Uncovering Combinations in the Control of Local Public Services: Empirical Forms and Their Determinants

Abstract

In the last ten years, the management accounting literature has devoted extensive attention to control forms applied in cooperative agreements between partner organizations. While originally contributors developed a theoretical approach focused on pure control archetypes, more recently this approach was criticized because not sufficiently powerful to explain the variety of forms and trajectories that inter-organizational controls can assume. The aim of our paper is to study the possible coexistence of inter-organizational control types existing in practice and to explore their determinants. From an empirical point of view, we conducted a survey on Italian municipalities and investigated their relationships with service providers in the areas of waste management and social services. Our results show that control combinations are more multifaceted than the theoretical configurations presented in the literature, and that in practice while some mechanisms related to certain archetypes are found in some combinations and not in others, some other mechanisms are common to all patterns. In addition, our evidence shows a composite framework where task characteristics come together with specific party characteristics and institutional factors to explain controls portfolios.

Keywords: public services, management control, new public management, control combinations

JEL Classification: M40, M41