Public and Private Organization

Comparing Public and Private Organizations:

Empirical Research and the Power of the A Priori

Hal G. Rainey

University of Georgia

Barry Bozeman

Georgia Tech

ABSTRACT

Research comparing public and private organizations and

examining the publicness of organizations represents a substantial

and growing body of empirical evidence, relevant to many international

issues in political economy and organization theory such

as the privatization of public services. This article assesses

several major streams in this research over the last two decades,

which in some ways refute widely held a priori assumptions about

similarities and differences between public and private organizations

but which in some ways support such assumptions. The

review covers research on goal complexity and ambiguity, organizational

structure, personnel and purchasing processes, and

work-related attitudes and values. The research results converge

in important ways, but they also present anomalies. For example,

in spite of virtually universal agreement among scholars that

public organizations have more goal complexity and ambiguity,

public managers do not differ from business managers in

response to survey questions about such matters. Public managers

do not differ from business managers on perceptions about

organizational formalization, in spite of a chorus of assertions

that government agencies have more red tape and rules than private

firms have. Public managers do, however, show very sharp

differences in response to questions about constraints under

personnel and purchasing rules. The article concludes with an

assessment of the credibility of these streams of research through

consideration of alternative plausible hypotheses.

No enemy of empiricism, Immanuel Kant simply insisted on

empiricism's knowing its place. God, freedom, and immortality,

Kant asserted, cannot be denied. Each is an a priori category of

the mind and, as such, must necessarily be presupposed. One...