Publicness: A Comprehensive Survey of Managerial and Organizational Antecedents in Hong Kong

Differences between public and private organizations have held the attention of academics in a range of social science disciplines for a number of decades, and are fundamental to public administration. Differences were, and sometimes still are, portrayed starkly—typically based on ownership. Conceptual development points towards the multidimensional nature of ‘publicness’: organizations vary by ownership (private, public, nonprofit), funding (government grants versus consumer payments) and control (by political or economic forces).This project will undertake:The first large-scale stratified random probability sample from all ‘registered organizations’ in Hong Kong to contribute towards theoretical debates on the relationship between publicness and managerial and organizational characteristics.A first time examination of intraorganizational variations based upon respondents’ position in the hierarchy.Longstanding assumptions about publicness in the academic literature will be placed under the most rigorous empirical microscope to date. The project will ascertain if some of the most widely cited publicness differences are maintained. The most widely reported difference is that managers in organizations with higher levels of publicness (public ownership, public funding and high political control) perceive greater administrative constraints on incentives--pay, promotion and disciplinary action--than do those with low publicness. Answers to questions on this topic and others (organizational environments, structures and process) have been to date undertaken in ad hoc studies with small samples, focused on limited functional categories (e.g. hospitals, airlines), implementing elite surveys typically in the USA.Hong Kong represents an ideal location for a study of publicness and its antecedents because there is a sampling frame of ‘registered organizations’: 287,000 companies (with ? 10 employees) plus public and subvented agencies. Stratified sampling by industry type and organizational size will be implemented, maintaining appropriate confidence levels and intervals. The study will be conducted by academics grounded in research on publicness (Bozeman, Rainey, Walker), managerial and organizational antecedents (Rainey, Walker) with appropriate methodological skills (Bacon-Shone, Jung).The outcome of the project will allow for inferences about the implied effects of publicness by cross-walking organizational attributes with levels and types of publicness. It will contribute towards a more comprehensive understanding the new global political and economic landscape resulting from organizational forms and behaviours that changed publicness boundaries following the global economic crisis. This challenged understanding of ‘publicness’: private banks were brought into public ownership (UK), government’s used public resources to spend their way out of difficulty (China), and political control over private companies has increased (hedge funds in the EU).