No abstract

In the 1980s, governments around the world adopted New Public Management ideas about inserting competition into government as a way to improve the performance of public organizations. In many nations, contracting out was one method of making governments more businesslike. Yet, there have been few studies of how government contracting behaviors have changed since the early 1980s. We replicate Ferris and Graddy's classic 1986 study of local government production and sector choice to assess how public procurement has changed over the past 35 years. Our findings show that today, contracting out is more commonly used across 25 local government service areas. In contrast to the original study, much of the growth has been in government‐to‐government contracts. For profit firms are also winning more contracts for high transaction cost work, while nonprofits are receiving fewer government contracts in nearly every service area. Our analysis suggests that contracting out remains of the highest importance in 21st‐century governance and that additional research is needed on how to manage contracts to achieve the best value.

This article compares and contrasts two classical decision-making approaches used in outsourcing specific public services. We perform content analysis of semi-structured interviews with public managers who are engaged in contracting for different public services, and find that incremental or small step-by-step decision-making is more likely to be observed in the outsourcing of “soft” or human services. Rational decision-making on the hand is more likely for “hard” services including janitorial services, public works, bridge design, street striping, parks maintenance, strategic planning, refrigeration experts, and food services. Our findings also indicate that some services can be outsourced using both decision-making approaches in certain cases. Using comparative analysis, we identify three factors associated with incremental decision-making across the organizations in our sample. All organizations that outsourced services using incremental models of decision-making had a for-profit business partner, experienced managers, and exhibited desire for cooperation and coordination.

The rapid global transmission of COVID-19 has demonstrated many weaknesses in government procurement of essential supplies. In the United States, these problems have been particularly evident, as systemic fragmentation through federalism has frustrated a coordinated response. Rather than working together, states and localities are competing over limited medical resources, while the federal government has not stepped in to alleviate burdens on the lower tiers of government. In this study, we introduce how procurement is managed under normal circumstances and how it changes during emergencies. Easing procurement rules comes with necessary tradeoffs, particularly involving equity and accountability. Using case studies from recent disasters, we identify procurement and management recommendations for the COVID-19 response and future emergencies. We conclude that public procurement is integral to effective management in the 21st century and must be treated as such in the study and practice of public administration and emergency management.

The research question raised is this study is: what factors affect state agencies' decisions to outsource oversight? The outsourcing of oversight here is conceptualized as a distinct occurrence of collaborative monitoring that expands the traditional principal-agent dyad common in the contracting literature to a small network of three agents. The adoption of the Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009 presents a workload surge for state agencies that need to implement novel monitoring requirements in addition to their traditional practices regarding the management of grants and contracts. As an external factor creating a dynamic contracting environment the Act is hypothesized to increase the probability that state agencies outsource oversight. Additionally professional capacity is also a factor that might affect state agencies' decision to contract out monitoring functions. Results from logistic regressions suggest that on average the factors measuring workload surge due to ARRA increase the probability a sampled agency outsources oversight by roughly 5 to 10%. Professional capacity on the other hand was not found to be a significant factor in the estimated models.