Introductory Essay: From a Closed System to an Open System: A Parallel Critical Review of the Intellectual Trajectories of Publicness and Nonprofitness

The study of the space between the state and the market (referred as “the study of the in-between space” throughout the article) has suffered from somewhat of an identity crisis since its inception. The crisis is reflected by the lack of a unified terminology, the lack of consensus on the principal characteristic of organizations in the space, and the debates on blurring sectoral boundaries. This article first provides a critical review of the intellectual trajectories of the search for publicness and the search for nonprofitness through the lens of organizational theory. By contrasting and analyzing the underlying reasons of both intellectual trajectories, this review concludes ownership (nonprofitness or publicness) is not the definitive characteristic of the subject organizations, and an open and multidimensional approach is more suitable. Second, this article then introduces articles included in this special issue and analyzing their common theme-context matters.