Putting Together the Publicness Puzzle: A Framework for Realized Publicness

In light of the blurring between sectors, it is critical not only to understand public organizations, but also to identify factors that contribute to the achievement of public outcomes across sectors. To what extent does organizational “publicness” lend insight to understanding and managing for public outcomes? By integrating the theory of dimensional publicness with recent work on public values, this analysis presents a framework that defines realized publicness as public outcomes predicted in part by institutions embodying public values. Based on insights from neo‐institutional theory, managing for public outcomes, or managing publicness, requires attention to the combined effects of regulative, associative, and cultural‐cognitive public value institutions. This analysis concludes with a timely application of the realized publicness framework to mortgage lending, demonstrating the importance of conceptualizing influences from diverse types of public value institutions when evaluating a particular initiative, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, and mortgage outcomes.     

Public and Private

The problem of public and private is often thought to be a boundary problem. 'Public' and 'private' are said to denote separate areas of human endeavour—distinct 'realms', 'spheres', or 'spaces'. The task of formulating clear boundaries, however, has proven to be enormously complex. It seems that every attempt at conceptualizing a purely private area of activity runs into a particular kind of difficulty, namely, many of the activities characteristic of the private sphere turn out to be activities toward which no responsible public authority could possibly remain indifferent: abuse within the family, collusion in the business world, criminal conspiracy among friends.
It may be, however, that the problem of public and private, conceived as a boundary problem, is thereby misconceived. It would perhaps be better to think of public and private as denoting not primarily—perhaps not at all—separate realms of endeavour but different ways of being in the world, different 'manners of acting'. To act in a private manner is simply different in character from acting in a public manner. Such a formulation, if pursued with care, would allow us to accept fully the arguments of those who would question the very idea of a private realm, while still permitting us to retain a vigorous and compelling public/private distinction.     

The Diminishing Publicness of Public Service under the Current Mode of Governance

In this article, it is argued that while there has been an apparent eclipse in discourse regarding the publicness or public quality of public service, the recent transition toward a market-driven mode of governance has created a serious challenge to such publicness. More specifically, the contemporary businesslike changes in the objectives, structures, functions, norms, and users of public service tend to diminish its publicness in terms of its current trends toward eroding public-private distinction, shrinking socioeconomic role, narrowing composition of service recipients, worsening condition of accountability, and declining level of public trust. Based on the existing studies, empirical findings, and country experiences, this article delineates the basic criteria determining the publicness of public service, uses these criteria to demonstrate how the recent businesslike reforms have led to the erosion of such publicness, and makes recommendations for reviving the quality of publicness in public service.     

Public versus Private Managers: How Public and Private Managers Differ in Leadership Behavior

This article aims to find out whether there are behavioral differences between public and private sector managers. Two groups of public managers (managers of social insurance agencies and public school principals) and a group of private managers (two samples) are investigated. Behavioral dimensions are investigated including leadership style (task, relationship, and change orientation), decision‐making style (the functions of sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling), and motivation profile (achievement, affiliation, and power motivation). An analysis of data from 459 managers in four organizations in Sweden reveal significant differences in behavior between public and private managers. However, no significant differences in leadership behavior are discovered among public managers. Possible explanations for such differences and similarities are explored.     

Using Data to Manage for Performance at Public Universities

As performance‐oriented reforms have become more commonplace in recent years, questions about the factors that drive organizational adoption and use of performance systems for internal management are of central importance. This article uses data taken from a survey of presidents at public universities to advance our understanding about the use of data and performance management strategies within public organizations. The central research question is, why do public administrators choose to employ performance management strategies? In addition, the author also explores variation in the extent to which public universities use performance management strategies for three tasks that are central to public management: (1) strategic planning, (2) evaluating employees, and (3) interacting with external stakeholders. Findings indicate that public universities often use performance data to help manage, but many of the causal factors that lead to data use vary across management functions.     

高校公共危机和突发事件舆论引导机制研究

高校公共危机和突发事件中,舆论的特点表现为舆论扩散的迅速性、舆论群体的高知性、舆论议题的多样性、舆论影响的破坏性、舆论关注的广泛性。在剖析目前高校公共危机和突发事件舆论引导的缺陷及不足基础上,探讨新时代新形势下高校突发事件舆论引导原则和路径,构建舆情研判和预警机制,健全协调联动处置机制,完善新闻信息发布机制,加强高校舆论队伍建设机制,建立舆论恢复重建机制,为化解高校风险危机提供解决方案。     

民办高校学生党建工作探赜

民办高校学生党建工作是关系到能否全面贯彻党的教育方针,坚持社会主义办学方向,培养德智体美全面发展合格人才的根本性问题。民办高校学生的特殊性决定了学生党建工作的特殊性和难度。我们积极探索民办高校学生入党积极分子的培养、教育途径和模式,夯实学生党员发展基础,将学生党建工作与思想政治教育有机结合,促进了学生健康成长和全面发展。     

我国民办高校办学特色路径研究

改革开放以来,我国民办教育突飞猛进,取得了巨大成就,已经成为我国高等教育不可分割的重要组成部分。从我国民办院校在具体办学实践中存在的问题入手,探索我国民办院校办学特色的路径如下:构建共性与个性统一、突出以学生为中心的理念;明确办学定位,服务区域经济发展;坚持"非盈利"公益办学方向,构建学校卓越发展机制;实施创新人才培养模式,构建特色化课程体系;建立一支稳定的、高水平的师资队伍。     

Public Budget Choices and Private Willingness to Pay

Efficient allocation of public funds depends upon good information about citizens' values. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how citizens' values can be obtained by eliciting marginal willingness to tradeoff (MWTTO) ratios for public spending categories and linking these ratios to individual, private willingness to pay. The link enables estimation of the willingness to pay for an expansion to any of the budget categories based on the elicited willingness to pay and the marginal willingness to tradeoff ratios. Tradeoff ratios and willingness to pay are estimated for public budget categories in Kentucky based on a representative sample surveyed by mail and the web in 2007. Estimates show that individuals are willing to pay the most for an expansion to educational services, followed by health care.     

Comparing Accountability in the Public and Private Sectors

Analysis of public accountability tends to concentrate on public sector institutions. However, increasing use of the private sector in the provision of public services suggests the need to compare accountability in the two sectors. While private sector (for-profit) companies are more accountable in terms of their 'bottom line', accountability requirements in the public sector are generally more stringent, particularly with regard to process and general policy.     

Does Public Policy Crowd Out Private Contributions to Public Goods

It is sometimes claimed that individuals' contributions topublic goods are not motivated by economic costs and benefitsalone, but that people also have a moral or norm-basedmotivation. A number of studies indicate that such moral ornorm-based motivation might be crowded out, or crowded in, bypublic policy. This paper discusses some models that can yieldinsight into the interplay between economic and moral ornorm-based motivation for voluntary contributions to publicgoods, and compares their policy implications. We distinguishbetween five types of models: Altruism models, social normmodels, fairness models, models of commitment and thecognitive evaluation theory.     

Social Heterogeneity and Optimal Mix Between Public and Private Provision of Public Goods

With a framework of incomplete contract, this paper shows that for provision of public goods such as medicare and education, pure privatization may not promote competition. On the contrary, the co-existence of public and private provision may enhance de facto competition. Two competitive effects are identified. When consumers are heterogeneous, the co-existence of public and private ownership gives consumers freedom to choose from different ownership, improving allocation efficiency (Tiebout effect). While consumers are homogeneous, the co-existence can promote yardstick competition, squeezing out information rents from both ownerships, improving production efficiency (benchmarking effect). In either case, the co-existence dominates unique ownership. The paper ends up with some implications for China.s medicare and education reforms. Yongqin Wang is an assistant professor at China Center for Economic Studies, Fudan University and Haibo Xu is a M.A. student in economics at the same center. We thank Te Bao, Zhao Chen, Sujian Guo, Ming Lu, Yew-Kwang Ng and Teague Savitch, and anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.     

民办高校反腐倡廉建设的思考

民办高等教育是市场化的公益行为,民办高校的法人治理结构不同于公办高校的分权与监督、约束与激励等基本的治理机制。当前的教育政策和法律在应对由信息不对称所引发的败德行为尚缺乏有效的预见和准备,民办教育的公益性和资本的寻利性之间的矛盾引发不少腐败行为,其发展过程中的各种腐败现象已严重阻碍了民办高校的健康发展。因此,民办高校反腐倡廉制度建设的内涵和外延都应随着反腐倡廉任务的变化而不断深化和扩大。要加强民办院校的党组织建设,切实发挥其政治核心作用。还必须充分认识到民办高校反腐倡廉建设的特殊性和必要性,通过完善制度体系、加强党建和民主监督、促进内外监督机制结合等措施,切实加强民办高校反腐倡廉建设。     

Cutback Management and the Paradox of Publicness

Cutback management in the public sector poses unique problems. More than 30 years ago, Charles Levine illustrated these problems by discussing the paradoxes of cutback management in public organizations. Building on Levine's work on cutback management and developments in publicness theory, the author provides a contemporary perspective on cutback management. He asserts that publicness creates paradoxical tensions in different domains such as organizational goals, employee motivation, and organizational performance. These tensions need to be embraced in both theoretical discussions of and practical engagement with cutback management. Instead of a short‐term, reductionist approach to cutback management, a holistic and long‐term perspective is necessary.