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An approach to market orientation in the basic units of public action

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Abstract

Bearing in mind that market orientation can vary from one level to another of the same organisation and that most, if not all, of the studies carried out in the field of public service orientation focus on an institutional level or a hierarchical level of strategic decision-making, this paper concentrates on the analysis of public service orientation in a basic unit of public action within a government, i.e. on a hierarchical level of the tactical and operational sphere of public action. The analysis of public service orientation and its consequences was carried out on the basic unit of public action for development of the Social Economy of the Basque Country, by means of a total of 9 semi-structured interviews aimed at specific key informants. The specific characteristics of the public service orientation construct, its dimensions and its consequences are defined in the basic units of public action, along with certain points regarding the key informants to be used in this field of study.

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Notes

  1. It is not the aim of this article to go into detail of all these debates; however, as for us, it is important to underline that there is a wide literature concerning the limits – Arndt (1978), Carman (1973), Bartels (1974), Luck (1974), Foxall (1989), Howe (1990)– and extension –Alderson (1965), Kotler (1972), Hunt (1976), Trustrum (1989), Alderson and Cox (1948), Munuera (1992), Vázquez (2004) of the concept of marketing.

  2. This line of thought raises the question of the existence of non-business marketing as a specific area within the discipline which, in turn, is made up of sub-areas of non-profit, public marketing, social marketing and political and electoral marketing (see, for example, Santesmases, 2012: 927 or Rufín and Medina, 2012: 23).

  3. Laverie and Murphy (1993) review a representative selection of papers published on marketing and public policies between 1982 and 1991 and detect that 75% of them refer to aspects such as publicity, consumption, energy conservation, fraudulent practices, legal aspects and general marketing in the public sector.

  4. The concept of “customer of the citizens” must be understood as a need for greater commitment, activism on both parts, the incorporation not only of individuals but of groups or associations (Subirats, 1992). The change in the management model of the European public sector, at both state and local corporation levels, has resulted in the promotion of public services, with users being regarded as customers rather than administrators (Bouinot and Bermils, 1995). Spain has tended towards the use of the term customer, especially in the processes of modernisation of the Public Administration (Chias, 1995).

  5. This slant indicates the tendency of subjects to express agreement with the item, regardless of its content (Ray, 1990) or the tendency to respond always in the affirmative. Based on Cervera et al. (1999a, b) and following Gil (1995) and Carman’s fine distinctions (1990), items in a negative sense are included.

  6. The items whose removal improved Cronbach’s alpha and those with low correlation in the reliability analysis of the scales were eliminated.

  7. This entire process was carried out between December 2012 and January 2013.

  8. Various authors criticise the correlational approach to validity although some defend its empirical testing (Hayduk, 1996) whereas others defend the notion of validity as being a merely qualitative assertion (Borsboom et al., 2004). Both groups share the notion of the validity of the scales or indicators of a latent variable as a qualitative assertion, but according to Hayduk it must be compared empirically by means of model-based testing.

  9. However Nunnally (1967) proposed values of α ≥ 0.5 o α ≥ 0.6, which he then changed to α ≥ 0.7 (Nunnally, 1978) with no apparent explanation. Moreover, reliability is considered to be acceptable when it is not lower than 0.5–0.6 (Hair et al., 1999).

  10. That is, the scale that adds the validated and tested scale plus those items which were omitted for reasons of improvement in the reliability of the scale.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Financial Economics (Business Economics), University of the Basque Country, Basque Country, Spain

    Jon Morandeira Arca

  2. Institute of Applied Business Economics, University of the Basque Country, Basque Country, Spain

    Victoria De Elizagarate Gutiérrez

  3. Department of Applied Economics, University of the Basque Country, Basque Country, Spain

    Irati Labaien Egiguren

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Arca, J.M., De Elizagarate Gutiérrez, V. & Egiguren, I.L. An approach to market orientation in the basic units of public action. Int Rev Public Nonprofit Mark 14, 409–426 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12208-017-0180-4

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