| In the late 1970s and early 1980s,with the development of public service reform movement in the world,the government purchasing of public services,because of its unique advantages in reducing the cost of public services,meeting the diversified public needs and improving the efficiency and quality of public services,has become an important reform measures in the reform of public service supply in all countries.After nearly half a century of development,the government purchasing of public services has become a global practice of public service reform,a strategic behavior of government governance in various countries,and serving a wider range of government goals.In China,in 1994,Luohu District Government of Shenzhen Municipality started the practice of purchasing sanitation services,which set a precedent for government purchasing of public services.In September 2013,the State Council issued Guidelines on the Government’s Purchasing of Public Services from Non-governmental Forces,marked that the government purchasing of public services has officially become China’s national strategic behavior.Since then,the scope and scale of government purchasing of public services have been further expanded in all regions of the country,involving education services,medical services,employment services,old-age services,prevention of juvenile delinquency and many other fields,which showing a large-scale,national and diversified development trend.However,after more than 20 years of practice,it is still a proposition to be verified whether the government purchasing of public services in China has achieved the original intention of the policy and whether it has achieved the expected performance goals.All kinds of messy phenomenon in government purchasing of public services at least suggest that the government purchasing of public services is not always “as people wish”,the actual effects are not consistent with the expected goals in many cases,that is the performance goals’ deviation.In order to seek the real performance of government purchasing of public services,this study will solve the following problems according to the logic of “problem construction,problem analysis and problem solving”: Why does the government should carry out performance management in government purchasing of public services? What are the performance goals of government purchasing of public services? How about the achievement of performance goals for government purchasing of public services? What are the reasons for the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services? How to effectively govern the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services?As for the question “Why does the government should carry out performance management in government purchasing of public services?”,this study took the theory of New Public Management,Principal-agent and Government Performance Evaluation as the theoretical basis,the aggravation of the contradiction between supply and demand of public services and the reform goal of governance modernization as the realistic driving force,the practice of performance management in government purchasing of public services at home and abroad as the practice foundations,and respectively explained “Why it happens”,“Why it is necessary” and “What kind of practice has it had” of the performance management in government purchasing of public services,which laid the foundation for the importance,necessity and practicality of performance management of government purchasing of public service.This chapter is the starting point of this study.As for the question “What are the performance goals of government purchasing of public services?”,through the analysis of 66 central and provincial policies about government purchasing of public services,this study found that the performance dimension including process performance and result performance two aspects;the performance goals including economy,efficiency,effectiveness,equity and standardization.At the same time,these 66 policies of government purchasing of public services make macro provisions for the implementation framework of the performance goal of government purchasing of public services,which can be summarized as “four main subjects” and “four mechanisms”.“Four main subjects”refers to the subject to realize the performance goal of government purchasing of public services,including the buyer,the undertaker,the evaluator and the consumer.“Four major mechanisms” refer to the realization mechanism of the performance goal of government purchasing of public services,mainly including the demand management mechanism of “what to buy”,the service purchase mechanism of “how to buy”,the performance evaluation mechanism of “worth to buy ”,and the cooperative supervision mechanism of “buy well”.The policy interpretation of the performance goals and its implementation framework in China’s government purchasing of public services,provided a policy basis for the construction of performance index system and the performance goals’ test of government purchasing of public services in the following paper.As for the question “How about the achievement of performance goals for government purchasing of public services?”,this study answered this question by measuring the performance of government purchasing of public services in Province S and testing its achievement of performance goals.The results show that the process performance of government purchasing of public services is “good”,while the result performance of government purchasing of public services is only“qualified”.Meanwhile,in the government purchasing of public services,the performance of standardization and equity is “excellent”,the performance of economy and efficiency is “good”,and the performance of effectiveness is only“qualified”.Actually,in the performance management of government purchase of public services,the performance of “qualified and its below” are all considered unsatisfactory and need to be improved.Moreover,as an agent of the public,the government should aim public services for “excellence” rather than “quality”.Therefore,in this study,all “qualified and its below” performance were regarded as deviations from performance goals,and it can be further concluded that the performance of government purchasing of public services in Province S deviated from the performance goals,which was called “the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services” in this study,also is the research question of this study.Among these deviations,the deviation of effectiveness goal is the most serious.As for the question “What are the reasons for the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services?”,using the research methods of grounded theory,based on the interview data obtained from field investigation and some relevant internet data,this study abstracted four core categories including subjective motivation,ability constraint,strategic behavior,and low performance,and built an explanatory model of the influencing factors and formation mechanism of performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services.Through the analysis of the explanatory model,the following conclusions are drawn:motivation is the fundamental reason of the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services;ability constraint is the main reason of the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services;strategic behavior is the direct reason of the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services.In government purchasing of public services,the buyer,the undertaker,the appraiser and the consumer take different strategic behaviors based on different dominant motivation and ability constraints,these strategic behaviors and their interactions directly lead to the performance goals’ deviation.As for the question “How to effectively govern the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services?”,based on the analysis of the influencing factors and formation mechanism of the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services,this study put forward the following three governance strategies to solve the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services: firstly,paying attention to motivation management to stimulate the subjects’ positive motivation in government purchasing of public services,mainly including public service motivation and public interest motivation.Secondly,enhancing the subjects’ capacity to ensure that all subjects in government purchasing of public services perform their roles well,that is to say,we should cultivate “smart buyers”,“secure sellers”,“professional third parties” and “active citizens”.Thirdly,establishing relationships of mutual trust between the government and society,the society and people,and the government and people,to create an environment of mutual trust and cooperation for the government purchasing of public services.The innovation of this study may have three aspects: Firstly,the innovation of research content.Through the method of policy text analysis,this study summarized the performance goals and its implementation framework of Chinese government’s purchase of public services,designed a performance evaluation index system based on this,and took Province S’s government purchasing of public services as an example to measure and categorize the achievement of performance goals,which realized the connection of performance goals of government purchasing of public service between the “ought” in policy design and the “is” in practice measurement,but also overcame the limitation of previous study that separated from the policy goal and simply carried out the overall performance measurement.Secondly,the innovation of research methods.Given the fact that the application of grounded theory in performance study of government purchasing of public services is still less,this study used the method of grounded theory to explore the influencing factors and formation mechanism of performance goal deviation in China’s government purchasing of public service,which enriched China’s research method of performance study in government purchasing of public service.Also,because the grounded theory method is more suitable for the study of complex factor identification problems,the theoretical model constructed by it may be more convincing to explain reality and vitality to guide practice.Thirdly,the innovation of explanatory model.The explanatory model constructed in this study is a multidimensional network structure model.This model made up for the incomprehensiveness of previous studies that only focused on a single subject’s influence on the performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services,and gave a more complete explanation on the formation mechanism of performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services.In particular,the systematic elaboration on the formation mechanism of performance goals’ deviation in government purchasing of public services under the interaction of four subjects is rare in previous study,which may be an innovation to some extent. |
