Institutionalizing Public Action: Multiple Alignments of Goods, Services, Roles, and Tasks

Public action through the organizational use of power and rules in government and governance is multidimensional in form, scope, and reach. Approaches to action, embodying differing interactions of the state, market, and civil society, include statism, state–market dualism, state–civil society dualism, and state–market–civil society synergism. The approaches are distinctive while interrelated. They concern goods and services as focuses of action involving availability, accessibility, consumption, and use. This requires the performance of roles and tasks as modes of action. The roles are owner, producer, provider, regulator, facilitator, buyer, seller, consumer, and user, with each entailing tasks of making, implementing, and reviewing decisions. The result is a complex institutionalization of action, with multiple alignments of goods, services, roles, and tasks in the public interest.