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

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. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015