In control we trust!? Exploring formal control configurations for municipally owned corporations

Abstract

PurposeThis study examines the interplay of formal types of control (input, behavior and outcome) exercised on municipally owned corporations (MOCs). It further investigates whether particular informal contingencies (trust and interdependence) predict affiliation to the derived municipal control configurations.Design/methodology/approachThe paper applies an exploratory cluster analysis based on survey data from 243 top-level managers of German MOCs. It then investigates the clustered municipal control configurations using binomial logistic regression.FindingsThe exploratory analysis reveals four municipal control configurations: (1) input-dominated control, (2) outcome-dominated control, (3) mixed input/outcome control and (4) “neglect of formal control”. As expected, both of the informal contingencies demonstrate strong predictive power. More precisely, trust increases the likelihood of belonging to the dominant outcome control cluster and interdependence increases the likelihood of belonging to the mixed input/outcome control cluster. Surprisingly, the neglect of formal control cluster is characterized by low trust and low interdependence.Originality/valueThe study sheds light on the widely assumed but understudied interplay of different formal controls in hybrid governance settings. Furthermore, the analysis stresses the importance of trust and interdependence when explaining hybrid control configurations.

Governance and accountability in hybrid organizations – past, present and future

“…In "In control we trustexploring formal control configurations for municipally owned corporations," Krause and Swiatczak (2020) analyze MOCs as hybrid settings of control configurations. MOCs typically deliver public services in infrastructure, welfare and culture outside the bureaucratic apparatus of local municipalities (Voorn et al, 2017).…”

“…This issue includes articles from four kinds of hybrid institutions: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) (Giosi and Caiffa, 2020), non-profit organizations (NPOs) (Kim and Mason, 2020), social enterprises (SEs) (Costa and Andreus, 2020) and municipally owned corporations (MOCs) (Krause and Swiatczak, 2020). This special issue also includes a synthesizing literature review that explores models of performance measurement in the context of hybrid public organizations (De Waele et al, 2021).…”

“A little bit of everything?” Conceptualising performance measurement in hybrid public sector organisations through a literature review

“…The current study is interested in the latter two aspects. Regarding organisational forms, scholars have studied hybrid organisations such as social enterprises (Battilana and Lee, 2014;Costa and Andreaus, 2020;Doherty et al, 2014), state-owned enterprises (Giosi and Caiffa, 2020), municipally-owned corporations (Krause and Swiatczak, 2020), non-profit organisations (Kim and Mason, 2020;Skelcher and Smith, 2015), knowledge-intensive public organisations in the education and healthcare sectors (Gebreiter and Hidayah, 2019;Grossi et al, 2020) and public-private partnerships (PPPs) (Liu et al, 2014).…”

The Relationship between Efficiency and Quality of Municipally Owned Corporations: Evidence from Local Public Transport and Waste Management in Poland

“…The term "municipally owned corporation" was first used in the work of Tavares and Camões [86] and currently is widely used and well established in the literature [4,9,14,16,87]. Similar to Voorn [15], we believe that this term best reflects the essence of the entities that are analyzed in this study.…”

“…They are defined as "autonomous organizations owned by municipalities, used to produce or deliver local public services outside the local bureaucracy" [9]. The increasing importance and specific nature of these entities have led to increasing discussions in recent literature about how they function and operate [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”