Realized Publicness at Public and Private Research Universities

• Author: Mary K. Feeney,Eric W. Welch
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02521.x
• Published date: 01 March 2012
• Date: 01 March 2012

Mary K. Feeney is assistant professor

of public administration at the University of

Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on

public management, sector comparisons,

mentoring, red tape, and science and

technology policy. Her most recent book,

coauthored with Barry Bozeman, is Rules

and Red Tape: A Prism for Public

Administration Theory and Research

(M. E. Sharpe, 2011).

E-mail: mkfeeney@uic.edu

Eric W. Welch is associate professor

and director of the Science, Technology

and Environment Policy Lab in the Public

Administration Program at the University of

Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on

technology in public organizations, environ-

ment policy, science and technology policy,

and research and development performance

evaluation. He currently is directing a

project on the effects of new international

agreements on the global exchange of

genetic resources.

E-mail: ewwelch@uic.edu

272 Public Administration Review • March | April 2012

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 72, Iss. 2, pp. 272–284. © 2012 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2011.02521.x.

Mary K. Feeney

Eric W. Welch

University of Illinois at Chicago

Although research-extensive universities in the United

States produce similar outcomes—research, teaching, and

service—they vary substantially in terms of the publicness

of their environments. In this article, the authors adopt

a public values framework to examine how regulative,

normative/associative, and cultural cognitive components

af‌f ect realized public outcomes by faculty. Using survey

data from a random sample of faculty scientists in six

f‌i elds of science and engineering at Carnegie Research

I universities, f‌i ndings show that organizational and

individual public values components are associated

predictably with dif‌f erent realized individual public

outcomes. For example, individual support from federal

resources and af‌f‌i liation with a federal lab (associative)

are related to increased research outcomes, while tuition

and fee levels (regulative) explain teaching outcomes, and

perceived level of inf‌l uence in the workplace (cultural

cognitive) explains teaching and service outcomes.

One of the oldest, and arguably most impor-

tant, questions in public administration

research is the distinction between public

and private organizations. Early public administration

scholars argued that public and private organizations

are distinct because they handle problems for which

government action is required and markets alone fail

(Dahl and Lindblom 1953; Lindblom 1977), because

they produce goods or outcomes that benef‌i t the public

(Blau and Scott 1962), and because of organizational

ownership and funding (Wamsley and Zald 1973).

 e growth of outsourcing and government-sponsored

corporations and authorities, the hybridization of

organizations, and the rise of nonprof‌i t organizations

delivering public services have contributed to a blur-

ring of the boundaries between the public and private

sectors (Kettl 1993; Weisbrod 1975). In the case of

public universities, the reduction of state appropriations

and the rise of businesslike practices such as technol-

ogy transfer and endowment building have blurred the

distinctions between public and private universities.

Although many scholars warn against oversimpli-

fying the distinctions between public and private

organizations (Bozeman 1987), much of the research

comparing university outcomes in the United States

assesses organizational distinctions and outcomes with

a simple, dichotomous variable indicating whether the

university is public or private—a distinction made by

ownership (de Groot, McMahon, and Volkwein 1991;

Owen-Smith and Powell 2003). Others complement

the public–private measure with measures such as

land-grant status or the ratio of total operating budget

per student (Turk-Bicakci and Brint 2005). Geiger

notes that the “public/private distinction in higher

education is largely a phenomenon of the past hun-

dred years” (1985, 387) and that many universities

are better described as not-for-prof‌i t organizations,

especially those that are distinct from the government

sector and not driven primarily by prof‌i t maximizing,

as is the case for private universities. Unfortunately,

categorizing all research universities as not-for-prof‌i t

organizations does not give us a clear understand-

ing of the ways in which origins, funding, structure,

priorities, and values are related to variations in the

production of public outcomes and the “publicness”

of these organizations.

Because the distinction between public and private

universities is complex, we suggest focusing on how

dimensions of publicness af‌f ect faculty behavior and

outcomes (Bozeman 1987; Bozeman and Bretschnei-

der 1994). We take advantage of Moulton’s (2009)

realized publicness framework to hypothesize how

three publicness dimensions—regulative, associative,

and cultural cognitive—af‌f ect the production of three

types of outcomes—research, teaching, and service—

at Research I universities (as def‌i ned by the Carnegie

Foundation).  is article explicitly acknowledges that

the relevant public for each of the three outcomes dif-

fers—knowledge produced through research and pub-

lication reaches the broadest audience, while the focus

of service can be external or internal to the university.

By applying hierarchical modeling, we investigate how

public value institutions, operationalized at both the

individual and the organizational levels, matter for

explaining publicness outcomes as evidenced by the

Realized Publicness at Public and Private Research

Universities