"A Citizen Conceptualization of Publicness: Public Values as a Foundation"

Bozeman's (1987) initial conception of publicness focused chiefly on the mix of political and economic authority in organizations, regardless of sector. The conceptualization was extended as Bozeman and Moulton (2011) sought... [ view full abstract ]

Bozeman's (1987) initial conception of publicness focused chiefly on the mix of political and economic authority in organizations, regardless of sector. The conceptualization was extended as Bozeman and Moulton (2011) sought to integrate empirical publicness and normative public values (Bozeman, 2007), showing the possible interconnections between them. Our proposed paper takes a next step in the evolution of integrative publicness, examining the public values consensus among a sample of more than 2,000 US citizens working in organizations of every sector. The publicness literature has not heretofore focused on citizens except in the most rudimentary was as espoused in Bozeman's early work (1987), as the ultimate basis of political authority and legitimacy. Here we focus on those roots of political authority, not only querying citizens' expressions of public values but also "enacted" public values, examining choices to social and policy issues that embody the values premises. The paper argues that citizens' conceptions of public values provides not only a useful guide for public policy and governance but for any organization. The authors provide examples of business enterprises that could have benefited from the strategic deployment of public values. The extended example is so-called "for profit colleges and universities," organizations with a high degree of endowments in political authority but a low degree of public values mission.

References

Bozeman (1987). All organizations are public. Jossey-Bass Publishing.

Bozeman (2007). Public values and public interest. Georgetown University Press.

Bozeman, B., & Moulton, S. (2011). Integrative publicness: A framework for public management strategy and performance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 21(suppl 3), i363-i380.