Organizational Tools for Government Action: A Critical Review of Typologies with a Focus on the Public-Private Distinction

Abstract

The increasing diversity of organizational types involved in government action in many countries calls for the development of a comprehensive typology of such organizations. This paper critically reviews both scholarly efforts to classify organizations in general and those based on the public-private distinction in particular, in order to draw implications for developing a better typology of organizational tools. While none of the existing typologies has been completely successful in providing guidance for understanding organizational tools for government action, some of them provide valuable insights, including the importance of taking the incongruence approach seriously and the need for more conceptual and empirical work on political and governmental variables in organizational analysis.