Contracting for Management: Assessing Management Capacity Under Alternative Service Delivery Arrangements

T. Brown and M. Potoski

Public administration issues, 2009, issue 4, 111-135

Abstract: Contracting critics suggest that when governments outsource, they reduce their capacity to produce services and manage service delivery. In this paper, we decompose the service delivery decision into service production and service management components. When governments contract for service production, they may also choose to contract for a portion of service delivery management. Studies that only compare the management activities of contracting and direct service delivery governments, without examining the management activities contracted to vendors are likely to be incomplete and biased. Drawing on a unique survey of governmental refuse collection service directors, matched with a survey of refuse collection vendors operating under municipal contracts, we show that the vendors management activities offset the decline in management capacity that occurs when governments contract for service delivery for this particular service. Governments can "buy" management activities when contracting for service production.

Keywords: municipal government; bodies of power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://vgmu.hse.ru/data/2010/12/31/1208184753/%D0% ... %D0%B8%20111-135.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nos:vgmu00:2009:i:4:p:111-135

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public administration issues from Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Irina A. Zvereva ().