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Problems in Identifying Public and Private Organizations: A Demonstration Using a Simple Naive Bayesian Classification

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Abstract

Publicness theory has received considerable treatment over the past 20 years. While the theory has provided much in the way of theorizing on how to think about public and private organizations, it has also raised unanswered questions. A major question in this regard is, given this theory, how should we go about classifying organizations as public or private given both what is known from the theory as well as an organizations legal definition. This manuscript seeks to address this question by identifying the components necessary for a classification scheme.

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Notes

  1. This was operationalized by Emmert and Crow (1988) as the percentage of the budget derived from the public sector.

  2. A possible exception is in the delivery of specialty treatments that tend to be more prevalent in private hospitals.

  3. This has an effect for organization structure and culture which will be discussed below—findings from Frumkin and Galaskiewicz (2004) suggest that where an organization chooses to focus (internally or externally) has effects for its organizational make up, regardless of whether it is public or private.

  4. Note that if a feature is correlated with another feature then it will overweight the contribution of that feature. This can be easily addressed by weighting the feature by the covariance between the correlated features which ostensibly removes obsolete or redundant information from the dataset—see Ratanamahatana and Gunopulos (2002).

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Jonathan Rauh

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  1. Jonathan Rauh
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Correspondence to Jonathan Rauh.

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Rauh, J. Problems in Identifying Public and Private Organizations: A Demonstration Using a Simple Naive Bayesian Classification. Public Organiz Rev 15, 33–47 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-013-0250-y

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