Kontraktsstyrning och kvalitetsindikatorers utformning vid kommunal upphandling : En flerfallsstudie

Sammanfattning: Management by contract is nowadays a common method within the public sector since the NPM overtook as paradigm with its mechanisms of control inspired by the private sector. The public agency is foremost a service provider where they interact with citizens in the service process. Swedish eldercare has significantly increased its expose to competition which means that eldercare can be executed not only by the municipalities own provider. Such an adaption increases the requirements to inspect quality and how the purchasers assure goal achievement by control. The outmost liability stays with the municipality to ensure that the service produces god care since their position as the service purchaser implies the responsibility to plan, precise and evaluate the required work that the executor has to accomplish. Previous research has shown the difficulties to define quality in the tendering process. The purpose of this paper is to examine how municipalities control executors to achieve objectives and inspect the design of quality indicators in agreements. The procedure that followed was to describe various in the theoretical frame of reference factors which influence management by contract and to present different perspectives of approaches on how purchaser can control the providers to ensure quality. The paper is a qualitative multiple case study approach with a document analysis and a semi-structured interview with a specialist in care and procurement. In the result section the municipalities are first displayed separately with a model of analysis as reference and characteristic aspects in the contracts before a gathered result is shown. In the same section there are demonstrating examples that indicates how the municipalities tend to control. The results discussion connect the results with theory and what previously been observed in this field of study. The discussion ends with a general discussion regarding the overall implementation of management by contract. The conclusion answers the purpose from a perspective of the emerged result. The result of the study presents that quality indicators in general are sufficiently concretized to regard them as possible to follow-up and the municipalities way of controlling the provider to assure objectives of the activity are accomplished differs from one another.