Public Procurement as Marketisation: Impacts on Civil Servants and Public Administration in Sweden

Authors

  • Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University, Sweden
  • Mikael Granberg Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University, Sweden

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v23i3/4.8635

Keywords:

local government, procurement, public administration, civil servants, consultants

Abstract

Swedish local government plays a central role in welfare production, providing some of the most crucial services to citizens. However, over the last decades there have been significant changes in how local governments are governed and how services are implemented. In many cases, these changes entail the promotion of rationalities and technologies associated with market-oriented principles and values as the primary means to providing welfare services. A central feature in this is public procurement. This phenomenon has been surprisingly absent from scholarly work that focuses on marketisation and the politics of public sector reform in Sweden. In this article, we present a case study based on interviews with actors involved in public procurement in Swedish local government. We provide insights into how public procurement sustains and expands the rationalities of marketisation. We conclude that the importance of public procurement has expanded, producing organisational changes and, perhaps most importantly, we are witnessing changes in the role of civil servants in Swedish public administration.

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Author Biographies

Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson, Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University, Sweden

Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson is senior lecturer in political science at Karlstad university, Sweden. His research is currently focused on marketization, local government and public procurement. In addition to this he maintains an interest for the politics of space with a specific focus on regional development as well as critical policy studies more generally.

Mikael Granberg, Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University, Sweden

Mikael Granberg is professor of political science and the director of the Centre for Climate and Safety at Karlstad University. He is also a research fellow of the Centre for Natural Hazards and Disaster Science at Uppsala University. His main focus is political processes and organizing. A special interest is if, and how, institutionalized political practices and norms facilitates or hinders collective action especially with regard to sustainable development and action on climate change.

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Published

2019-12-13

How to Cite

Öjehag-Pettersson, A., & Granberg, M. (2019). Public Procurement as Marketisation: Impacts on Civil Servants and Public Administration in Sweden. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 23(3/4), 43–59. https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v23i3/4.8635

Issue

Section

Original Articles