Bringing Public Organization and Organizing Back In

In: Organization studies: an international multidisciplinary journal devoted to the study of organizations, organizing, and the organized in and between societies, Band 34, Heft 2, S. 145-167

Abstract

Since the late 1990s social science-based studies have allocated much less attention to public organizations. Based on the sixth Organization Studies summer workshop, this introductory paper suggests a diagnosis of such a decline as well as a research agenda. It lists some fundamental issues still to be explored such as publicness and governance. It also considers how social science-based organizational knowledge might be extended to various empirical objects and fields in public domains and set-ups such as inter-organizational arrangements, hybrid organizations, multi-stakeholder arenas, hybrid organizing, and transnationalization processes, that usually are covered by scholars – economists, historians, anthropologists, management academics, etc. – who are not using organizational theory lenses.