Strategies for Avoiding the Pitfalls of Performance Contracting

Robert D. Behn · Peter A. Kant

178 citations0/0 files storedPublic Productivity & Management Review

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Public Policy and Administration Research Public Procurement and Policy Public-Private Partnership Projects

Abstract

C ontracting is in. All sorts of governments are contracting for all sorts of goods and services. The public sector contracts with the private and nonprofit sectors for the design, construction, and maintenance of roads and bridges (Chi, 1993, pp. 14-15); for the production of nuclear weapons (Kettl, 1993, chap. 6); for the management of prisons and the delivery of services within prisons (Allen, 1989); for information technology (Globerman & Vining, 1996); for the management of public schools (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1996b); for educating, training, and placing in jobs welfare recipients and displaced workers (Chi & Devlin, 1989); for child support enforcement (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1995, 1996a); and for a host of other social services (Smith & Lipsky, 1993, pp. 3-1 1). Eighty percent of the largest cities in the United States contract vehicle towing, and half contract solid waste collection (Dilger, Moffett, & Struyk, 1997). Over the past several decades, as society has debated government's make-or-buy decision, public agencies have shifted more toward the buy alternative-toward privatization and what Richard Nathan (1997) calls nonprofitization (p. 4).' Government contracting, however, is not new. It has been going on for centuries. The government does not think of making pencils. It buys them.2 As Donald Kettl (1993) observes, the American government had defense contracts before it had a constitution. Indeed, he also notes, in government, almost everything can be-and has been-contracted out (pp. 6, 157). Thus, scholars, journalists, and practitioners have written numerous articles, chapters, and books that explain why government should contract (Butler, 1985; Savas, 1982), when it should contract (Donahue, 1989; Prager & Desai, 1996), and how it

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

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

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 178 citations exist upstream.

References

1985The economic institutions of capitalism firms, markets, relational contracting 1992The machine that changed the world 1995Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector 1991The machine that changed the world : the story of lean production 1993Sharing power: public governance and private markets 1989The Privatization Decision: Public Ends, Private Means 1982Privatizing the public sector : how to shrink government 1987Exploring the Limits of Privatization

Cited by

2014Performance-based contracting in service supply chains: a service provider risk perspective 2007WHAT WORKS BEST WHEN CONTRACTING FOR SERVICES? AN ANALYSIS OF CONTRACTING PERFORMANCE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL IN THE US 2007Th e Decision to Contract Out: A Study of Contracting for E‐Government Services in State Governments 2011At the Eve of Convergence? Transformations of Social Service Provision in Denmark, Germany, and the United States 2002The Psychological Barriers to Performance Management

Explore the map →

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

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.