Glenn College Dean Trevor Brown and colleagues have published “Managing Public Sector Contracts” in the Cambridge University Press Elements in Public and Nonprofit Administration series. The book presents a framework for analyzing the complexities of contracting, how these vary across circumstances, the ways government contract managers can address challenges and the skills of contract managers.
“My colleagues and I are excited to publish this work on how to improve government contracting. We provide a framework that helps governments figure out the types of skills their workforce needs to manage the challenges of contracting in different market conditions. It’s a powerful combination of rigorous research and usable guidance,” Brown said.
The framework, viewed through the lens of market frictions, offers deeper insights into the payoffs and trade-offs among contracting strategies, guiding the practice of contract management by helping managers identify contract challenges and deploy management activities to fit the circumstances.
“Today,” the authors note, “purchasing constitutes a significant part of how governments around the world provide goods and services to their citizenry. Among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, government purchasing accounts for around 13% of national GDP and around 27% of total government expenditures.”
Brown and co-authors Matthew Potoski of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Ole Helby Petersen and Lena Brogaard of Roskilde University ground their framework on central concepts. Market frictions are underlying imperfections that cause common contracting problems; contract management activities are the tasks and procedures that contract managers perform to prepare and execute the purchase; and skills are the ability to perform contract management activities that identify and mitigate frictions.
“These concepts are interdependent — market frictions can influence the efficacy of contract management activities, activities may reduce or increase the presence of frictions, and skills may influence both the choice and effectiveness of activities in addressing contracting challenges,” the authors write. “Omitting any of these components is likely to result in misleading accounts of the root causes and potential solutions to contracting challenges.”
This research was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.