Suchergebnisse

Private organizations are increasingly relied on, explicitly and implicitly, to carry out public objectives. But given that profit and public motives are not always aligned, why do private firms behave in publicly responsible ways? Specifically, how do diverse regulative, economic, normative, and cultural influences combine to enable or constrain publicly responsible behavior? This analysis focuses on a specific group of private actors: mortgage lenders. Through semi‐structured interviews with private lending agents participating in a public mortgage program, this analysis investigates influences that contribute to publicly responsible behavior. From the interviews, four different publicness dispositions are identified: pecuniary (sensitive to economic and regulative constraints), traditional (sensitive to regulative and isomorphic constraints), altruistic (sensitive to isomorphic and cultural‐cognitive influences), and opportunistic (sensitive to multiple influences). Even for organizations (and their actors) operating within the same policy context and the same public program, responses to political authority likely are contingent on varying publicness dispositions.

In light of the blurring between sectors, it is critical not only to understand public organizations, but also to identify factors that contribute to the achievement of public outcomes across sectors. To what extent does organizational "publicness" lend insight to understanding and managing for public outcomes? By integrating the theory of dimensional publicness with recent work on public values, this analysis presents a framework that defines realized publicness as public outcomes predicted in part by institutions embodying public values. Based on insights from neo‐institutional theory, managing for public outcomes, or managing publicness, requires attention to the combined effects of regulative, associative, and cultural‐cognitive public value institutions. This analysis concludes with a timely application of the realized publicness framework to mortgage lending, demonstrating the importance of conceptualizing influences from diverse types of public value institutions when evaluating a particular initiative, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, and mortgage outcomes.

Nonprofit organizations are increasingly advised to become fiscally self-sufficient and reduce resource dependence to preserve autonomy. However, little is known empirically about the relationships between particular resource streams and the roles espoused by nonprofit organizations that define their public value, including service delivery, innovation, advocacy, individual expression, social capital creation, and citizen engagement. To address this gap in the literature, we collect and analyze survey data from more than 100 nonprofit organizations, developing and testing a new "Nonprofit Sector Public Role Index" that assesses their perceived performance on six different roles simultaneously. Furthermore, we evaluate characteristics that make nonprofits more or less likely to fulfill various roles, with primary emphasis on financial resources. We find evidence that particular resource streams are strongly associated with particular nonprofit roles. Therefore, resource dependence—particularly dependence on public support—may play an important value preservation role in the nonprofit sector.

"Empirical publicness" explains organizations on the basis of their mix of political and economic authority, whereas "normative publicness" seeks to identify, prescribe or infuse public values. The scholarly traditions developed by these two types of publicness have tended not to overlap and for very good reason-blending empirical and normative theory and purpose is a problem of longstanding, one presenting practical and epistemological challenges. We seek to integrate these two different publicness theories with the goal of shedding light on public organization theory but also to provide a heuristic framework useful for strategic management of organizations. We illustrate the approach and its assumptions in the context of the domain of technology-based economic development policies. We consider the prospects and potential for integrating normative and empirical theories of organization. Adapted from the source document.