Public Procurement: Public Administration and Public Service Perspectives

Abstract

Why is public procurement not a major topic in public administration education programs? While many scholars and practitioners acknowledge its importance, most master's degree programs in public administration do not. In this paper we document this discrepancy, investigate its causes, and provide two remedies to place public procurement more squarely in the educational mainstream. The first entails a description of public procurement from wellestablished public administration perspectives, which illustrates how closely public procurement is aligned with the field's traditional functions and issues. The second analyzes public procurement in the context of the "public service values" orientation of NASPAA's accreditation standards, which indicates the extent to which these values are inherently accounted for and manifested in agency procurement policies, processes, and practices. Thus, public administration might achieve a deeper and broader understanding of public service values by paying more attention to public procurement in its education programs. We conclude with recommendations for public administration schools that may want to (a) incorporate public procurement content in existing master's degree courses; (b) add a public procurement course; or (c) adopt a public procurement concentration for the master's degree.Public procurement occupies a problematical position in American public administration. While its importance is evident both in practice and in the scholarly literature, schools of public administration largely ignore it; only a few offer any courses, much less programs, in public procurement. Roughly 30 years ago, Phillip Cooper (1980) noted this condition when he called public administration's attention to the importance of procurement. Twenty years ago, MacManus and Watson (1990) called for procurement to be included explicitly in public budgeting and finance courses. Ten years ago, Khi Thai (2001) noted that, despite its importance, procurement content was not evident in public administration programs. Today, we observe similar conditions and make a similar call. We then conducted word searches on course titles and course descriptions (typically contained in either Word, pdf, or html files) for required and elective courses in order to locate courses with content in budgeting/financial management, public personnel management, information management, and public procurement. The following search terms were used: (a) for budgeting and financial managementbudget*, finance*, fisc*, fund*; (b) for public personnel management-personnel, human; people; (c) for information technology-information; computers; technolog*; and (d) for public procurementprocur*, contract*, purchas*, outsource*, privat*, project manag*. Four programs did not have web pages that listed either course titles or course descriptions. JPAE 18(2), 327-348 328 Journal of Public Affairs EducationFor public procurement-related courses, each time one of the search terms was located, we reviewed the course description to judge th...

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“…Indeed, it is seen as the nexus of public financial system, and social and economic outcomes and as such, politically sensitive (Schapper & Malta, 2011;Schapper et al, 2006). The importance of public procurement has been acknowledged by viewing it in several facets which include, but not limited to the contracting out of public functions and its implications; social equity and minority contracting; and the unique challenges of contracting for public services (Snider and Rendon 2012). In most instances, the significance of procurement, both private and public have been expressed as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and budgetary allocation of an organisation, or a country.…”

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