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"Van Slyke, David"
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Agents or Stewards: Using Theory to Understand the Government-Nonprofit Social Service Contracting Relationship
Using agency and stewardship theories, this study examines how public administrators manage contracting relationships with nonprofit organizations. Interviews were conducted with public and nonprofit managers involved in social services contract relationships at the state and county level in New York State. The use of trust, reputation, and monitoring as well as other factors influence the manner in which contract relationships are managed. The findings suggest that the manner in which nonprofits are managed evolves over time from a principal-agent to a principal-steward relationship but with less variance than the theories would suggest. This results in part from the contextual conditions that include the type of service, lack of market competitiveness, and management capacity constraints. The intergovernmental environment in which social services are implemented and delivered presents complex challenges for public managers responsible for managing contract relationships. The findings from this study document those challenges and the corresponding management practices used with nonprofit contractors.
Journal Article
Managing Public Service Contracts: Aligning Values, Institutions, and Markets
The contracting of public services has been an integral part of public managers work for a long time, and it is here to stay. This essay sums up current research on the topic for busy practitioners and scholars. Where are we today with respect to the problems and pitfalls of contracting out, from balancing equity with efficiency to confronting the frequent problem of imperfect markets?
Journal Article
The Mythology of Privatization in Contracting for Social Services
States and municipalities have privatized services in an effort to improve their cost-effectiveness and quality. Competition provides the logical foundation for an expectation of cost savings and quality improvements, but competition does not exist in many local marketplaces-especially in the social services, where governments contract primarily with nonprofit organizations. As government increases its use of contracting, it simultaneously reduces its own public-management capacity, imperiling its ability to be a smart buyer of contracted goods and services. This article examines two questions about the privatization of social services based on interviews conducted with public and nonprofit managers in New York state: Does social services contracting exist in a competitive environment? And do county governments have enough public-management capacity to contract effectively for social services? The findings suggest an absence of competition and public-management capacity, raising the question of why governments contract when these conditions are not met.
Journal Article
Managing Complex Contracts: A Theoretical Approach
When a product is difficult to specify in a contract and requires specialized investments for a market exchange, the buyer and seller can find themselves locked into a mutually dependent relationship in which both win-win and lose-lose outcomes are possible. This paper presents a theory of such complex contracting in the public sector and identifies the conditions that increase the likelihood of win-win outcomes for the buyer and the seller. Rules that allow parties to incentivize cooperative behavior increase the chances of a winning outcome. Relationships can promote cooperation if structured to incorporate repeated play and external reputations. Finally, contract success is contingent on mutual understanding between the two parties. Both the buyer and the seller need to understand the rules and the relationship in the same way in order for the exchange to deliver a win-win.
Journal Article
Contracting for Complex Products
A fundamental source of contracting failure is product uncertainty. When the product's cost, quality, and quantity cannot be easily defined, buyers and sellers are unable to clearly and completely define exchange terms. The risk is that the buyer is the only purchaser of this \"complex product,\" and once the contract is let, the vendor is the only supplier. The consequence is a collective action problem in which each party has incentives to exploit contract ambiguities for their own gain at the other's expense. We lay out the theoretical case for how complex contracting risks collective action problems. We then illustrate the theory's analytic value with the case of the Coast Guard's controversial Deepwater project, a major acquisition program to upgrade and integrate its fleet of air and sea assets. Through this case, we show how managing the state of agents requires understanding how different principal-agent relations' work.
Journal Article
Nonprofit Sector Growth and Density: Testing Theories of Government Support
Theories of nonprofit density have assumed a variety of dispositions toward the state, including opposition, suspicion, indifference, and mutual dependence. In this article, we conduct the first large-scale simultaneous empirical test of the two most prominent nonprofit theories: government failure theory and interdependence theory. The former characterizes nonprofit activities as substitute or oppositional to state programs, accounting for the limitations and failures of government-provided services and more reflective of the heterogeneity of demand for services. The latter emphasizes the more complementary and collaborative nature of nonprofit activities, focusing on the overlapping agendas of nonprofits and the state and the mutual dependency that arises from partnership. The theories are difficult to test empirically because both predict the same relationship between state capacity and the size of the nonprofit sector, albeit for theoretically distinct reasons. A true joint test requires the separation of government support from private support for nonprofits. Using a newly constructed panel dataset in which we separate out nonprofit revenue sources normally agglomerated in the Internal Revenue Service 990 data, we examine the empirical merits of both theories to answer the question of whether human service nonprofit organizations thrive when government fails or when government collaborates. Our findings suggest that government funding has a more favorable effect on nonprofit density than private donations. The findings raise several policy and management implications that need evaluation.
Journal Article
Complex Contracting: Management Challenges and Solutions
Governments at all levels buy mission-critical goods and services whose attributes and performance requirements are hard to define and produce. Many governments—and the public managers who lead them—lack experience and knowledge about how to contract for complex products. The contract management counsel provided to public managers is thin. Missing is a conceptual managerial framework to guide purchasing the complex products that are often so critical to public organizations' core missions. Drawing on perspectives from across the social sciences, the framework presented in this article provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls. The framework helps identify conditions that increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for the purchasing government and the vendor—the win-win. To illustrate the framework, the article provides examples of successful and failed acquisitions for complex products such as transportation projects, social service systems, and information technology systems.
Journal Article
An Empirical Examination of Public Involvement in Public-Private Partnerships: Qualifying the Benefits of Public Involvement in PPPs
This article investigates the roles and impacts of public involvement in public-private partnerships (PPPs). Our findings contribute to the literature on public-private collaborations by demonstrating the ways that the facilitation of deliberative activities can provide administrative benefits to PPPs. The results suggest that although public involvement can improve support from citizens and political leaders for PPPs and improve the tailoring of project designs to local conditions, the processes have little effect on expediting project delivery or in addressing power imbalances between public and private sectors. We also find that a combination of in-person approaches and virtual approaches to public involvement can improve the achievement of performance standards in PPPs.
Journal Article
Governing on the Edges: Globalization of Production and the Challenge to Public Administration in the Twenty-First Century
Globalization means many things for governments around the world in terms of governance. Questions that are left unexplored in the public administration literature are what changes in the globalization of production mean for governments and their relationships with business and civil society, and what the implications are for public administration. The authors develop a conceptual framework that governments can use to shape their interactions with business in more strategically and mutually beneficial ways. The data are derived from extensive fieldwork in the emerging economies of Southeast Asia. Key challenges to government include the importance of understanding global value chains, value chain-related trade facilitation, investment in logistics, the strengthening of enterprise clusters, effective education, skill development and training, and the governance risks inherent in value chains and networks. The essay concludes with a discussion of five key considerations for public administration in thinking, planning, and acting strategically in relationships with the private sector regarding the globalization of production. These considerations are crucial for creating business environments that strengthen economic development and manage societal concerns in ways that are aligned with public values.
Journal Article