The Publicness of Public Administration

TLDR

Public administration theory has long struggled to define its publicness, with at least five distinct approaches attempting to separate public from private organizations. The study shows that the five approaches to publicness rest on two opposing conceptual versions—public goods and public interest—derived from contrasting ontological descriptions, and that public administration is an empirical manifestation of their confrontation, resulting in an inherently inconsistent conceptual framework.

Abstract

Public administration theory has always struggled to find a clear-cut understanding of the publicness of public administration. There are at least five different approaches to distinguish public from private organizations. A closer examination shows that these five approaches are based on two conceptual versions of the publicness of public administration. The first conceptual version derives its understanding of publicness from “public goods,” whereas the second conceptual version involves the publicness of the “public interest.” These two versions are derived from two contravening ontological descriptions of publicness that have been developed in modern political theory. Both of these ontological descriptions have to be acknowledged as constitutive for understanding the publicness of public administration: Public administration can be seen as the empirical manifestation of the confrontation of these two meanings, which implies that “public administration” is constituted by an inconsistent conceptual framework.