This article addresses whether perceived goal agreement matters for cross‐sectoral collaboration outcomes. Using original survey data from Lebanon that compares the perceptions of local governcment ...and nonprofit leaders, the findings indicate perceived goal agreement is salient and linked to judgments that collaboration meets its objectives. The article also examines perceptions of goal agreement as it relates to social (trust) and process (power‐sharing) collaboration outcomes and find it to be associated with higher trust between collaborators. While this is the case for nonprofits more than local governments, we find no corresponding sector differences for the relationship between perceptions of goal agreement and effectiveness. In addition, agreeing on goals seems to be linked to perceptions of unequal decision‐making authority for local governments. The results highlight implications for the relationship between goal agreement and cross‐sector collaboration outcome, particularly in the context of developing countries.
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Objectives The study sought to contrast risk profiles and compare outcomes of patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS) and coronary artery disease (CAD) who underwent aortic valve replacement (AVR) ...and coronary artery bypass grafting (AS+CABG) with those of patients with isolated AS who underwent AVR alone. Background In patients with severe AS, CAD is often an incidental finding with underappreciated survival implications. Methods From October 1991 to July 2010, 2,286 patients underwent AVR+CABG and 1,637 AVR alone. A propensity score was developed and used for matched comparisons of outcomes (1,082 patient pairs). Analyses of long-term mortality were performed for each group, then combined to identify common and unique risk factors. Results Patients with AS+CAD versus isolated AS were older, more symptomatic, and more likely to be hypertensive, and had lower ejection fraction and greater arteriosclerotic burden but less severe AS. Hospital morbidity and long-term survival were poorer (43% vs. 59% at 10 years). Both groups shared many mortality risk factors; however, early risk among AS+CAD patients reflected effects of CAD; late risk reflected diastolic left ventricular dysfunction expressed as ventricular hypertrophy and left atrial enlargement. Patients with isolated AS and few comorbidities had the best outcome, those with CAD without myocardial damage had intermediate outcome equivalent to propensity-matched isolated AS patients, and those with CAD, myocardial damage, and advanced comorbidities had the worst outcome. Conclusions Cardiovascular risk factors and comorbidities must be considered in managing patients with severe AS. Patients with severe AS and CAD risk factors should undergo early diagnostics and AVR+CABG before ischemic myocardial damage occurs.
Capturing the benefits of competition is a key argument for outsourcing public services, yet public service markets often lack sufficient competition. The authors use survey and interview data from ...U.S. local governments to explore the responses of public managers to noncompetitive markets. This research indicates that competition is weak in most local government markets (fewer than two alternative providers on average across 67 services measured), and that the relationship between competition and contracting choice varies by service type. Public managers respond to suboptimal market competition by intervening with strategies designed to create, sustain, and enhance provider markets. In monopoly service markets, managers are more likely to use intergovernmental contracting, while for-profit contracting is more common in more competitive service markets. The strategies that public managers employ to build and sustain competition for contracts often require tangible investments of administrative resources that add to the transaction costs of contracting in noncompetitive markets.
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Scholarship across disciplines offers evidence that gender plays a significant role in organizational dynamics. Gender differences in preferences, attitudes, and behaviors affect employee ...behavior and organizational outcomes. This article extends the gender factor into the realm of interorganizational and intersectoral collaboration to examine not just whether, but also how gender affects the management of these relationships. We analyze these differences in the context of local government–nonprofit organization (NPO) relations in a developing country with data from two 2017 nationally representative surveys of local governments and NPOs in Lebanon. Our results suggest that in male-dominated nations like Lebanon, females leading local government organizations are less likely to enter into cross-sector collaborations than their male counterparts, and in the nonprofit sector, gender plays no significant role in the decision to collaborate. However, among existing collaborations, females, as compared with males, have been more likely to both initiate and fund the interorganizational/intersectoral relationships. These results contribute to the literature on gender, management, and intersectoral collaboration, and offer an agenda for future scholarship on these topics.
Contracting for prison services has been a topic of discussion for decades. Absent from this discussion is the relationship between contracting for immigration detention and confinement quality, a ...topic that has gained relevance as the detained immigrant population recently surpassed 440,000 per year. Detaining immigrants presents unique challenges because of detainee characteristics, the performance standards governing facilities, and the intersectoral and intergovernmental arrangements used to manage detention facilities. This research conducts the first‐known large‐N study that evaluates the confinement quality of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention facilities to determine the effect, if any, of contracting on performance. The findings suggest that all detention facilities have deficiencies that threaten the well‐being of detained immigrants, but, broadly, privately contracted detention facility environments are less safe and secure than their public counterparts. The authors use contracting theory to explain why this performance disparity might exist and conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of this research.
Leaders’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their organization’s collaborations are critical as they determine current and future collaboration. This article examines perceived collaboration ...effectiveness—the extent to which targeted goals are achieved—based on an organization’s role in that collaboration’s governance arrangements (initiation, funding, coordination, and decision-making). Findings suggest that governance arrangements have modest association with perceived effectiveness of collaborations between nonprofits and local governments in Lebanon. Perceived effectiveness increases when an organization is directly engaged in coordinating the collaboration’s work, activities, resources, and partners, but decreases when an organization has the responsibility for decision-making. Perceived effectiveness also appears to be related to trust, relationship effectiveness, service category, and the organization’s sector.
Scholarly literature on cross-sectoral collaboration is rich, but incomplete as most studies tend to overlook nuances across different service categories. Though many studies confirm that ...collaboration may vary by specific service type, very few ask how and why? This study contributes to this area of inquiry by exploring these questions in the context of nonprofit-local government collaboration in a developing country in which nonprofit organizations play a major role in public service delivery, expanding analysis beyond the traditional western settings that dominate current scholarship. Analyzing a unique dataset of survey responses from 223 Lebanese nonprofit managers, we find that local-nonprofit collaboration likelihood does indeed vary by the nonprofit’s service focus. This is consistent with existing scholarship. Further, we extend the analysis to examine whether and how a set of underlying features that shape collaboration vary by service category. Patterns emerge to explain the association between the service category and perceptions of weak institutional features in the collaboration landscape. We offer explanations for these findings, drawing on specific characteristics of selected services and the mechanisms through which they could influence collaboration and its dynamics.
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This article examines whether and how the capacity of a street-level organization moderates its ability to perform effectively in the context of a public program reform. We use the case of ...California probation departments during the phased implementation of the state’s Low-Income Health Program, a major Medicaid reform that offered critical new services for many probation citizens/clients, namely, mental health and substance abuse treatment. We exploit six years of monthly California county-level probation department data to conduct quasi-experimental difference-in-differences analyses. Results indicate that in those counties that had activated the reform, probation departments with greater capacity achieved higher rates of probation completion success when compared to departments with lower capacity. The analysis implies that organizations improved most when departments benefitted from a combination of reform-generated resources and more robust organizational capacity.
Representative bureaucracy theory suggests that demographic representation among street‐level bureaucrats will improve outcomes for minority citizens receiving a given public service. Scholars of ...representation in public bureaucracies argue that the effect of bureaucrats' demographic profile on outcomes for minority citizens becomes particularly salient in contexts where bureaucrats exercise relatively high amounts of discretion. Empirical evidence has documented this relationship in education, policing, and a variety of public programs. We extend this literature to the context of prisons, where street‐level corrections staff exercise considerable discretion over inmates’ daily lives. Using prison violence and disciplinary actions to proxy for the potential effects of a representative staff on the experiences of prison inmates, we find that prisons with greater representation have fewer assaults and exercise fewer disciplinary actions. We offer evidence that the positive effects of demographic representation may not hold in privately managed prisons. We speculate that differential organizational socialization and managerial incentives may help to explain this result.
代表性官僚理论认为, 街头官僚的人口代表性将为接受指定公共服务的少数民族公民改善结果。研究公共官僚中人口代表性的学者主张, 在官僚人员拥有相对较高的自行决定权的情况下, 官僚人员的人口统计概况对少数民族公民结果产生的作用尤为突出。实证证据已在教育、监管和一系列公共计划中证明了这一关系。作者将该文献应用到监狱背景, 在该背景下, 实行街头矫正的工作人员对囚犯的每日生活拥有相当大的决定权。通过将监狱暴力和纪律处分作为典型工作人员对监狱囚犯经历产生的潜在作用指标, 作者发现, 代表性更突出的监狱出现侵犯事件的情况更少, 同时纪律处分也更少。作者证明, 人口代表性的积极影响可能不适用于受私人管理的监狱。作者推测, 差异化的组织社会化和管理激励可能有助于解释这一结果。
La teoría de la burocracia representativa sugiere que la representación demográfica entre los burócratas a nivel de calle mejorará los resultados para los ciudadanos minoritarios que reciben un servicio público determinado. Los académicos que estudian la representación en las burocracias públicas argumentan que el efecto del perfil demográfico de los burócratas en los resultados para los ciudadanos minoritarios se vuelve particularmente relevante en contextos donde los burócratas ejercen una discreción relativamente alta. La evidencia empírica ha documentado esta relación en la educación, vigilancia y una variedad de programas públicos. Extendemos esta literatura al contexto de las cárceles, donde el personal de correcciones a nivel de calle ejerce una considerable discreción sobre la vida cotidiana de los reclusos. Al utilizar la violencia en la prisión y las acciones disciplinarias para identificar los posibles efectos de un personal representativo sobre las experiencias de los reclusos, encontramos que las prisiones con mayor representación tienen menos agresiones y ejercen menos acciones disciplinarias. Ofrecemos evidencia de que los efectos positivos de la representación demográfica pueden no aplicar a las cárceles privadas. Especulamos que la socialización organizacional diferencial y los incentivos gerenciales pueden ayudar a explicar este resultado.
Theory tells us that competition is the chief driver of improved efficiency and effectiveness in government contracting, yet contract provider markets are often noncompetitive. This study offers a ...detailed, contextualized examination of public administrative responses to thin contract markets. Following an inductive approach with data from semistructured interviews with contract administrators, the authors offer a preliminary typology of the conditions that give rise to thin markets, and the “market management” strategies used to create, enhance, and sustain competition in the markets from where governments purchase goods and services. The authors then review the efficacy and implications of these strategies for public services to citizens.
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