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Research comparing public and private organizations and examining the publicness of organizations represents a substantial and growing body of empirical evidence, relevant to many international issues in political economy and organization theory such as the privatization of public services. This article assesses several major streams in this research over the last two decades, which in some ways refute widely held a priori assumptions about similarities and differences between public and private organizations but which in some ways support such assumptions. The review covers research on goal complexity and ambiguity, organizational structure, personnel and purchasing processes, and work-related attitudes and values. The research results converge in important ways, but they also present anomalies. For example, in spite of virtually universal agreement among scholars that public organizations have …