Managing Contracted Services in the Nonprofit Agency: Administrative, Ethical, and Political Issues

by Susan Bernstein

Overview

Through interviews conducted with nonprofit 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 Bernstein illustrates and analyzes these administrators’ strategies for managing the administrative, ethical, and political issues of contracted services. Managing Contracted Services is one of the first books to examine how administrators manage contracted services in a bureaucratic and political environment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439904152
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	04/29/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	230
File size:	265 KB

About the Author

Susan R. Bernstein is Assistant Director for Administrative Operations in the Department of Social Work Services of The Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City.

Table of Contents

Foreword – Roger A. Lohmann
Acknowledgments
1. The World of Nonprofit Agency Managers
2. The Game of Contracted Services
3. Perspectives
4. Compliance
5. Change
6. Ethics
7. Accountability
8. Service Delivery
9. Prerequisites

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher