Article
Outsourcing Social Services to NGOs in Russia: Federal Policy and Regional Responses
Our research bears on two critical issues for contemporary Russia: federal–regional power relations; and whether Moscow can modernize institutions and address dissatisfaction with social service delivery, a major political issue. It is the first comprehensive study of a major 2015 reform that ended the state monopoly over service provision and initiated outsourcing (contracting out) to socially oriented non-profits (SONPOs) and other nonstate organizations. We find substantial interregional variation. Statistical tests of economic, political, and institutional explanations show that only the economic helps to explain variation across Russia's regions. We rely on comparisons of six regions, drawing on semi-structured interviews to gain a contextualized understanding of their varied implementation strategies. Key findings are that regional leaders demonstrated agency in crafting diverse strategies, while the Center showed flexibility. Whether Moscow can modernize public services remains unclear, though there is some evidence of improvement since the beginning of the outsourcing reform.
The issue is devoted to outsourcing using by public authorities. In the issue there is the experience of using administrative processes in the RF subjects. The nature of public duties that can be outsourced are determined. Outsourcing is seen as a technology of public administration.
This study aims to provide the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MoCA) of the People's Republic of China an overview of international experience with the use of direct and indirect, consumer and producer side instruments for engaging civil society organizations in the delivery of government-financed social and human services. The discussion in the report falls into three major parts. Part one offers an overview of the scale of the civil society sector globally and of the extent and patterns of government support for it. Against this backdrop, part two then examines in more detail the experience of particular countries with government-nonprofit cooperation with respect to outsourcing social services. Finally, based on these experiences, the final part offers some suggestions for the Government of China as it seeks to fashion a workable relationship with the emerging Chinese civil society organization (CSO) sector.
The role of strategic IT consulting in consulting service lifecycle is determined. Practical issues of its basic directions such as strategic IT audit, IT strategy development, IT service organization and transfer to outsourcing, are discussed.
This chapter addresses the relationship between class, family and social welfare policies by analysing the construction of the identity category of ‘unfortunate families’ in popular scientific discourses, governmental policy documents and discourses of social services, and by examining how those labelled as ‘unfortunate’ negotiate this identity conferred to them. The chapter shows that gender and class are closely intertwined in the production of this identity, as it is single mothers who are primarily categorized as ‘unfortunate’. In our analysis we draw on multiple sources of data. First, we analyse in-depth and focus group interviews with service providers and clients and participant observation data from a number of Russian cities. Second, we analyse various government documents and social advertisements, mass media materials, social policy and social work textbooks, and popular scientific texts published during the 1990s-2000s.
In this chapter we aim to examine the discourses created and reproduced through the interaction between single mothers and representatives of social services. The analysis is based on twenty-six interviews with single mothers and six interviews with social workers conducted in 2001–2003, and six interviews with single mothers and three with social workers conducted in 2006 in the Saratov region in Russia, as well as official documents and the publications of other researchers. In our interviews with mothers, we focused on the issues of familial well-being and interactions with social services, while social workers were asked to discuss their experiences with clients. A short overview of statistics and social policy terminology prefaces a discussion of how mother-headed families and state social policy interrelate and affect each other. The subsequent sections contain analysis of the interviews with single mothers who, as the heads of low-income households, interact with the social service system. The analysis demonstrates that single mothers are frustrated by inadequate assistance and the impossibility of improving their life situations. The discussion goes on to show that social workers, who are used to interpreting complex issues in the life situations of single mothers as individual psychological peculiarities, tend to blame the victim, thus ignoring important social conditions and imposing on women a responsibility for problems that are societal in origin.
In the article the international experience of management of employment in the public sector is shown, corresponding numerical calculations are given, the thought on possibility of its use in Russia is stated. The author believes that transfer of some functions into outsourcing in frameworks of the policy of the new public management (NPM) can be one of directions of perfection of the management of employment efficiency and payment in the public sector. Simultaneously he expresses his conviction that reduction of the number of the occupied should not be mechanical, but the thought over and gradual process assuming simultaneous increase of efficiency of activity in the sphere of the public management.
The paper analyzes how the agricultural sector applies outsourcing in its practice. What differs the outsourcing from other forms of cooperation of enterprises is identified. We show that an agro-enterprise could function as an outsourcee. Some ways of how outsourcing can be used in the agricultural production to make its profitability higher are proposed here.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.