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The title of this lecture refers to organizations, politics, and public purposes to emphasize developments in the analysis of public organizations and their management and the need for that analysis to include politics as an influence on those organizations. The Gaus Award recognizes contributions in the joint tradition of public administration and political science. Organizations serve as essential components of the administrative branch of government and of virtually all other aspects of human life and many other forms of life. Social scientists that I call "organization theorists" have developed theory and research about organizations and the people in them. This body of work provides concepts and insights useful for the analysis of the organizations in government, which I call "public organizations." Organizations play crucial roles in the pursuit of values and goals shared by large aggregates of people. "Organizations, Politics, and Public Purposes: Analyzing Public Organizations and Public Management" refers to these shared values and goals as public purposes. Organizations are essential to public administration and we cannot effectively analyze organizations in public administration without concepts developed by political scientists; we need to draw on political science.

Research comparing public and private organizations and otherwise analyzing "publicness" involves complex challenges. These include the challenge of designing and attaining adequate samples to represent the two complex categories of "public" and "private," as well as dimensions of publicness, and subcategories and control variables needed for valid comparisons. This review of sampling alternatives begins with discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the presumably optimal design, a national probability sample of organizations. Due to the expensive nature of such a design-the discussion concentrates on the one such study ever conducted-the discussion then considers the strengths and weaknesses of the purposive samples and samples of opportunity that most research have used. In spite of limitations in representativeness and in accounting for all variables needed to eliminate alternative interpretations, studies using such samples can be aggregated to support conclusions about differences between public and private organizations that are by now well-founded. Researchers should continue to seek opportunities for the optimal large representative samples. Lacking such opportunities, researchers can contribute usefully to analysis of publicness by carefully designing their studies to make them consistent with previous studies and to support aggregation with previous studies. Adapted from the source document.