Why are Local Authorities Reluctant to Externalise (and Do They Have Good Reason)?

Tom Entwistle

23 citations0/0 files storedEnvironment and Planning C Government and Policy

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 Outsourcing and Supply Chain Management

Abstract

In vogue with the international currents of public management, the United Kingdom's New Labour government sees the outsourcing, or externalisation, of public service delivery as a key instrument of performance improvement. Evidence suggests, however, that a significant proportion of local authorities are reluctant to externalise. On the basis of fifty interviews in six case-study authorities, the author identifies five reasons for a reluctance to externalise. He further considers the degree of theoretical support for this reluctance, concluding that gaps in our knowledge—critical to ‘make or buy’ decisions—make it impossible to determine whether a reluctance to externalise is well founded or not.

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 — 23 citations exist upstream.

References

1976Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications.1995Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure 1994Competitive Advantage Through People 1993Reinventing Government 1982Contestable Markets and the Theory of Industry Structure 1988Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour 2002Public and Private Management: What’s the Difference?1998The Boundaries of the Firm Revisited

Cited by

2019Outsourcing and insourcing of organizational activities: the role of outsourcing process mechanisms 2008Civic government or market-based governance? The limits of privatization for rural local governments 2016Analysing public service outsourcing: The value of a regulatory perspective 2005Leadership and service improvement: Dual elites or dynamic dependency?2012Provisión de servicios públicos en el contexto de la administración local de España: El papel de los factores políticos institucionales y la externalización de los gobiernos locales

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.