Administrative, Ethical, and Political Issues
Susan R. BernsteinForeword by Roger A. Lohmann
Through interviews conducted with non-profit agency managers in the New York City metropolitan area, Susan Bernstein vividly describes their experiences with "contracting out," the principal way that the "reluctant" American welfare state has of providing public services through the private sector. The agency administrators look upon this as a nightmarish game, and their stories illuminate how welfare state mechanisms work in practice as well as the tangled nature of bureaucracies. Managing Contracted Services is one of the first books to examine how administrators manage contracted services in a bureaucratic and political environment.
"This valuable piece of scholarly work examines an important facet of administrative behavior in social welfare agencies in a very sensitive and penetrating way. The ethnographic approach enables a fuller exploration of this practice terrain than is generally possible with survey research. With the benefit of this work, future students of administration should be better able to formulate questions to guide research." Rino Patti
© 2006-2021 Temple University | All Rights Reserved