When I spoke a few weeks ago at Berkeley, Philip

Selznick made an interesting point about the value of commercial

firms that are not profit-maximizers. As he noted, the genteel old

publishing houses needed to cover their costs, and probably wanted to

make a comfortable profit, but they were at least as committed to producing

public goods in the form of high-quality literature. By contrast, a publicly

traded firm must maximize profits, so if it generates public goods, they

come as unintentional collateral benefits (at best). My friend Harry

Boyte has promoted a whole philosophy of "public work,"

which prizes the ability of every citizen to generate public goods, often

in collaboration with others. One hallmark of public work, it seems to

me, is an intentional focus on public benefits. That is what is

missing in profit-maximizing firms, but it’s very evident in certain less

economically efficient private enterprises. Boyte’s schema is useful,

in part, because it allows us to reshuffle the traditional categories

of state/market/civil society. Public work can take place in any of these

sectors, or it can be absent or suppressed in any of them. For example,

if a state apparatus becomes heavily bureaucratic and rigid, then civil

servants will stop performing public work. Likewise, if traditional publishing

houses are bought by international conglomerates that relentlessly aim

at efficiency, then their editors must cease to do public work. (Obviously,

I owe an argument here about why public work is valuable. In brief, I

think there are objective benefits to the community and subjective or

psychological benefits to public workers.)