Roundtable: Perspectives on The Public

Numerous fields of study prominently feature the term public in their name, from public policy to public opinion. In the contemporary field of public management and governance, there has been limited theoretical development on the concept of the public despite its obvious importance as a central idea (Frederickson 2021). This gap in theory prompts a deeper exploration into the ontological, epistemic, axiological, and political dimensions of the public as a core concept in the discipline. In the following roundtable, ten scholars were assembled to advance numerous perspectives on the public and to stimulate broader interest and development of theory on this central concept.

Roughly a century ago John Dewey advanced a theory of the public based on the consequences of social interaction. As he stated it, “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (1927, 245–46). Recently in this journal, I (Whetsell 2024) developed Dewey’s theory under the lights of contemporary scholarship on public value (Moore 1995) and complexity and network science (Barabási 2016; Miller and Page 2009). In that article, I advanced the concept of the pragmatic public, which I defined as “a property of social systems that emerges when the local interactions of two or more actors generate broader (negative or positive) consequences for others who recognize these effects and respond by organizing collective or state action” (Whetsell 2024, 27). This definition emphasizes the potential for enhancing positive consequences and highlights the complex systems concepts of interdependence and emergence (Simon 1996). Thinking about the public as an emergent property¹ of social interdependence has several important entailments for public management and governance. Chief among them is the practical consideration that the linear aggregation of individual preferences (methodological individualism) cannot fulfill the charge of adequately identifying the public. Pragmatism suggests attending to the patterns of interdependence between individuals rather than simply their characteristics as islands unto themselves.