theories—not to develop
hypotheses, but to become “theoretically informed to be sensitive to subtleties of meaning embedded in the data”
(Brower et al., 2000, p. 389), or to help identify patterns from data in productive directions (Glaser, 1992; Strauss &
Corbin, 1998). The second section describes data and methodology. The third section reports findings, showing
employees' perceptions include five themes: purpose, value, behavior, outcome, and external environment. The
fourth section links the findings to the existing literature and argues that purpose, value, behavior and outcome form
the core meanings of felt organizational publicness. The article then concludes by discussing the limitations and
implications.
1|THEORIES OF ORGANIZATIONAL PUBLICNESS AND PUBLIC
The theory of organizational publicness can be traced back to Rainey et al.'s (1976) article on the difference between
public and private organizations. A stream of analysis follows and emphasizes a particular nominal variable—
ownership or legal status (Bozeman & Bretschneider, 1994; Perry & Rainey, 1988). Only using this variable, however,
fails to capture the varieties of organizational forms and dynamics in a changing environment where public and pri-
vate organizations have hybrid forms, blurring boundaries and converging managerial practices.
As a result, publicness theory advanced to a dimensional approach, with the premise that publicness is not a
dichotomous or categorical variable, but a continuous variable or a matter of degree. All organizations are subject to
the influence of publicness and privateness (Bozeman & Moulton, 2011), with some being more public and others
more private. Both public and private organizations have a certain degree of publicness. The dimensional approach
has progressed significantly in the past30 years. Initially, Bozeman (1987) proposed a publicness grid based on two
dimensions (political authority and economic authority), extending earlier theories that compare public agencies and
businesses on one continuum (Dahl & Lindblom, 1953; Wamsley & Zald, 1973). Later on, scholars began to consider
other dimensions such as resource publicness, goal/agenda publicness, and communication publicness (Bozeman &
Bretschneider, 1994). Still, the most widely-used dimensions are ownership, funding, and control (Andrews
et al., 2011; Heinrich & Fournier, 2004). These dimensions are “objective”organizational attributes and their impact
on individual attitudes and behaviors has been widely examined (Lee et al., 2020; Xu & Li, 2021). Those studies
mostly assume the existence of individuals' sense of publicness and its role in linking the objective publicness attri-
butes with the individual behaviors, without actually conceptualizing it, let alone testing it.
1248 MIN AND YANG
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