Abstract:
The date was the November 4, 2008. A group of scholars gathered in the library of the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. The global financial crisis was moving toward it peak and the final act in the US Presidential election was being played out. The subprime mortgage crisis, which would spill out into the global recession, was in the process of changing the boundaries of public policy making, public management, and business practice. Writing this introduction in 2010, the publicness map of much of the world is very different to that prior to the recession, and the first decade of the twentieth century, the ‘‘noughties,’’ that preceded it. Publicness is conceptualized variously as the influences of political authority (Bozeman 1987; Wamsley and Zald 1973), as organizational ownership (Rainey, Backoff, and Levine 1976), or as the relationship between the two (Dunsire et al. 1988; Rainey and Bozeman 2000). In the middle of 2010, patterns of publicness have changed in unanticipated ways as banks, the bastions of privateness, have been subjected to greatly increased external political control and publicness (Moulton 2009). Institutions of private financial might have become reliant on tax dollars and new forms of regulation are being developed to restrain the ‘‘pure privateness’’ of unfettered markets.
Full Paper
Walker, R. M., & Bozeman, B. (2011). Publicness and organizational performance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, mur025.