The Contracting Quandary: Managing Local Authority–VNPO Relations

Abstract

Problems with competitive transactional contracting raise the possibility of relational contracting as an attractive alternative for managing local authority–VNPO (voluntary non-profit organisation) relations. This empirical study of 45 relational social service contracts examines the conditions under which advantages such as flexibility and social capital development emerge as opposed to dangers of political abuse, defiance and resource frustrations. Findings suggest that successful relational contracting requires partners whose professional and management reputations inspire competence trust and whose commitment encourages goodwill trust. Decisions between competitive transactional contracting and relational contracting present difficult dilemmas. The costs and benefits of relational contracting need to be weighed against those of transactional contracting. At the same time there are political and ideological pressures, as well as public service norm constraints.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.