Contracting has become one of the tools that governments use to make their services more efficient and effective. This work studies the positives and negatives involved with the multiple elements of contracting. Contract culture is broken down into its many parts: rules and regulations, norms and values, local governments and the private sector. This allows the authors to examine the topic through a unique cross-cultural lens and provide a fresh take on this expanding topic. Sources such as survey data, in-depth case studies, and analysis of advocacy coalitions are used to shed new light on contract governance. Topics include: *Contracting on the Public Agenda. *Limits of the New Contractualism. *The hard and soft elements of contracts. *Local Governments. *Contracting as part of the New Public Management.

A heated debate is raging over our nation’s public schools and how they should be reformed, with proposals ranging from imposing national standards to replacing public education altogether with a voucher system for private schools. Combining decades of experience in education, the authors propose an innovative approach to solving the problems of our school system and find a middle ground between these extremes. Reinventing Public Education shows how contracting would radically change the way we operate our schools, while keeping them public and accessible to all, and making them better able to meet standards of achievement and equity. Using public funds, local school boards would select private providers to operate individual schools under formal contracts specifying the type and quality of instruction. In a hands-on, concrete fashion, the authors provide a thorough explanation of the pros and cons of school contracting and how it would work in practice. They show how contracting would free local school boards from operating schools so they can focus on improving educational policy; how it would allow parents to choose the best school for their children; and, finally, how it would ensure that schools are held accountable and academic standards are met. While retaining a strong public role in education, contracting enables schools to be more imaginative, adaptable, and suited to the needs of children and families. In presenting an alternative vision for America’s schools, Reinventing Public Education is too important to be ignored.

Examining the consequences of the outsourcing of public services, this book explores the transformation of working conditions, employment relations and the role of the state under marketisation strain. It places these developments in a wider framework that incorporates the legacy of the national models of public administration and employment relations regimes in the public sector. Adopting a comparative perspective by focusing on Italy, Denmark and Britain, the author investigates and questions the influential interpretation of a spreading neo-liberal trajectory in public service working conditions and employment relations, and reveals significant diversity across countries mediated by national institutional configurations. Discussing the interplay between the austerity agenda in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the swelling of outsourcing practices in public services, this book responds to the scholarly call for an integrated approach towards institutions and actors. A valuable read for researchers examining human resource management, labour studies and public administration, this book provides a comprehensive overview of employment relations in outsourced public services.

The original Handbook of Public Administration was a landmark publication, the first to provide a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the discipline. The eagerly-awaited new edition of this seminal international handbook continues to provide a complete review and guide to past and present knowledge in this essential field of inquiry. Assembling an outstanding team of scholars from around the world, the second edition explores the current state-of-the-art in academic thinking and the current structures and processes for the administration of public policy. The second edition has been fully revised and updated, with new chapters that reflect emerging issues and changes within the public sector: - Identifying the Antecedents in Public Performance - Bureaucratic Politics - Strategy Structure and Policy Dynamics - Comparative Administrative Reform - Administrative Ethics - Accountability through Market and Social Instruments - Federalism and intergovernmental coordination. A dominant theme throughout the handbook is a critical reflection on the utility of scholarly theory and the extent to which government practices inform the development of this theory. To this end it serves as an essential guide for both the practice of public administration today and its on-going development as an academic discipline. The SAGE Handbook of Public Administration remains indispensable to the teaching, study and practice of public administration for students, academics and professionals everywhere.

A useful volume for those interested in the development of privatization around the world. J. Prager, Choice This accessible book aims to inform readers interested in assessing privatization and market development concepts on a global scale, and outlines a range of thinking on how these policy ideas have moved around the globe. Bringing together an international team of contributors, the book traces how privatization concepts have grown in application, and how they have spread to become a central policy idea for governments. And whilst interest in the initial policy of selling-off state owned enterprises has peaked, the contracting and partnership modes of privatization have risen to global prominence. This book also reflects on the importance of the privatization family of ideas on both developed and developing countries. Privatization and Market Development will be of great interest to those involved in public administration and public policy making from a global perspective.

Marketization is one of the most powerful reform doctrines reshaping the organization of public service delivery throughout the last four decades. This book revisits conventional ideas and models of marketization and compares how these have diffused and evolved across municipalities in England and Scandinavia. The book highlights the paths and impacts of marketization as diverse and dynamic and asks us to reconsider what and how we think about marketization. The content of the book is co-authored by researchers from four countries and builds upon comparable surveys and case-studies from two longstanding ‘spearhead’ services – parks and roads – for the implementation of marketization. The book appeals to scholars and policy makers with interests in discussions about the history and future of marketization in an international perspective.

This book shows how a system theoretical concept of technology helps us to understand the paradoxes of control. It describes a phenomenon which shows regularity that is unexpected against the background of received knowledge within management studies. It presents a series of cases which touch upon a range of technologies within the public sector.