New control modes and emergent organizational forms: Private-public contracting in public administration

This paper considers private-public partnerships as a central feature of efforts to reinvent government and the delivery of public services in the UK. Specifically, it examines the contracting out of services by a major government department and a National Health Service hospital. Hoggett's (1996) discussion of new modes of control in the provision of public services is mobilised to illuminate dynamics and lines of tension where services are contracted out to the private sector. Critical awareness of these dynamics and tensions, it is concluded, should be directed to issues of accountability that tend to be displaced by a focus upon changes in the management and delivery of public services