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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.
The proverbial blurring of the public and private sectors has penetrated the study of public administration for at least the last 50 years (Benn and Gaus 1983; Dahl and Lindblom 1976; Wamsley and Zald 1973). In light of such blurring, it is critical not only to understand public organizations, but also to identify factors that contribute to the achievement of public outcomes across various organizational contexts and implementation structures (Denhardt 1990; Hill and Lynn 2005; Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001; Milward and Provan 2000; Wise 1990). Rather than asking "what makes an organization public," an alternative question asks, "what makes an organization more likely to provide for public outcomes?" The theoretical framework of dimensional publicness offers potential insight. In contrast to a dichotomous view of public and private organizations based entirely on ownership, dimensional publicness recognizes varying degrees of public influence (political audiority) over all forms of organizations, referred to by Bozeman as the "publicness puzzle" (Antonsen and Jorgensen 1997; Bozeman 1987; Bozeman and Bretschneider 1994; Haque 2001; Perry and Rainey 1988; Rainey and Bozeman 2000). The key question becomes, to what extent can understanding dimensional publicness lend insight to understanding and managing for public outcomes?
While research on dimensional publicness affirms the distinctiveness of the concept (Bozeman and Bretschneider 1994; Bozeman and Kingsley 1 998; Bozeman, Reed, and Scott 1 992; Coursey and Bozeman 1990;...