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WHAT WORKS BEST WHEN CONTRACTING FOR SERVICES? AN ANALYSIS OF CONTRACTING PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL IN THE US
Author(s) -
FERNANDEZ SERGIO
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.313
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1467-9299
pISSN - 0033-3298
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2007.00688.x
Subject(s) - public sector , private sector , performance management , performance measurement , best practice , work (physics) , organizational performance , business , public administration , economics , accounting , public relations , public economics , political science , management , marketing , engineering , economic growth , economy , mechanical engineering
During the last decade the field of public administration has undergone a period of renewed interest in the topic of performance and effectiveness. Key contributions to the growing stream of research on public sector performance include work focusing on the adoption and implementation of performance measurement in the public sector (see, for example, Julnes and Holzer 2001; Behn 2003); theoretical and empirical research on management’s effect on organizational performance (see, for example, O’Toole and Meier 1999; Meier and O’Toole 2002); and efforts to identify the determinants of organizational effectiveness (see, for example, Rainey and Steinbauer 1999; Brewer and Selden 2004). Surprisingly, this literature includes very few studies that explicitly address the issue of performance in contracting for services (exceptions include Domberger and Hensher 1993; Romzek and Johnstone 2002). In the United States alone, hundreds of billions of dollars are contracted out every year, and innumerable policies and programmes are implemented, at least in part, through contractual arrangements between public agencies and private providers (Savas 2000; DeHoog and Salamon 2002; Kelman 2002; Cooper 2003). Moreover, contracting for services appears to be a growing trend in Western Europe and other regions (Kettl 2000; Savas 2000). With the stakes so high, there is a pressing need for research that identifies factors and practices that contribute to success in contracting for services. This paper takes on the challenge by developing a model of contracting performance and testing it using Substantively Weighted Analytic Techniques (SWAT), a new methodology that allows researchers to isolate high performance among a large number of observations in order to identify variables practitioners can manipulate to improve practice (Meier and Gill 2000).