The Future of Leadership in Public Universities: Is Shared Leadership the Answer?

Leadership of public universities has come under fire—from scandals, from funding, from students, from every direction. Top‐down leadership of institutions of higher education has been described as a “disease.” Shared governance—a mechanism of faculty representation in the leadership and decision‐making processes—a seeming alternative, has been described as “a recipe for paralysis.” In this article, the authors proffer shared leadership as a potential elixir for leading public institutions of higher learning, unleashing creative potential, focusing on pressing strategic imperatives, and enabling sustainable systems that leverage true talent to maximum effect. It is time to move beyond the moribund myth of top‐down heroic leadership and beyond the bureaucratic, political quagmire of the current state of affairs in shared governance. Is shared leadership the answer?      

Municipalities’ Contracting Out Decisions: An Empirical Study on Motives

Municipalities have various motives behind their decisions about the modes of their task execution. Empirical studies have not yet provided a fully satisfying explanation for municipalities’ contracting out decisions. Therefore, we interviewed several Dutch principal municipal managers to evaluate the causes and motives for the choices of the current structures for the delivery of their services. This study investigates the relevance of common public choice and transaction cost motives on contracting out and explores the relevance of additional institutional and pragmatic motives. We found that municipalities do not regularly evaluate the service provision of their activities and the potential benefits of outsourcing. In fact, if the activity has an adequate performance level and complaints from municipal employees, local politicians or inhabitants do not occur, a catalyst for a discussion on the contracting out of this activity is, in general, lacking. Principally in the case of structural underperformance municipalities consider a change of service provider, and then the efficiency motive is most relevant. Thereby, institutional motives – such as the stability of service provision – and pragmatic motives are also relevant. Institutional pressures in particular initiate the evaluation of organisational performance, whereas both economic motives as institutional and pragmatic motives are used to compare alternative service providers.     

Contracting Out: Dutch Municipalities Reject the Solution for the VAT Distortion

In 2003, the Dutch government introduced a VAT-compensation fund in order to create a level playing field for local governments with respect to Value Added Tax (VAT). This fund eliminates the effect of the tax difference between local governments that supply services themselves and local governments that contract out services to the private sector. However, as this article shows, according to most municipalities, differences in their treatment in terms of VAT did not hinder the contracting out of public services. Therefore, the VAT compensation fund lacks legitimacy. It appears to have had little effect so far, as the number of contracted-out public services has hardly increased since its introduction. In general, municipalities have a negative opinion of the fund. They state that non-budgetary effects and institutional considerations, such as the quality of services, the vulnerability of municipal activities and concern for employment in the municipality itself, are more relevant to decision making on outsourcing.