Changing Public-Private Sector Relations: A Look at the United States

One of the distinctive elements that accounts for the dynamism and innovative capacity of America's political institutions is the use of private organizations to accomplish public purposes. The nation has found it useful to contract out for services when bureaucratic obstacles thwart new policy objectives. Yet in recent years the country has seemed to lack exactly the qualities of dynamism, vitality, and innovative capacity in the public sector, in business, and in the voluntary sector that we have most cherished. The blame for this, in the view of some observers, rests with the blurring of the boundaries between public and private sectors that has characterized the postwar period. This article explores the paradoxical shift in attitudes on public-private sector relations against the background of contemporary ideological trends. The arguments for either a massive shifting of functions to private contractors or for the federal government to reabsorb major activities now carried out by contractors are equally unconvincing. The problem is to make the present system of shared responsibility among government, business, and the voluntary sector work more effectively, not to experiment with ideological solutions that would rear-range the nation's political and institutional landscapes.