The Administered Public Recreation Marketing Concept

The objectives of the study were (a) to identify the reasons and concerns of those public administrators and marketing scholars who do not accept the usefulness of marketing in the public sector; (b) to deconstruct, comprehend, interpret, and critically appraise the current conceptualization of public sector marketing from the viewpoint of negativists identified in step (a); and (c) to reconstruct, redefine, reinterpret, and reoperationalize the current controversial conceptualization of public sector marketing into a new conceptualization in the context of park and recreation services. The critical theory approach to the study primary used non-empirical procedures data collection and analytic procedures which included investigative research, negative case analysis, and theoretical triangulation. These procedures were supplemented with empirical data collected from in-depth interviews with five scholars and with three parks and recreation managers. Results of the non-empirical procedures revealed the biased selective nature of the current conceptualization of public park and recreation marketing and the existence of alternative conceptualizations which have been ignored.