Can Public Organizations Perform Like Private Firms? The Role of Heterogeneous Resources and Practices
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the well-known governance problems in public (state-owned) organizations, such as process rigidity, limited autonomy, and weak incentives, public organizations exhibit substantial performance heterogeneity, with some performing similarly to their private counterparts. In this paper, we scrutinize those sources of heterogeneous performance based on the interplay of management practices and resources. We argue that the governance constraints in public organizations inhibit the adoption of performance-enhancing practices. However, this negative effect is attenuated by the presence of distinct resources, such as human capital. We examine these effects in the context of over 9,000 public and private schools in Brazil. We find that private schools are more likely to use internal operational practices, such as planning and human resource management, as well as practices of engaging with external stakeholders. Differential adoption of these practices partially explains why private schools outperform their public counterparts in terms of student learning. Yet, access to highly educated teachers in public schools attenuates the negative association between public governance and the adoption of superior practices. In other words, schools with skilled teachers are more likely to adopt superior practices, thus reducing their performance gap compared with private schools. This result suggests that heterogeneous resource endowments—in our context, human capital—can soften governance constraints that inhibit performance-enhancing practices in public organizations. We thus show that heterogeneous practices and resources jointly explain not only performance differences across public and private organizations but also variations in the performance of organizations with the same governance form. Funding: This work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [Grant 428670/2016-4]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [Grants 2016/18423-3 and 2017/07423-5]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1634 .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it