This article proposes a public-institutional lens for analyzing managerial activities in public agencies. In contrast to the traditional view of management processes, a political-institutional perspective better captures and describes how public agencies interact with their environments and how they go about organizing internal activities to support agency-environmental interactions. After analyzing the traditional view of management processes, three principal qualities that define public-institutional processes are discussed that is, as political processes, as institutional sense-making processes, and as processes that accommodate individual differences.
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