The increasing diversity of organizational types involved in government action in many countries calls for the development of a comprehensive typology of such organizations. This paper critically reviews both scholarly efforts to classify organizations in general and those based on the public-private distinction in particular, in order to draw implications for developing a better typology of organizational tools. While none of the existing typologies has been completely successful in providing guidance for understanding organizational tools for government action, some of them provide valuable insights, including the importance of taking the incongruence approach seriously and the need for more conceptual and empirical work on political and governmental variables in organizational analysis.
AbstractThis study examined the relationships between multiple dimensions of accountability and organizational performance. The data from higher education institutions in Korea were analysed using ordinary least squares multiple regressions and ordered logistic regressions. We analysed our models with the whole data and the public institutions only data to detect any sectoral differences in the relationships. The overall results show that higher accountability generates more desirable outcomes for organizations. In particular, legal accountability is positively related to most of the performance variables in all institutions. In contrast, the relationship between legal accountability and procedural transparency is less clear. Hierarchical accountability is consistently and positively associated with student satisfaction and procedural transparency in all organizations. Political accountability is significantly linked to student satisfaction only in public institutions. Higher political accountability in making external policies is positively related to student satisfaction, whereas higher political accountability in internal management is negatively associated with student satisfaction.
As scholars have observed, government agencies have ambiguous goals. Very few large sample empirical studies, however, have tested such assertions and analysed variations among organizations in the characteristics of their goals. Researchers have developed concepts of organizational goal ambiguity, including 'evaluative goal ambiguity', and 'priority goal ambiguity', and found that these goal ambiguity variables related meaningfully to financial publicness (the degree of government funding versus prices or user charges), regulatory responsibility, and other variables. This study analyses the influence of the external political environment (external political authorities and processes) on goal ambiguity in government agencies; many researchers have analysed external influences on government bureaucracies, but very few have examined the effects on the characteristics of the organizations, such as their goals. This analysis of 115 US federal agencies indicates that higher 'political salience' to Congress, the president, and the media, relates to higher levels of goal ambiguity. A newly developed analytical framework for the analysis includes components for external environmental influences, organizational characteristics, and managerial influences, with new variables that represent components of the framework. Higher levels of political salience relate to higher levels of both types of goal ambiguity; components of the framework, however, relate differently to evaluative goal ambiguity than to priority goal ambiguity. The results contribute evidence of the viability of the goal ambiguity variables and the political environment variables. The results also show the value of bringing together concepts from organization theory and political science to study the effects of political environments on characteristics of government agencies.
