Abstract

The widespread use of government contracting opens up learning opportunities in public organizations’ engagements with private contractors. However, whether public organizations utilize these opportunities to improve their practices has scant coverage in the government contracting literature. We adapt insights from the organizational learning literature, develop an argument on the learning logic in government contracting, and examine manager perceptions of learning outcomes and whether intra- and inter-organizational and contextual conditions shape the learning outcomes. The argument is assessed against survey data reporting on the municipal park and road managers’ contracting experiences in Scandinavia. The findings show that government contracting in the context of the study is associated with positive learning outcomes and indicates possible tradeoffs between conventional cost-driven and learning strategies. The implications contribute to discussions about the role and benefits of government contracting beyond cost savings in the post-NPM reform era.

摘要

政府合同的广泛使用为公共组织与私人承包商的合作提供了学习机会。然而，政府合同文献中很少涉及公共组织是否利用这些机会来改进其实践。我们采用组织学习文献中的见解，对政府合同中的学习逻辑进行论证，并研究管理者对学习成果的看法以及组织内部和组织间以及环境条件是否影响学习成果。该论点是根据有关斯堪的纳维亚半岛市政公园和道路管理者承包经验的调查数据进行评估的。研究结果表明，研究背景下的政府签约与积极的学习成果相关，并表明传统成本驱动策略和学习策略之间可能存在权衡。这些影响有助于讨论后新公共管理改革时代政府承包除了节省成本之外的作用和好处。