The many outcomes from contracting out: The voice of public managers

Abstract

This paper argues that adopting a stakeholder approach to the study of contracting outcomes produces more rich and rounded representations of the realities of the contracting out of public services. We revisit the research on contracting outcomes, highlighting the public manager perspective as key for gaining deeper, more detailed insights. The public manager perspective is explored in an inductive analysis of answers to open-ended survey questions collected from public managers with contracting experience within the context of municipal park management in Scandinavia. The emerging managerial perspective is summarized in a best-case, worst-case and complex-case scenario highlighting the mix, complexities and trade-offs in a composite set of contracting outcomes. The nature of contracting outcomes as complex and composite rather than unidimensional and clear-cut is one key finding. Furthermore, the importance of some specific outcomes (e.g. learning) complements existing research themes. Our findings sustain the initial argument, demonstrating how the stakeholder approach can produce new insights. A key implication is that future research can benefit from assessing contracting outcomes by providing voice to multiple stakeholders.

Political Ideology and Social Services Contracting: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

“…In many countries, public managers design, award and manage public procurement contracts, and elected politicians have only informal influence on each of those stages of the contracting process (Brown, Potoski, and Van Slyke ). In‐depth case studies involving interviews with key actors involved in making local contracting decisions would add greatly to our understanding of the political management strategies that lie behind this complex issue (Lindholst et al ).…”

The impact of governance on the outcomes of contracting out

“…Below, we clarify the two additional criteria of specific relevance to our focus that we applied in evaluating the search results. Topic: We only included studies that related local governance to the outcomes of contracting out public services. Different types of outcome are relevant in a discussion of contracting out (Lindholst et al, 2018). We acknowledge the diversity in outcomes, but the focus of this study is the crucial and recurring question of whether or not contracting out provides services at lower costs without eroding service quality.…”

“…In less ideologically charged words, the dependent variable aims to capture whether contracting out leads to lower service costs without eroding quality, preferably with an increase in quality alongside reduced costs (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). Supporters of New Public Management believe that both cost efficiency and service quality can be measured, but in practice this is often difficult (Hood and Dixon, 2015; Lindholst et al, 2015; Lindholst et al, 2018). Moreover, whether contracting out improves value for money is contested, as empirical studies point in different directions and many of them suffer from a series of methodological problems (see Boyne, 1998).…”

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

“…Yet, there can be a different scenario in which outsourcing may lead to positive changes in organizational outcomes given certain conditions, which alleviate the anti-sentiment against outsourcing among employees. The recent surveys for public managers and employees in both the United States and other countries (Government Business Council, 2015; Lindholst et al, 2018) reveal some important organizational factors, such as sufficient resources and knowledge sharing, which public organizations need to secure to successfully achieve promises of outsourcing and to benefit their employees.…”

“…Lindholst and colleagues (2018) explored public managers’ outsourcing experience in the context of municipal park management in Scandinavia. The survey data collected from public managers suggest that outsourcing outcomes are complex and composite rather than unidimensional.…”