  We discuss mean-field theories for self-organized criticality and the
connection with the general theory of branching processes. We point out that
the nature of the self-organization is not addressed properly by the previously
proposed mean-field theories. We introduce a new mean-field model that
explicitly takes the boundary conditions into account; in this way, the local
dynamical rules are coupled to a global equation that drives the control
parameter to its critical value. We study the model numerically, and
analytically we compute the avalanche distributions.
