Contracting and the Bureaucratic Representation of Minorities and Women: Examining Evidence From Federal Agencies

Abstract

<jats:p> This study examines the question of whether the extent of contracting out by U.S. federal agencies has an impact on the representation of minorities and women in those agencies. Contracting often results in reductions in force (RIF), which may occur at the lower and middle levels where there is significant representation of minorities and women. As a result, agencies that engage in higher levels of contracting may have lower levels of representation of minorities and women overall and in selected grade levels, controlling for other known determinants of minority and female representation. A panel design is employed with data on outside contracts as a proportion of each agency’s budget from 2009 to 2015. Those data are matched with a 1-year lag to data on the employment of African Americans, Hispanics, and women from 2010 to 2016. Findings indicate that contracting is associated with lower levels of African American, Hispanic, and female employment in selected grade levels. </jats:p>

How Outsourcing May Enhance Job Satisfaction in the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy: Exploring the Role of Knowledge Sharing

“…Third, our data were unable to separate different types of outsourcing: Outsourcing services seem to be the case holding a tighter connection to our theoretical arguments than outsourcing equipment and goods. However, although the final sample data set merged with FEVS does not include the observations from the Department of Defense where outsourcing equipment/materials takes a major portion, services rather than purchasing materials/equipment are the most common type of outsourcing activities among other departments and agencies in the federal bureaucracy (Brown & Kellough, 2019; Government Business Council, 2015). Given this limitation in the sample data, our analyses still present statistically significant evidence on the effects of outsourcing on remaining employees’ work attitudes, but care should be taken in interpreting the results.…”

“…Outsourcing activity is measured using the ratio of dollar spent on outsourcing to the appropriation on discretionary spending as developed and tested by previous studies (Brown & Kellough, 2019; Yang & Kassekert, 2010). The total budget authority consists of appropriation on discretionary spending and appropriation on mandatory spending.…”

Assessing the impact of pure market, government, and social organization interaction on the effectiveness of public service procurement

“…Social organizations, with the nature of civil society groups, tend to be responsible for their profits and losses in survival and development. Under this premise, their efficiency should be higher than social organizations with official background security (Brown & Kellough, 2020). In this study, the identity of social organizations with official backgrounds is recorded as 0, and that of social organizations with private backgrounds is recorded as 1.…”

Do NPM Strategies Lead to Negative Organizational Behavior? Lessons from the Differential Effects of Contracting Out on Voluntary Turnover

“…Hence, the literature has not explored the actual behavior of remaining employees-i.e., turnover-as one of the probable consequences of contracting out practices while examining the impact of contracting out on the size of the workforce as a whole (Fernandez et al, 2007), minority employment (Brown & Kellough, 2020), or contracted employees' performance (Johnston & Seidenstat, 2007). Among the types of turnover, this study focuses on voluntary turnover, in which employees hold higher human and social capital as compared to those who are involuntarily terminated from their positions by their employers for their poor performance or misconduct.…”