Save The Children

The Publicness of Public Administration
Udo Pesch

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 publicadministration. 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 acknowledgedas 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.

Keywords: public–private distinction; conceptual foundations; public administration theory; public interest;public goods; normativity

In any branch of social research, one would expect to find clear-cut definitions for its central concepts. After all, not much can be intelligibly said about an empirical phenomenon without first dispensing of the right conceptual toolkit (cf. Landau, 1962). Nevertheless, such clear-cut definitions appear to be lacking in public administration theory. There seems to be, asDwight Waldo (1968, p. 3) coined it, a “crisis of identity” because of the lack of a consistent conceptual framework. According to Shamsul Haque (2001), the situation has worsened and now contaminates not only the theory of public administration but also the practice of public administration. This identity crisis becomes especially apparent in relation to the concept of publicness. Althoughpublicness can be seen as one of the constitutive concepts of public administration (cf. Rutgers, 2003), the literature on
public administration reveals great divergence over it. This article addresses this divergence and attempts to analyze the possibilities of developing a consistent conceptual framework concerning the publicness of public administration. It is organized as follows.

The nextsection outlines how the publicness of public administration is presented in academic literature. Five approaches to the differences between public and private organizations are identified. In these five approaches, two conceptual versions of the publicness of public administration are recognizable. The third section explores the roots of these two conceptual versions
by looking at the developmentof the concept of publicness in political theory, showing that political theory contains a double conceptualization of publicness, which relates to the two conceptual versions of the publicness of public administration. In the fourth section, this relation is further elaborated.

The conclusions in the fifth section declare that public administration involves two incompatible and evencontradictory meanings of publicness and that— paradoxically as it may sound—the practice of public administration can be seen as an attempt to find a workable equilibrium between the two meanings of publicness. As no clear-cut definition of the publicness of “public administration” exists, public administration theorists are compelled to research a subject that is characterized by conceptual ambiguity.Organizational Approaches to the Public–Private Distinction

In public administration theory, a number of alternative approaches can be recognized concerning the way public and private organizations are distinguished. Based on Rainey (1997), Bozeman and Bretschneider (1994), and Scott and Falcone (1998), we can construct five distinct approaches:

1. The generic approach, which assumes that...