Critically evaluate the implications of public services outsourcing Essay

Critically evaluate the implications of public services outsourcing for the management of labour and industrial relations - Essay Example the outsourcing as an issue has drawn wide attention from different scholars, mostly those interested in the disentangling the effect of the value chain restructuring in the private firms. Nevertheless, there has been extremely limited systematic comparative research on the topic within the public sector organisations whereby the practitioners and the scholars majorly focus on the economic implications. The adoption of outsourcing strategies in the public sector has significantly impacted on the management of labour and industrial relations. Thus, drawing from the above, this paper aims at filling the gap, discussing the impacts of the outsourcing of the public services on the on the labour and the industrial relations structure in the public sector in the comparative perspective. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at disentangling the interplay of the restructuring towards the outsourcing of the public services, the terms of the employees and the dynamics and conditions of the employment relations in the various sectors across countries. Secondly, the study is focused on the examination of whether the impacts of the outsourcing cluster to result in the discernable convergent trajectories in any given sector or the country. Value chain analysis has been the alternative approach that revises on the thinking about how the outsourcing relationships should be structured and conceived. Outsourcing can be described as the form of the restructuring whereby â€Å"one organisation contracts with another for the provision of the particular goods and services† (Asher, 1987) instead of providing the goods or services directly. This inter-firm relationship directly impacts on the employment conditions and work organisation of the public services. The value chain analysis is a fundamental analytical tool for the disentangling how the external restructuring process impacts on the quality of the work and the employment relationships. The position of the