The many outcomes from contracting out: The voice of public managers

Andrej Christian Lindholst, Morten Balle Hansen, Thomas Barfoed Randrup, Bengt Persson and Anders Kristoffersson

Environment and Planning C, 2018, vol. 36, issue 6, 1046-1067

Abstract: This paper argues that adopting a stakeholder approach to the study of contracting outcomes produces more rich and rounded representations of the realities of the contracting out of public services. We revisit the research on contracting outcomes, highlighting the public manager perspective as key for gaining deeper, more detailed insights. The public manager perspective is explored in an inductive analysis of answers to open-ended survey questions collected from public managers with contracting experience within the context of municipal park management in Scandinavia. The emerging managerial perspective is summarized in a best-case, worst-case and complex-case scenario highlighting the mix, complexities and trade-offs in a composite set of contracting outcomes. The nature of contracting outcomes as complex and composite rather than unidimensional and clear-cut is one key finding. Furthermore, the importance of some specific outcomes (e.g. learning) complements existing research themes. Our findings sustain the initial argument, demonstrating how the stakeholder approach can produce new insights. A key implication is that future research can benefit from assessing contracting outcomes by providing voice to multiple stakeholders.

Keywords: Contracting out; marketization; outcomes; public management; qualitative analysis; stakeholder (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399654417733992 (text/html)

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:sae:envirc:v:36:y:2018:i:6:p:1046-1067

DOI: 10.1177/2399654417733992

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().