Antecedents and consequences of market orientation in public organisations

The aim of this article is to link research on market orientation in the field of marketing with the proposals of reform and modernisation made in the administrative and political field. Market orientation in business organisations is a highly topical issue, or even more, it is considered by someacademicians as the new marketing paradigm. Following these studies and their proposals of application in other sectors, a market orientation model is developed, from a public management perspective, in the setting of local governments through testing a set ofhypotheses about the construct and its antecedents and consequences. Antecedents explaining why some local governments are more market oriented than others are identified. Moreover, market orientation is shown to influence public organisation performance.