LIST OF PANELS

In this panel we seek to address the overarching research question: “How are public administrations creating markets, and how are these markets reconfiguring public administrations?”

Markets are increasingly becoming one of the more preferred means for re-engineering the public sector, with proponents arguing that they reduce costs while increasing performance. As a result, market-oriented reforms and associated practices are increasingly being deployed throughout public administrations. Whether or not we theorize the contemporary state of public administration as “post-NPM”, markets not only seem to prevail - the ambitions and expectations on them as governmental instruments are higher than ever (Brunsson & Jutterström, 2018). These processes leave no policy area behind, and various policy fields, from social policy to higher education are marketized in in specific yet different ways. To exemplify, these may include the continuous attempt of finding new ways of inserting competition in public service delivery, the search of policy innovations which open up service delivery to new actors and new forms of collaboration, and ongoing legislative processes with the aim of increasing and facilitating competition. This may in turn entail concrete models and policy tools such management by contracts, purchaser-provider split models or similar quasi-market solutions around public services (Hansen & Lindholst, 2016), but also more ideational changes such the re-configuration from citizens to customers, and from professionals into managers (Peetz, 2019).
 
We aim to theorize the ongoing marketization of the public sector in different contexts and from different points of entry. As we do so we follow the influential body of literature that lately have come to pay specific attention to markets as socially produced and arranged through complex entanglements of actors, expertise and material objects (eg. Çalişkan and Callon, 2010). Here, we are interested in how public administrations produce markets through such arrangements, how they mobilize certain forms of expertise and how they setup their organizational formats to act as an interface with private interests. This also includes an elevation of questions related to who the organizing agents are and why these actors choose to intervene, questions that have been described as key to understanding the organization of markets over time and space. Moreover, we are equally interested in how public administrations are themselves recast as market actors in diverse ways as the market arrangements also reaches into them. Not least, we find it important to understand how this form of marketization have effects for established bureaucratic principles and its potential for changing the role and function of civil servants. Finally, we argue that beyond understanding how material objects, expertise and actors are drawn together in market arrangements, it is of vital importance to detail their consequences in terms of power and politics.  
 
Brunsson, N. & Jutterström, M. (Eds.) (2018). Organizing and reorganizing markets. Oxford Oxford University Press.

Çalışkan, K. & Callon, M. (2010) ‘Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets’, Economy and Society, 39(1), 1–32.

Hansen, M.B. & Lindholst, A.C. (Eds.) (2016). Marketization revisited. International Journal of Public Sector Management.29(5):398–408.
Peetz, T. (2019). Neoliberalism or organizational economization? Ephemera Theory & Politics in Organization, 19(3): 591–613.

In this panel we seek to address the overarching research question: “How are public administrations creating markets, and how are these markets reconfiguring public administrations?”
 
Markets are increasingly becoming one of the more preferred means for re-engineering the public sector, with proponents arguing that they reduce costs while increasing performance. As a result, market-oriented reforms and associated practices are increasingly being deployed throughout public administrations. Whether or not we theorize the contemporary state of public administration as “post-NPM”, markets not only seem to prevail - the ambitions and expectations on them as governmental instruments are higher than ever (Brunsson & Jutterström, 2018).
 
Theoretically, we are interested in how public administrations produce market arrangements, how they mobilize certain forms of expertise and how they setup their organizational formats to act as an interface with private interests. Moreover, we are equally interested in how public administrations are themselves recast as market actors in diverse and numerous ways as the market arrangements also reaches into them.

Accordingly, we welcome papers that theorize how producing markets also produces novel expressions of public administrations. Such papers can draw on different theoretical traditions and we welcome scholars from any discipline that can provide novel input for the continued discussion on these matters. To be clear, while empirical papers are welcome, we are especially interested in papers that explicitly theorize such processes, preferably also by discussing power and/or politics.