This 2007 book describes the largely overlooked process of using private government contractors to perform essential or inherent functions in the military and civilian sectors of government. It shows ...how such practices undermine the capacity effectiveness and morale of government officials and it establishes constitutional and statutory arguments against the practice. It recognizes and accepts the proper role for outsourcing or privatization while safeguarding against its improper use. The argument ultimately turns on the necessity for our democratic system to require the executive branch to perform crucial tasks in-house unless Congress has permitted delegations to private contractors.
Recent years have seen a growing role for private military contractors in national and international security. To understand the reasons for this, Elke Krahmann examines changing models of the state, ...the citizen and the soldier in the UK, the US and Germany. She focuses on both the national differences with regard to the outsourcing of military services to private companies and their specific consequences for the democratic control over the legitimate use of armed force. Tracing developments and debates from the late eighteenth century to the present, she explains the transition from the centralized warfare state of the Cold War era to the privatized and fragmented security governance, and the different national attitudes to the privatization of force.
The legitimate use of force is generally presumed to be the realm of the state. However, the flourishing role of the private sector in security over the last twenty years has brought this into ...question. In this book Deborah Avant examines the privatization of security and its impact on the control of force. She describes the growth of private security companies, explains how the industry works, and describes its range of customers – including states, non-government organisations and commercial transnational corporations. She charts the inevitable trade-offs that the market for force imposes on the states, firms and people wishing to control it, suggests a new way to think about the control of force, and offers a model of institutional analysis that draws on both economic and sociological reasoning. The book contains case studies drawn from the US and Europe as well as Africa and the Middle East.
Dead ringers Nadeem, Shehzad
2011., 20110117, 2011, 2011-01-17, 20110101
eBook
In the Indian outsourcing industry, employees are expected to be "dead ringers" for the more expensive American workers they have replaced--complete with Westernized names, accents, habits, and ...lifestyles that are organized around a foreign culture in a distant time zone.Dead Ringerschronicles the rise of a workforce for whom mimicry is a job requirement and a passion. In the process, the book deftly explores the complications of hybrid lives and presents a vivid portrait of a workplace where globalization carries as many downsides as advantages.
Shehzad Nadeem writes that the relatively high wages in the outsourcing sector have empowered a class of cultural emulators. These young Indians indulge in American-style shopping binges at glittering malls, party at upscale nightclubs, and arrange romantic trysts at exurban cafés. But while the high-tech outsourcing industry is a matter of considerable pride for India, global corporations view the industry as a low-cost, often low-skill sector. Workers use the digital tools of the information economy not to complete technologically innovative tasks but to perform grunt work and rote customer service. Long hours and the graveyard shift lead to health problems and social estrangement. Surveillance is tight, management is overweening, and workers are caught in a cycle of hope and disappointment.
Through lively ethnographic detail and subtle analysis of interviews with workers, managers, and employers, Nadeem demonstrates the culturally transformative power of globalization and its effects on the lives of the individuals at its edges.
Measuring the Performance of the Hollow Stateis the first in-depth look at the influence of performance measurement on the effectiveness of the federal government. To do this, the authors examine the ...influence of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (with consideration of the later Program Assessment Rating Tool of 2002) on federal performance measurement, agency performance, and program outcomes. They focus a systematic examination on five agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services-the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Indian Health Service. Besides representing a wide range of federal government organizational structures and program formats, these agencies offer a diverse array of third-party arrangements including states, native American tribes, scientists, medical schools, and commercial and nonprofit health care intermediaries and carriers. Exploring the development of performance measures in light of widely varying program mandates, the authors look at issues that affect the quality of this measurement and particularly the influence of program performance by third parties. They consider factors such as goal conflict and ambiguity, politics, and the critical role of intergovernmental relations in federal program performance and performance measurement. Through their findings, they offer illumination to two major questions in public management today-what are the uses and limitations of performance measurement as a policy and management tool and how does performance measurement work when applied to the management of third-party government? While scholars and students in public administration and governmental reform will find this book of particular interest, it will also be of use to anyone working in the public sector who would like to have a better understanding of performance measurement.
The coordination of public services is an enduring challenge and an important policy priority. One way to achieve collaboration across organizational boundaries, which is being considered in public ...services such as the English National Health Service (NHS), is through the adoption of alliance contracting, prime provider contracting and outcome‐based contracting. This article reviews the cross‐sectoral literature concerning the characteristics of these new contractual models, how they function, their impact, and their relation to public sector governance objectives. These new contractual forms are characterized as models which, in line with the New Public Management (NPM)/post‐NPM agenda, seek to incentivize providers through the transfer of risk from the commissioners to the providers of services. Key findings are that the models are likely to incur high transaction costs relating to the negotiation and specification of outcomes and rely heavily on the relational aspects of contracting. There is also found to be a lack of convincing cross‐sectoral evidence of the impact of the models, particularly in relation to improving coordination across organizations. The article questions the reconciliation of the use of these new contractual models in settings such as the English NHS with the requirements of public sector governance for transparency and accountability. The models serve to highlight the problems inherent in the NPM/post‐NPM agenda of the transfer of risk away from commissioners of services in terms of transparency and accountability.
Contracting back-in has received growing scholarly attention, but there is little empirical consensus in the literature as to what drives governments to bring previously contracted work back in-house ...and to what extent. This study performs a meta-analysis to synthesize 332 effect sizes from 16 existing studies concerning the antecedents of contracting back-in across different countries. The analysis indicates that contracting back-in is a market management strategy driven by low levels of market competition, high proportions of for-profit contractors, insufficient cost savings, and inadequate contract management. Meanwhile, contracting back-in is a political move shaped by left-wing political ideology and employee opposition to outsourcing. Environmental factors including unemployment rate, population size, and population density also play a role. This study provides empirical generalizations of previous results and contributes a more coherent knowledge base for future studies.
Points for practitioners
Our analysis indicates that contracting back-in is driven by a mix of both pragmatic and political factors, but pragmatic factors related to contracting management complexity shape contracting back-in in a more forceful way. Our findings also suggest that factors pushing governments to contract out do not necessarily have an impact on contracting back-in. Government decisions to contract out and contract back-in may be based on different considerations.
This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on ...new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion.
This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers.
Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor.
Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.
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