Accountability in Practice: Organizational Responses to Public Accountability Claims.

Private providers delivering public services for a profit are confronted with competing, and very often contradicting accountability demands. They are operating in a hybrid environment, in which expectations of shareholders collide with accountability demands from public stakeholders. The paper contributes to the understanding of organizational action in contested environments. It studies private action in public areas through the lens of neo-institutional theory, distinguishing with compartmentalizing, defiance, pacification, and acquiescence four types of entrepreneurial reaction to environmental expectations. Taking major privatization processes in German public policy as an example, the paper studies how the institutional characteristics of different fields of public policy (hospital care and social housing) shape the actions of for-profit providers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]