Governing cooperation hazards of outsourced municipal low contractibility transactions : An exploratory configuration approach

• Increasingly, public sector organizations (PSOs) outsource the delivering of important welfare services. This gives rise to important questions of how PSOs can control their suppliers. The purpose of this paper is to show how PSOs manage cooperation hazards of low contractibility transactions, i.e., activities expected to be difficult to govern. The paper applies a taxonomic configuration approach which means we apply a holistic view on the governance of suppliers and search for internally congruent governance packages that also are adapted to the context of the transactions. Three theoretically meaningful and qualitative different configurations appear in the empirical material. We find indications of the importance of internal congruence in governance packages in order to effectively deal with cooperation hazards and that the intensity in and types of controls in inter-organizational relationships are affected by the amount of cooperation hazards. A conflict between a relational and a market-based governance package in one of the configurations is argued to be the main driver behind lower expectations about positive behaviour from suppliers

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Inter-organizational relationships

Management control

Outsourcing

Configurations

Taxonomies

Cluster analysis

Transaction cost economics

Public sector

Business Administration

Företagsekonomi

Business Studies

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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