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This paper analyzes the optimal privatization policy when firms endogenously choose their strategic variable. The level of privatization is shown to determine: (i) the choice of strategic variable, whereby an asymmetric equilibrium could emerge (either Cournot–Bertrand or Bertrand–Cournot); (ii) the stability of equilibrium when the partially privatized firm and the private firm choose quantity and price respectively as the strategic variable; and (iii) the level of welfare, whereby Cournot–Cournot and Bertrand–Cournot games could lead to a greater welfare than the Bertrand–Bertrand model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an editor's note introducing the second issue of World Competition. It includes contributions on various topics, such as competition law in the Philippines, digital markets regulation in the EU, privatization in the steel sector in Brazil, and more. The first article reflects on the evolution of Philippine competition law and highlights the importance of enforcement cases and cooperation between government agencies. The second article discusses procedural issues related to the EU Digital Markets Act. The third article addresses algorithmic bias in digital market regulation. The fourth article analyzes sub-threshold transactions under EU merger control. The fifth article examines the competitive implications of "sherlocking" by online platforms. The final article explores common ownership in the Brazilian steel sector after privatization. [Extracted from the article]

Organization structures and processes of UK-based professional associations and regulatory bodies (professional bodies) are analyzed across all professions and over the long term. These are successful, long lived, and important organizations which have been neglected in the sociological and organizational literatures. Numbers have been growing and on average these organizations have enjoyed consistent financial success. They have been changing, reacting in part to external challenges, but also in response to internal challenges arising from growth and strains due to reactions to changes from their primary stakeholders, their members. We trace substantial changes in their staffing, governance, and education activities. We evaluate whether these changes amount to corporatization, as has been found in other public and third-sector organizations. We evaluate whether the changes confirm the charge that these organizations demonstrate the iron law of oligarchy. We find corporatization has been substantial but limited and that the changes represent shifting toward strategy rather than oligarchy, though democratic weakening has occurred. We find organization responses to member confusion, concerns, and criticisms to be influential in driving these changes and contributing to the sustainability of these organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the Second World War fundamentally changed the circumstances in Yugoslavia. The authentic revolution under the inviolable leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia created a radically different political situation. There was no political force that stood against the communist rulers and they had carte blanche to build the state from the ground up. However, in the absence of their own experience, they had to rely on Soviet models. The construction of a large economic system soon became the most important segment of state policy. This paper based on archival sources of Yugoslav provenance aims to shed light on the origins, development and scope of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study quantitatively estimates the impacts of the partial privatization of Japanese national universities (as implemented in 2004) on research performance outcomes, which are aggregated and disaggregated across research fields. Japanese private universities can be viewed as counterfactuals not targeted by the reform for the same period, which provides within-country variations in this governance/managerial change. Difference-in-differences estimation strategies using private universities as control groups show that the partial privatization of national universities has resulted in a deterioration in the quality and quantity of national universities' research output, as constructed using publication records from 1999 to 2009. The study then estimates the effects of partial privatization disaggregated by research field and finds that only medical science is negatively affected by the partial privatization. This study is the first to provide a quantitative assessment of whether the partial privatization of Japanese universities has been favorable for research performance using an identification strategy based on a quasi-experiment. It also reveals the heterogeneous impacts across research fields and departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsustainable student debt and a precarious labor market continue to raise public doubts over the value of a college degree. Observers note decades of grade inflation, eroding confidence in academic standards. Yet little attention has been paid to the perceptions of professors themselves. This report fills the gap by surveying 223 tenured professors in U.S. public universities. We query faculty on sensitive questions central to debate over academic standards. Results show a substantial fraction of professors affirms the serious problems of grade inflation and declining standards. Moreover, political orientation is the best predictor of where faculty stand on these delicate questions. We close by encouraging viewpoint diversity in higher education and greater self-awareness among liberal faculty of our collective biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of Manipur in the northeastern region of India, along with a fragmented state-society relationship also suffers from the twin problems of limited public infrastructure and poor state capability to deliver public services. Power services in Manipur suffered from the dual problem of weak power generation and limited state capability to ensure citizens' access to power services. Following the policy recommendations of the Government of India and the Electricity Act of 2003, to improve the delivery of power services the government of Manipur unbundled the electricity department into two entities Manipur State Power Corporation Limited (MSPCL) and Manipur State Power Distribution Corporatization Limited (MSPDCL) in 2014. Corporatization separated the functions of allocation and distribution of power services and transformed the power sector from a bureaucratic organization into an arms-length, contract-based managerial unit, to function as a corporate entity. Corporatization along with the use of pre-paid meters, user-friendly services like easy ways of recharging the pre-paid meters, and call center services have profoundly improved the state's capability to deliver power services. This paper is based on a survey amongst 200 households through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires in 2019-2020 in the urban areas of the two valley districts of Imphal West and Bishnupur in India. The survey focused on the capability of the state institutions to deliver power services, citizens' responses to the reforms in the delivery of power services, and the sustainability of these reforms in building state capability. The response from the survey revealed that corporatization has improved citizens' access to power services, however, the lack of additional accountability checks and performance-based management would, in the long run, affect MSPDCL's delivery of power services, and Manipur's corporatization model. The research, however, was undertaken in the pre-Covid period, hence citizens' access to services in the post-Covid world needs to be re-examined in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores practices of community-based energy justice activists in Johannesburg. Against the background of municipal corporatization of electricity delivery in the wake of the postapartheid state's neoliberal policy turn, residents of the urban periphery organize to ward off cost-recovery measures and illegally (re)connect to the grid. Informed by theories of critical urban studies on the South, this article situates activists' practices historically and discusses the limits of their strategic claims with a view to their inextricable relation to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American public universities have assumed business-minded practices and norms that more closely align with the goals and values of corporations than social institutions charged with creating and disseminating knowledge. One consistent strategy to lower costs involves faculty labor. Institutions have outsourced educational missions to a largely contingent workforce to decrease instructional costs; over the last two decades, the number of adjunct or part-time faculty now comprises 70% of all faculty. As a result, policies have decreased instructional costs and provided administrators with increased flexibility to respond to student demands. However, research indicates compromised student outcomes, less shared governance, and faculty work–life pressures that can undermine commitment, motivation, and professional identity. The following literature review examines the locus of academic capitalism and faculty labor, theorizing how faculty labor policies infer consequences for equity, inclusion, and social justice in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers environmental R&D (ER&D) of clean technology for reducing pollutant emissions in a polluting mixed duopoly and analyzes partial privatization's impacts on ER&D, environment and welfare. In the situation that environmental taxes are exogenously given, it finds that the impacts of privatization policy on ER&D and environment critically depend on the level of environmental damage. However, regardless of the marginal damage, an appropriate partial-privatization policy can increase social welfare. In addition, it also considers an endogenously determined optimal environmental tax and shows that if the marginal damage is high, partial privatization's impacts on ER&D, environment and social welfare may be not the same as the exogenous environmental tax situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Brasileira de Políticas Públicas is the property of Revista Brasileira de Politicas Publicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article departs from existing literature by including licensing in a multinational market where the innovator is the Stackelberg leader. When the domestic mixed-ownership firm is the leading innovator, it focuses on local social welfare. Thus, the royalty it charges becomes a function of level privatization. As the private share in the domestic firm increases, the leader increases the royalty it charges. The relationship is reversed when the foreign firm becomes the innovator. The optimal licensing policy is a mix of a fixed fee and a royalty, with a difference that a Stackelberg leader charges more than a Cournot competitor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the optimal privatization policy in a mixed duopoly where the private firm may have environmental awareness. It finds that if the marginal environmental damage is low (high), partial privatization is optimal and its optimal level increases (decreases) with the degree of the private firm's environmental awareness. However, if the marginal environmental damage is moderate, full nationalization or full privatization can be optimal and the optimal privatization level does not depend on the degree of the private firm's environmental awareness. This study highlights the role that environmental pollution and private firms' environmental awareness play in determining optimal privatization policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies current issues of the legal regulatory framework for making public policy on space activities. It has been established that the national rocket and space industry is in the deepest institutional and legal crisis caused by ineffective space policy. The focus is on the urgency of the legal optimization of the system of public administration of the space sector and the need for a clear legislative distribution of powers in the field of making space policy. The study proves that organizational and legal changes are required in the space sector through transforming State ownership, privatizing and developing various forms of ownership and business in the space sector of the economy. An important factor in overcoming the sectoral crisis should be the implementation by the State of an adequate regulatory space policy and the identification of legal mechanisms to stimulate an innovative model for space activities. The study reveals the conceptual basis for the implementation of space law reform in Ukraine and makes proposals and recommendations to improve the efficiency of public administration tools in the national space sector.

Microorganisms produce costly cooperative goods whose benefit is partially shared with nonproducers, called 'mixed' goods. The Black Queen Hypothesis predicts that partial privatization has two major evolutionary implications. First, to favor strains producing several types of mixed goods over nonproducing strains. Second, to favor the maintenance of cooperative traits through different strains instead of having all cooperative traits present in a single strain (metabolic specialization). Despite the importance of quorum sensing regulation of mixed goods, it is unclear how partial privatization affects quorum sensing evolution. Here, we studied the influence of partial privatization on the evolution of quorum sensing. We developed a mathematical population genetics model of an unstructured microbial population considering four strains that differ in their ability to produce an autoinducer (quorum sensing signaling molecule) and a mixed good. Our model assumes that the production of the autoinducers and the mixed goods is constitutive and/or depends on quorum sensing. Our results suggest that, unless autoinducers are costless, partial privatization cannot favor quorum sensing. This result occurs because with costly autoinducers: (1) a strain that produces both autoinducer and goods (fully producing strain) cannot persist in the population; (2) the strain only producing the autoinducer and the strain producing mixed goods in response to the autoinducers cannot coexist, i.e., metabolic specialization cannot be favored. Together, partial privatization might have been crucial to favor a primordial form of quorum sensing—where autoinducers were thought to be a metabolic byproduct (costless)—but not the transition to nowadays costly autoinducers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production of costly public goods (as distinct from metabolic byproducts) has largely been understood through the realization that spatial structure can minimize losses to non-producing "cheaters" by allowing for the positive assortment of producers. In well-mixed systems, where positive assortment is not possible, the stable production of public goods has been proposed to depend on lineages that become indispensable as the sole producers of those goods while their neighbors lose production capacity through genome streamlining (the Black Queen Hypothesis). Here, we develop consumer-resource models motivated by nitrogen-fixing, siderophore-producing bacteria that consider the role of colimitation in shaping eco-evolutionary dynamics. Our models demonstrate that in well-mixed environments, single "public goods" can only be ecologically and evolutionarily stable if they are partially privatized (i.e., if producers reserve a portion of the product pool for private use). Colimitation introduces the possibility of subsidy: strains producing a fully public good can exclude non-producing strains so long as the producing strain derives sufficient benefit from the production of a second partially private good. We derive a lower bound for the degree of privatization necessary for production to be advantageous, which depends on external resource concentrations. Highly privatized, low-investment goods, in environments where the good is limiting, are especially likely to be stably produced. Coexistence emerges more rarely in our mechanistic model of the external environment than in past phenomenological approaches. Broadly, we show that the viability of production depends critically on the environmental context (i.e., external resource concentrations), with production of shared resources favored in environments where a partially-privatized resource is scarce. Author summary: Many organisms produce "public goods", substances that may directly benefit their competitors as well as themselves. Because goods production is costly, understanding the evolutionary stability of public goods production has been a subject of considerable interest: what keeps cheaters from taking over a population and driving producers to extinction? Here, we ask when partial privatization of public goods (that is, when producers retain some portion of the good for their own exclusive use) is sufficient to stabilize production even in the absence of spatial structure, and how this depends on environmental conditions. We derive lower bounds for the amount of privatization needed to stabilize production and find that these bounds depend critically on environmental conditions. We further investigate the case of two public goods, each needed for the acquisition of the other, and each a resource whose availability limits growth. We find that the ecological dynamics of such colimiting resources can interact, with privatization of one resource subsidizing more-public, or even fully public, production of the other. Finally, we offer the perspective that producers are not "losers" in a race of loss-of-function mutations, but rather can do no better than to produce the resource in a given set of conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public universities have assumed business-minded practices and norms that more closely align with goals and values of corporations than social institutions charged with creating and disseminating knowledge. One pervasive cost-savings strategy is the outsourcing of instruction to a contingent workforce. This case study explores the experiences of part-time and full-time non-tenure track faculty from undergraduate colleges across a striving, public, four-year research institution midway through its ten-year plan to attain Tier I Carnegie classification status and rebrand itself as a "very high" research institution. Findings describe contingent faculty experiences of the double-edged sword of autonomy. Their contingent status freed them from many responsibilities and oversight of tenure-line faculty but also alienated them from other meaningful faculty roles and activities. Drawing from academic capitalism, we theorize their work lives—grounded in now-antiquated notions of non-tenure-track faculty as casual labor, regardless of appointment type—provide descriptive insights into faculty culture and infer potential consequences of economic-minded faculty labor policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facts about the increased corporatization of medical care in the United States are offered here in order to trace their impact on patients and their care. The culture of medicine, as it has been impacted by a corporate ethos, is also addressed, including aspects of physicians' training that make it difficult for them to empathize with their patients' struggles, and the gradual evolution of practices that view patients as isolated, impaired "organ systems" targeted for siloed treatments. Narratives from patients who report their encounters with an alienating system are discussed from a perspective that focuses on patients' resulting self‐experience. Finally, three cases of chronically ill patients who engaged in psychoanalytic treatments in the context of their experiences with "not care" are examined in depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the nature of today's corporatized health care system in the United States, offering examples of the psychological toll it takes on clinicians at all levels. It details corporate practices that disenfranchise practitioners from exercising their clinical judgment and from offering input to system administrators about problematic patient care experiences. It discusses the sense of frustration, resignation and moral injury that can permeate their work lives and disrupt their sense of effectiveness and well‐being in this context. Following this background is a psychoanalytic analysis of narratives from two physicians about their corporate health care experiences. Two case studies follow, in which a nurse and a physician entered psychoanalytic psychotherapy to process the destructive psychological impact of their work environments. A third case illustrates the negative impact of automatized insurance practices on one psychologist and her patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we expand upon our use of the cocoon metaphor for understanding and working with organizations from a psychodynamic perspective. Conceived as both defensive and generative, cocoons are relational phenomena that manifest throughout organizations and risk being mistaken as dysfunctional entities in need of dismantling. To illustrate the utility of the cocoon metaphor in conceptualizing organizational problems, we present a case study of a hospital restructuring following its acquisition by a for‐profit health care system and driven by efficiency and cost‐savings. The resulting disruptions across operating divisions created a set of problems that necessitated the help of an outside consultant. Engaging members of the organization in the task of solving their own problems entailed recognizing their (inter)subjective experiences and behaviors as more than just defensive hiding, or aggressive attacking, but also as holding the potential for new ways of working and relating. It also entailed showing leaders how to replace environmental impingement in the form of "looking for mistakes" with what we call, borrowing from Marion Milner (1969), a "waiting watchfulness" that fostered understanding of the emotional world inside, outside, and at the boundaries of cocoons to promote organizational learning and meaningful change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The shareholding state in Italy emerges following the partial privatizations of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the 1990s. • The literature finds that states retaining minority stakes in their former SOEs are unlikely to influence corporate strategies. • This paper suggests that state minority stakes may serve state interests. • The decision to retain majority or minority stakes depends on sectoral specificities. • It also depends on the influence that private shareholders may exercise on the board. The shareholding state in Italy emerges following the partial privatizations of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the 1990s. As today, it is still debated whether the Italian state is using its controlling stakes in former SOEs to pursue policy objectives, or if it is acting passively as other financial shareholders. The limited contributions in this field of study find that states retaining a minority stake are unlikely to influence corporate strategies, while the opposite occurs when a majority stake is held. This paper suggests that minority stakes may also serve state interests even if the company's statute does not envisage the state to play an active role. The issue is explored through a case study of the partial privatizations of CDP, in which the state retains a majority stake, and Eni, in which the state retains a minority (albeit predominant) stake, and that operate respectively in the banking and energy sectors. Their different level of financialization unveils the diversified strategies adopted by the Italian state to preserve national interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a model of privatization and divestiture of a vertically integrated public monopoly. The framework is used to derive general conditions of how mixed companies might be used to promote efficient outcomes without assuming either an ideal social planner or superior cost performance of private enterprise. The conditions suggest that efficient public policy towards mixed (public‐private partnership) companies depends on basic cost and demand conditions. The results indicate that: (1) a vertically integrated private monopoly can be more efficient than any combination of mixed companies when there is a sufficiently flat linear (elastic) demand curve and relatively greater (upward sloping) marginal cost for the downstream sector; (2) an upstream public and downstream public firm can achieve the first best outcome when the downstream firm has constant marginal costs; and (3) a partial privatization of the upstream firm achieves higher welfare than taking that action for the downstream firm. The intuition behind the propositions is provided using standard features of cost and demand. While the implications for public policy regarding privatization and divestiture in infrastructure sectors are not definitive, the results underscore the importance of understanding cost and demand conditions when developing and implementing public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public services are often corporatized with the expectation that corporatization brings more business-like service delivery. However, the actual usage of business techniques is rarely studied as a factor that influences corporatization's success. We study the mediating effect of business techniques on the autonomy-performance link among Dutch municipally owned corporations. We find that while the direct effect of autonomy on performance is statistically non-significant or negative, business techniques are both directly helpful for performance in MOCs and (partially) mediate the relationship between autonomy and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how policies of market liberalization and partial privatization of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) involved in the production and provision of key inputs – banking, energy and telecom – affect the vulnerability and resilience of an economy. SOEs' response to such policy changes and their ability to operate under the new market conditions are crucial for maintaining quality and continuity in the supply of intermediate goods and services that underlie the functioning of the economy and society. The paper analyses this issue in the context of Chinese SOEs' reforms. It finds that privatization and liberalization in China have been designed (i) to strengthen the economy's resilience, as access to private capital and foreign markets has contributed to companies' growth and to increase the stock and quality of critical infrastructure for the country; but also (ii) to minimize the vulnerabilities that arise from such policies, by envisaging measures against volatility in capital markets and the destabilizing effect of market competition through ad hoc regulation. The paper may prove relevant for the next steps of Chinese SOEs' reforms and its findings might find applicability in other geographical contexts as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This white paper discusses the seven most important challenges facing radiology today: declining reimbursement, corporatization and consolidation, inadequate labor force, imaging appropriateness, burnout, turf wars with nonphysicians, and workflow efficiency. Participants in the Intersociety Summer Conference-2023 focused their effort on identifying potential solutions given how critical these topics are to the sustainability of the profession., (Copyright © 2024 American College of Radiology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Partial privatization creates organizational hybrids that can generate conflict between professional and institutional logic among social workers. Research is scant but necessary to identify better organizational approaches. Using the social and economic exchange (SEE) model, we examined Israeli social workers' perception of their relationships with their workplaces. To examine organizational affiliation and seniority impact on SEE, we conducted a two-way ANOVA on data from 824 social workers: 55.1% from government sector (GSO) 30.8% from 'third sector' (TSO), and 14.1% from for-profit sector (FPO) organizations. Our findings showed the SEE model identified ways organizations and their social workers manage sector hybridity. Social exchange among TSO social workers was higher than GSOs, but similar to FPOs. Economic exchange was higher in FPOs, compared to GSOs. Seniority related only to economic exchange, possibly signaling change among newer social workers. TSOs must strengthen their social exchange to maintain their advantage among social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second, each polluting firm commits to the amount of target emissions, HT ht . However, it need not reduce the output by a large amount because a reduction of HT ht partially offsets the negative effect of environmental damage by increasing HT ht . Note that given the voluntary commitments on target emissions, HT ht in the second stage, the amount of purchase of abatement goods HT ht will be solely determined by the choice of HT ht . Further, the decision on the purchase of abatement goods HT ht , is the same as the choice of outputs HT ht if the target emissions, HT ht , are given. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines endogenous determinations of both the degree of partial privatization and the timing of quantity competition under a homogeneous product duopoly with a public and either a domestic or a foreign private firm. We develop a three-stage game. In the first stage, a domestic government determines its partial privatization level. In the second stage, each firm decides the timing of its quantity setting. In the third stage, each firm sets its output level based on this timing. To select a single equilibrium for the timing game, we use the risk-dominance criterion. The main conclusion is as follows. When the private firm is domestic, partial privatization and private leadership emerge in equilibrium, whereas when the private firm is foreign, full nationalization and public leadership emerge in equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Innovar: Revista de Ciencias Administrativas y Sociales is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There are different governmental reasons and technologies for seeking public-private partnerships throughout the developed countries. Significant motives have been to improve efficiency and risk distribution in comparison to traditional financing techniques and to lessen budget and borrowing limits. In this study, the movement toward privatization enhancing the efficiency of MoH's hospitals has been assessed using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) from 1979 to 2020. Moreover, the efficiencies of the individual hospital were estimated through the DEA model, which includes: scale efficiency (SE), pure technical efficiency (PTE), and overall technical efficiency (OTE). In addition, factor affecting such efficiencies was analyzed through Tobit regression. The VRS results suggest that the numbers of hospitals benefiting from the complete corporatized phase are greater than those benefiting from the last phase (and vice versa in the case of DRS). The variance between inefficient hospitals in the less corporatized phase (2000-2020) was more prominent than in the fully corporatized phase (1988-1999). In conclusion, fully corporatized hospitals (on average) achieve relatively better overall efficiency. It is recommended that additional corporatization might be stimulated by a standardized set of performance measures, which cover both the quality criteria and economic efficiency measurements from a healthcare perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corporatization of public services by moving services previously provided in‐house into various types of arms‐length corporate forms of organization is becoming an important trend at multiple levels of government. Although the use of such corporate forms to deliver public services is not a new phenomenon, evidence on the impact of corporatization on public services provision is only slowly emerging. In this symposium, we aim to advance our understanding of the theoretical and practical implications of corporatization through empirical analyses of its dynamics in a range of different settings. In this introductory article, we begin by explaining what is meant by the corporatization of public services and the different forms that it can take, before summarizing the existing evidence on the governance, accountability, and performance of corporatized public services. We then describe the articles included in the symposium and conclude by outlining a future research agenda for studying corporatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent health care reforms in England, combined with financial austerity, have accelerated both corporatization and commercialization in the English National Health Service (NHS) and this has encouraged greater public sector entrepreneurialism (PSE). We advance this argument by examining the meaning and experience of corporatization in this sector, illustrating our argument with qualitative data from a specialist hospital at the forefront of this trend. We demonstrate how the policy and practice of corporatization is entangled with increased commercialism and how this shapes more entrepreneurial conduct from staff. Framed in terms of the recursive relationship between organizational dynamics and individual behaviors, we focus empirically upon the shifting epistemic boundaries associated with increased corporatization, describing the dissonant effects of these shifts upon individuals, their attempts to compartmentalize, and the ethical dilemmas that result. Through this case we draw conclusions about the emerging impact of corporatization, commercialization, and public sector entrepreneurialism across public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Corporatization—arguably as important as privatization regarding public service reform—remains an under‐researched topic in Public Administration. In this paper, we explore the extent to which the implementation of different types of corporatization strategies can be explained by the ideology of the ruling party in the Spanish public healthcare sector, selected for study because this sector was subject to reform, particularly, decentralization and marketization. To do so, we use count‐data regression models to analyze secondary data from the 17 Spanish regional governments for the period 2003–2017. Our estimates reveal that right‐wing controlled regional governments exhibit a clear preference for corporatization strategies that actively involve the private sector, such as Public–Private Partnerships and Public Finance Initiatives. Further analysis suggests that left‐wing governments are positively associated with the implementation of corporatization strategies that do not involve the private sector, such as the creation of Public Enterprises and Public Entities. These results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporatization implies disintegration of public authority, leading to not only structural but also cultural differentiation of government, transforming it into a fragmented and hybrid governance system consisting of an authority and multiple autonomous or semi‐autonomous operators. This article addresses corporatization at the local government level in Norway, exploring if and how this change in formal structure triggers the emergence of separate cultures in the operator entities. Described as an institutionalization process, new norms, cognitions and identities seem to develop in these entities, creating a sense of 'us' (the municipal company) and 'them' (the municipality), thus strengthening the regulative separateness through normative and cultural‐cognitive elements. Findings from our multiple‐case study indicate that this process may be relatively fast and strong, transforming local government into a system comprising various hybrid types, especially segregated and assimilated types. The stronger the structural differentiation is, the stronger cultural differentiation seems to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out an archival account of events leading up to the mass agencification of the British civil service by the Thatcher administration (1979–1990). This account holds lessons for contemporary understandings of the ideological roots and institutional structures of corporatization. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, she wanted to make government "efficient" through the adoption of "business‐like" practices. We show that this project was grounded in her Methodist upbringing and the emerging neoliberal economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Thatcher's efforts to instill a "market mentality" were met with stubborn resistance from a bloc of Ministers and senior civil servants. We find that Thatcher used agencification to break this resistance. Agencification removed Ministerial control over service delivery and saw "business‐like" managers placed in charge of the newly created agencies. This curtailed the workings of democracy. Like Thatcher's agencification, corporatization today imperils democracy in pursuit of "efficiency." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporatization, the conversion of state‐owned enterprises into semi‐autonomous, legally independent entities, has gained in popularity internationally since the 1980s. This review suggests that usage of the term has become entangled with other definitions of corporatization, and other organizational reforms associated with new public management, and appears consequently to have lost its distinctiveness in many contemporary studies of corporatization. Through a scoping review of literature on corporatization of healthcare organizations internationally, we develop a typology of four perspectives on corporatization (as managerialism of medical work, as institutional level reform to encourage market‐like behavior, as corporate governance implications of legal independence, and as private sector colonization) and analyze the specific processes, impacts, and mediators associated with each approach. This typology can aid conceptual clarity in future research on corporatization and orient practitioners to particular management and policy questions within the complex field of reform signified by this term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public corporations have been constantly in the spotlight, with some commentators arguing that they can help governments provide better public services, and others insisting that their governance is simply too complex. Despite this ongoing debate, few studies have researched public corporation performance. The present study offers empirical evidence of the effects of various forms of corporatization on public service costs. In particular, it examines public service costs incurred under four different forms of governance: public agencies, public corporations, mixed public corporations with minority public ownership, and mixed public corporations with majority public ownership. The analysis considers eight types of public services in 874 Spanish municipalities between 2014 and 2017. The empirical results show that services provided by public corporations are no less costly than those provided by public agencies. In fact, the services offered by mixed corporations with government majorities tend to cost more than those provided by public agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privatization has played an important role in national economic reform in Vietnam. However, unlike other transitional countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Vietnam has chosen a partial and gradual privatization where the government still holds significant ownership in most privatized firms. Whether partial privatization can enhance privatized firms' performance or full privatization should have been implemented is a critical question that needs to be answered. This paper utilizes semiparametric regressions to study the relationship between residual state ownership and firm performance. The results indicate an inverted U relationship between state ownership and firm performance. We show that the performance of privatized firms improves with an increase in the level of state ownership until around 40%, after which the effect of state ownership on firm performance tends to decline. This demonstrates that in a transitional context, relinquishing governmental control via privatization can significantly benefit privatized firm performance. However, further reduction of state ownership may decrease the performance of privatized firms. Overall, the study contributes significantly to the growing body of evidence on the nonlinear effects of state ownership. This suggests that in the transitional context of Vietnam, due to weak corporate governance and limited protection of minority shareholders, there could be a temporary optimal position where state and private investors hold balanced ownership to simultaneously supervise operations and promote the performance of privatized firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When visiting universities during recruitment tours, many students and parents want to know if the student will be 'safe' while attending the institution. This paper uses a qualitative examination of security at a Canadian university to argue that the increase in security measures on campuses is driven by both the desire to provide physical security and the pressure from the increasing corporatization of academia to use security as a recruitment and retention tool. These goals can be served by the same security measures or compete for budgetary priority. Overall, this study demonstrates how the concepts of corporatization, institutional risk management, security theatre, and university branding are present in how the university designs security policies and brands itself as a 'safe' environment, and how this can leave students wanting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]