Integrative Publicness: A Framework for Public Management Strategy and Performance

“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.