TRANSFORMING PUBLIC SERVICES: CONTRACTING FOR SOCIAL AND HEALTH SERVICES IN THE US

Government contracting with private service organizations has grown rapidly in the United States in the last 25 years. Advocates of contracting hope that it will spur competition among service agencies, lowering costs and improving service quality. In practice, however, contracting departs significantly from this competitive model. Instead, government and private agencies develop long-term relationships which can be considered regimes governed by specific norms and expectations. These regimes profoundly influence the delivery of services and the politics of contracting. This article analyses these regimes in the context of the contested nature of public authority. The article concludes with suggestions for reforming public policy to improve the performance and effectiveness of contracted services.     

BUREAUCRATIC MALAISE IN THE MODERN SPY NOVEL: DEIGHTON, GREENE, AND LECARRE

Modern espionage novels and particularly those of Deighton, Greene, and LeCarre provide exceptional insights into bureaucratic politics. As well as offering a wealth of material about bureaucratic structure and behaviour, their works speak to the negative consequences and effects of bureaucratic pressures and ideologies on the human spirit. Specifically, these novelists posit that in a bureaucratic world heroism is flawed: that principles no longer flow from moral purpose, and that the evil which needs to be conquered can no longer be identified solely with an externalized enemy. The conclusion drawn is that the bureaucratic state, which substitutes technique for purpose and principle, and bureaucratic personality for individual initiative and motivation, is largely responsible for this malaise. The world which remains reflects, paradoxically, both order and disorder — the image is that of a universal clock winding its way down to an uncertain, yet organizationally dominated future.     

A NOTE ON PERCEPTUAL DETERRENCE,RELIGIOUSLY BASED MORAL CONDEMNATION,AND SOCIAL CONTROL*

Empirical investigations of social control mechanisms are often limited to single sources of control, such as the efficacy of legal punishments. Because research has produced only moderate support for the hypothesis that perceived risk of legal punishments reduces the likelihood of nonconformity, some have searched sources of control that condition this relationship. such as the degree of moral condemnation individuals hold toward a criminal/delinquent act. However, relevant research has resulted in contradictory findings. Using cross-sectional and panel data, we obtained results that show that moral condemnation of an act conditions the deterrent relationship and that findings from previous studies may have underestimated the effect of legal deterrents given the presence of those in the population who refrain from marijuana use because it is believed to be sin fur. Implications of the findings for the relative deterrability of serious versus minor offenses and the relevance of this distinction for issues of social control are discussed.     

DIMENSIONS OF RACIAL INEQUALITY AND RATES OF VIOLENT CRIME*

The purpose of this paper is to identify systematic sources of discrepancies in the macro-level research on racial inequality and rates of violent crime. A review of the literature suggests three likely sources of discrepant results across previous studies: differing operationalizations of racial inequality, differing samples, and differing specifications. The analyses reveal that while sample composition appears to be relatively unimportant, operationalization of racial inequality in terms of socioeconomic status (SES) rather than income can lead to very different conclusions. For certain models, SES-based measures are clearly superior to income-based measures. However, slight modifications of the regression models can render the effects of racial inequality in SES nonsignificant. These results call for a skeptical assessment of previous evidence indicating a positive relationship between racial inequality and rates of violent crime.