Public, Private and Hybrid Organizations: An Empirical Examination of the Role of Publicness

This article provides an empirical examination of the role of publicness in explaining organization-level phenomena. Analysis of data from 250 public, private and mixed, or hybrid, R&D laboratories indicates that there are clear distinctions between organizations based on sector affiliation. These differences center around levels of administrative intensity, funding patterns and complexity, governmental influences on goals, and the nature of the products produced by the laboratories. A dimensional approach, grounded in political economy-based organization theory, is applied in the analysis. Findings indicate that such approaches help explain publicness through the identification of specific, empirically identifiable dimensions of publicness.