Public Sector Outsourcing: Governmentality or the loss of power and control? - Colin Haslam, Professor of Accounting and Finance at Queen Mary

Over the last two decades British central and local government authorities have pursued a revolutionary strategy that has progressively outsourced the provision of public services to the private sector. This transfer of public resources to the private sector is founded upon a simple good-bad typology. Supposedly, the public sector is inefficient because it lacks incentives and a profit motive, whereas because profit-driven private firms compete in competitive markets inefficiency is driven out and value for money delivered.  

In recent years outsourcing contracts with the private sector have increased as a share of total government external procurement from 34% to roughly 60% (see figure 1). The outsourcing relationship between central and local government agencies and private sector counterparties is mediated through the ‘outsourcing contract’. These contracts represent a form of decentralised, capillary power capable of reinforcing ‘governmentality’, a term coined by Michel Foucault and referring to the way in which the state can exercise indirect control at a distance.

What will public management be like in Britain for the next five years? - Perri 6, Professor in Public Management, School of Business and Management at Queen Mary

Christopher Devereux - License: CC BY 2.0

If the voters will believe you, then a good way to get elected is to promise them that your government will spend less of their money and, at the same time, provide the people with more generous services. It is hardly a novel approach. But, provided the voters are not convinced by any alternatives they are offered, it can work. And in May 2015 at least in England although not in the rest of the United Kingdom, it did.

Having promised both things, how is the trick actually going to be done? And what will public management in Britain be like for those running our public services over the next five or even ten years?

Tweeting in government follows the flow of money and power - Dr Panos Panagiotopoulos, Lecturer in Management at Queen Mary

Public authorities mainly use social media to communicate with citizens. But they can also use networks like Twitter and LinkedIn to link people with expertise within the public sector. Unfortunately we still know little about how public officials use social media in this context. This article reports new research findings about these networks, from a study of tweets from the Twitter hashtag #localgov. We find that the pattern and direction of Twitter communication in government itself facilitates internal networking while reflecting the structure of power in the British state.

Every two years, Oxford’s Internet Institute runs the Internet, Politics, and Policy (IPP) conference. This year, the conference looked at crowdsourcing. The purpose was to inform policy debates as well as to advance social science research. New work was presented on crowdfunding, crowdlabour (see the Amazon Mechanical Turk) and government crowdsourcing. Research in the area is now less impressed by the size and power of the crowds and more interested in the composition of the crowds and in people’s motivation to join them. For example, the Zoouniverse platform is an impressive collection of citizen science websites. Visitors to the site can help research by classify galaxies according to their shape, because people are often better at pattern recognition than algorithms are. Nevertheless, it is hard to sustain crowdsourcing initiatives. You can find more detailed reflections from the conference and a full list of papers here.

Five key points about big data in government - Dr Panos Panagiotopoulos, Lecturer in Management at Queen Mary

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“Big data” in government are the topic of the moment across the world. Public sector datasets have evolved to include large volumes of very diverse sources of information. They raise issues of privacy, security or information sharing, but also of design and training. To make good use of big data, public managers have to ask the right questions. Not only on the data but also to a new generation of “data scientists” on whom they depend. The post discusses five key points about how public managers need to prepare for working with big data.