Privatizing the Delivery of Services: Political Process and Prospects.

This paper claims that the spread of privatization of delivery in social services - that is privatization of provision while funding remains public - has not proceeded uniformly across different policy domains. Certain differences in the attributes of policy domains are responsible for the variance in the incidence and extent of privatization of delivery. The paper examines two such attributes: the size of policy domains and the prevalence of professional philosophies that support institutional restructuring for reasons other than privatization. By utilizing a comparison of privatization of delivery initiatives in the education and mental health domains, across two political systems - England and Massachusetts - this study suggests that privatization of delivery is more difficult in large policy domains than in small ones and that privatization is facilitated by the pre-existence of dominant professional philosophies that demand institutional restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]