Evaluation Research and Institutional Pressures: Challenges in Public-Nonprofit Contracting

This article examines the connection between program evaluation research and decision-making by public managers. Drawing on neo-institutional theory, a framework is presented for diagnosing the pressures and conditions that lead alternatively toward or away the rational use of evaluation research. Three cases of public-nonprofit contracting for the delivery of major programs are presented to clarify the way coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures interfere with a sound connection being made between research and implementation. The article concludes by considering how public managers can respond to the isomorphic pressures in their environment that make it hard to act on data relating to program performance.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 23. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

How Competitive Is “Competitive” Procurement in the Social Services?

The scholarship on contracting generally argues that markets for social services are weak and lacking in competition. Using data gathered from Florida’s largest social service agency, the Department of Children and Families, this article adds to the discussion by constructing a more rigorous measure of competition that accounts for the quality of bidding entities. The findings indicate that while the measures used in earlier studies align reasonably well with the raw number of initial responders to competitive solicitations, they tend to overestimate competition when the quality component is included in the analysis. That is, social service markets may be even weaker than previously reported. Furthermore, an examination of the relationship between competition and performance fails to find a significant association.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Understanding the Differences Between Vendor Types in Local Governance

It is commonly posited that for-profit, nonprofit, and other government vendors have fundamental differences, which make one or the other the superior choice depending on the circumstances of service delivery. Past research, focusing on service and market characteristics, finds support for this proposition. In this article, we investigate not only the typical theoretical expectations regarding vendor traits, service characteristics, and market conditions associated with the sectors, but also the presumed trustworthiness and management practices that are argued to differentiate them in an effort to better understand the roles played by each in local government contracting. Our findings indicate that as expected, nonprofits are most commonly employed when dealing with hard to define, “soft” services with weak markets. However, contrary to expectations, nonprofits are not generally considered more trustworthy than for-profits and are not managed more “loosely” (i.e., more ambiguous contracts, more discretion exercised in sanctioning) than their for-profit peers. Rather, public vendors seem to be the most trusted and are managed less rigidly than contractors from the other sectors.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline