Jocelyn M. Johnston

Government Contracts and “Managing the Market” Exploring the Costs of Strategic Management Responses to Weak Vendor Competition

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.

Social Welfare Contracts as Networks The Impact of Network Stability on Management and Performance

This analysis of state social service contracts identifies sources of system instability and explores the impacts of instability on service delivery networks. The authors examine social welfare service contracts explicitly as networks and assess the effects of network instability on the management of contracts, contract effectiveness, the performance of network organizations, and clients. They offer observable patterns and detailed examples that indicate that instability imposes significant costs on service delivery networks—costs that impair organizational and network performance and that divert resources from services for vulnerable clients. The high costs associated with instability undermine arguments for more market-based service delivery.

American Exceptionalism, Human Resource Management, and the Contract State

With the nature, scope, and pace of public sector contracting accelerating significantly during the Bush administration, and with the Obama administration promising to curb the contracting excesses of its predecessors, it is useful to take stock and ponder the consequences of this movement to date for human resource management. This article puts public sector contracting and its effects in a larger historical, political, and democratic context by (a) reviewing the American propensity for market-based solutions (including contracting) to government problems, a disposition rooted in American exceptionalist values; (b) chronicling how that predisposition has manifested itself in four successive and now overlapping expansions of contracting (from products, to services, to core governmental functions, to human resource management functions); and (c) showing how these developments have had significant consequences not only for the future of the public service but also for the values associated with democratic constitutionalism in the United States.

The Medicaid Mandates of the 1980s: An Intergovernmental Perspective

Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, has undergone significant changes in the last fifteen years. Many of those changes relate to the intergovernmental nature of the program. Medicaid is jointly operated, with the federal and state governments sharing program costs. Despite a set of program guidelines dictated by the federal government, states have traditionally had substantial latitude in Medicaid decisions. However, a series of developments in the 1980s led to increasing constraints on state Medicaid discretion, including federal mandates to expand Medicaid coverage. This article examines the inception and effectiveness of the Medicaid mandates from the perspective of interstate equity of health care services for poor families.

Changing State-Local Fiscal Relations and School Finance in Kansas: Pursuing “Equity”

AT THE 1992 Annual Conference of the National Tax Association, Will Myers of the National Education Association noted that the results of school finance litigation in Kansas had “opened a new vista on local school support with profound implications for local government” (1992). The reform implies a fundamental realignment in state and local fiscal relations. Kansas is one of many states in which recent reforms have altered the relative roles of states and local governments in the funding and control of public elementary and secondary schools, usually in the interests of equalization of education resources across districts. The impetus for reform in the state of Kansas, and in that of other states, is judicial action. California’s 1971 case, Serrano v. Priest, is often cited as the first and perhaps most famous school finance court case Changing State-Local Fiscal Relations and School Finance in Kansas: Pursuing “Equity”

Managing Goal Conflict in Public Service Delivery Networks: Does Accountability Move Up and Down, or Side to Side?

ABSTRACT Goal conflict is one of the greatest challenges to effective public service delivery networks. Scholars offer management prescriptions, but to what extent can a diverse set of network actors be managed? Data from a comparative case study approach suggest that informal accountability forces play a greater role than formal authority in preventing and mitigating goal conflict. Goal conflict appears to be weakest when network administrative organizations are responsible for both vertical network management and direct service delivery. In terms of reducing goal conflict, networks that manage both vertically and horizontally may be best equipped to achieve goal congruence.