The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

Part IIIPublic Sector Communication and Practices

Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen

Introduction

Context matters—not least when public organizations and their managers are performing communication in practice, and when such endeavors are to be of a strategic nature. In 2013, Christopher Pollitt explicitly made the case for the importance of considering context when theorizing as well as studying public sector organizations, their management, and the policies that they develop and implement (Pollitt, 2013). This argument resonates with the point of view put forward by Pollitt 10 years earlier, which held that “the public sector is a very particular place, with some special characteristics” (Pollitt, 2003, p. 4). This pointing to the particular yet multiple characteristics of public sector organizations reflects the most recent development in the debate about what constitutes the publicness of public organizations. Although this position originated as a “core approach” to defining the publicness of public organizations and emphasized a relative binary understanding of organizations as being either publicly owned or privately held by private actors, a dimensional approach was later suggested (Bozeman, 1987, 2013; Bozeman & Bretschneider, 1994; Perry & Rainey, 1988; Rainey, 2014; for a similar argument, see Fredriksson & Pallas, 2016 and Grøn & Salomonsen, 2018). According to the dimensional approach, what constitutes the distinctiveness of public sector organizations, and hence what determines ...