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Organizations, Politics, and Public Purposes: Analyzing Public Organizations and Public Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2012

Hal G. Rainey
Hal G. Rainey
Affiliation:
The University of Georgia
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Extract

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.

Type
The 2011 John Gaus Lecture
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 9 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2012

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