Three Essays on Active Definition in Government Contracting
Open Access DepositedGovernments around the world are trying to address serious social, economic, and environmental crises, by leveraging their government contract expenditure. It is increasingly important to understand policy implementation opportunities and challenges experienced by people working on government contracts. This is a three-essay Ph.D. dissertation. In Essay 1, introduces a new framework, Active Definition, conceptualized by the author to help understand how people define, undefine, and redefine their work on government contracts. Informed by theories from law, economics, and psychology, the five elements of Active Definition are people, relationships, work, and context. Some of the elements of this framework are used to guide the analysis of two separate case studies in the UK. Essay 2 explores the use of contracts to implement Net Zero carbon emission target policies around the UK and concludes that post-award contract management practices need to be improved. This finding has potential implications for sustainability and green public procurement policies in development in the US and EU. Essay 3 examines the use of social outcomes-based contracts in 30 projects under the UK’s Life Chances Fund as a promising tool for addressing major societal challenges. Essay 3 finds that traditional sequential logic models may not be suited to analyzing outcomes-based contracts and that the parties to these projects operationalize social outcomes through payment triggers that seem important for performance management.
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Macdonald_gwu_0075A_16835.pdf | 2024-10-02 | Open Access |
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