OUTSOURCING IN PUBLIC SERVICES. IMPACTS ON WORKING CONDITIONS AND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS IN A THREE-COUNTRY TWO-SECTOR COMPARISON
Tesi di Dottorato
Data di Pubblicazione:
2015
Citazione:
OUTSOURCING IN PUBLIC SERVICES. IMPACTS ON WORKING CONDITIONS AND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS IN A THREE-COUNTRY TWO-SECTOR COMPARISON / A. Mori ; relatore: L. Bordogna ; coordinatore: L. Bordogna. DIPARTIMENTO DI SCIENZE SOCIALI E POLITICHE, 2015 May 25. 27. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2014. [10.13130/mori-anna_phd2015-05-25].
Abstract:
Over the past three decades, public administrations have been subject to a far-reaching restructuring towards outsourcing in a wide range of tasks and services. Under the pressure of increasing public debt, stricter spending constraints, shifting consumer preferences and the demand for higher value for money in an era of austerity, these organisations have differentiated the provision of services, opening the traditional public production and delivery to competition. The picture that emerged following these processes is strikingly various and patchy: public administrations across Europe, indeed, have adopted a wide set of market-type mechanisms, including public-private partnership, voucher system and contracting out (OECD 2011).
The restructuring process of public services provision towards outsourcing represents a tile within a broader mosaic of public administration reform, an ‘unending wave of reforms’ (Pollitt 2002) that has expanded progressively since the 1980s across all European governments under the label of New Public Management (NPM) (Hood 1991), suggesting uniformity and communality. This doctrine aimed to remove any difference between the public and the private sector as a way of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of public services: thus governments imported in their public bureaucracies business-like tools and values, alongside with market-type mechanisms from the private sector.
Outsourcing stems precisely from NPM-inspired reform stream, as a market-type mechanism for saving government public funds (Savas 2000): opening service provision to market competition might achieve a cost reduction, since private providers in a competitive regime are expected to realize economies of scale and to raise effort or productivity with a given input/workforce-combination. Unquestionably, outsourcing has promoted a model of competition, but that is often largely based on the reduction of labour costs and not on the improvement of quality and innovation: empirical evidence increasingly emerged, arguing that cost savings may simply correspond either to reduced employment or to a fall in employment terms and conditions (Flecker and Hermann 2009).
This process, leading to complex changes in the organisation of work and employment conditions has been subject to growing scrutiny mainly across private sector firms (Flecker et al. 2005, Marchington et al. 2005, Flecker 2009, Perraudin et al. 2009). It has been assumed that external restructuring of companies, involving the dispersion of activities across organisational boundaries, has led to a degradation of working terms and conditions (Doellgast and Greer 2007, Flecker and Meil 2010), since it may trigger competition with a cheaper labour-supply, shifting work from highly unionized and better sheltered organisations to more vulnerable companies, subjects to market fluctuations, where trade union power is low or inexistent. The vertical disintegration presents substantial challenge to employment relation structure as well (Doellgast and Greer 2007), weakening the bargaining power of union while the dependency relations between companies along the value chain can be expected to translate into increased disparities and instability in terms of employment and working conditions (Flecker 2009).
Thus, drawing on varying approaches in the literature, the research aims to discuss the impacts of outsourcing on working conditions and employment relations structure in the public sector at a double comparative level: across countries and between public administration sub-sectors within each country. This multi-level comparative research design, indeed, enables to address the second main research question, that is whether implications following outsourcing process display
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Keywords:
outsourcing; public services; public sector; working conditions; industrial relations; healthcare; local government; Italy; England; Denmark
Elenco autori:
A. Mori
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