Devin, you’ve thought very deeply both theoretically and practically about entrepreneurship and the public interest, which of course is the topic of this podcast very broadly.   A link to the 6-minute video that you prepared for the 2020 Academy of Management meetings is in the notes to this podcast.  I love this video because it so clearly spells out that the “public interest” is notoriously difficult to define, and that it might involve compromises that lead to winners and losers.  Can you explain this briefly?   What is the public interest?

   Devin explained that it's becoming more common for us to think in terms of the values that different communities of people hold.    Ultimately, the public interest is a complex amalgamation of private interests.   The public interest gets defined by how groups of people figure out what they find mutually important.  It arises when those involved feel a similar sense of priorities.  And importantly, that varies with who is in the community -- with which people are included.  Ultimately there's no definitive answer.  It depends on the definition of the community and the ways that the people within it conceptualize what holds them together.

Anita asked if it is worthwhile to think of communities as nested at different levels, with towns amalgamated into states and states in turn into country/federal communities.   Would it be fair to say that you study the interactions between these different levels of publicness and public interests?

   Devin said that's exactly his agenda.  When he started his studies, he struggled with this, as each person seems to have an image of what constitutes their strongest community.   There are some great review pieces out there on different types of communities, eg, of practices, of faiths, of geographies.  Communities can be conceptualized in many different ways.  Much of my interests is in looking at the overlaps.  For example, being part of certain academic communities may be tied to particular geographies.  Communities can be in conflict as well as be embedded within each other.  Studying the public interest is in part studying the tradeoffs between communities that vary in their coherence and internal alignment.  You truly limit yourself if you don't recognize that we are all in many communities simultaneously.

Your work builds on insights developed by the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, who championed this idea that communities of like-minded private-sector actors can work out solutions to free-riding and other problems among themselves.  For example, a group of farmers can work out among themselves that they’re not going to let their cows overgraze the town green.   You have studied self-organization in the case of Northern California fire departments that may have different incentives but common goals that they can act upon together.   You are looking at how self-organizing communities work with higher-level public agencies to exchange knowledge and get the outcomes you want.  How did this work in the case of North Carolina fire departments?  What were they able to accomplish?

    Devin explained that, most of the time when we're thinking about these things, we're thinking about a community in isolation.  We think about things like institutional voids.  But this often isn't a strong representation of the situation.   The question is:  What are the barriers to getting communities to self-organize and create local institutional arrangements?  Communities can be deeply effective if they arise within a social ecological system of communities.  Then the question becomes, how do you create connections?   That takes is to the interplay between local, state and national levels of community.  Achievement arises the more we create cross-cutting collaborations, relationships and trust; and the more we develop conversations over time in which actors can find their common interests.  We know that face-to-face interaction is quite important.

Your work has led me to think quite differently about the private versus public action.   Your work highlights how private actors can work together in ways to achieve mutual goals, which sounds a lot like public action to me.   And you’ve also shown how specialists with expertise working for governments can support private achievements, which sounds like private consulting.  Is this private-public distinction robust?  

   It does break down in the sense that it's endogenous, yes.   We have to construct the communities, and the bridges between them.

What makes you optimistic?

   What makes Devin optimistic is our innate human proclivity to solve the problem around us, and the energy of young people -- especially our students -- to address them.    Our pragmatism has given rise over the past generation to incredible solutions to critical problems.    Devin wants us to make the choice to stay optimistic so that we can drive toward pragmatic solutions to important problems that accumulate to improve lives in truly significant ways.