Accounting and Competitive Tendering in UK Local Government: An Institutionalist Interpretation of the New Public Management

Abstract

The paper applies institutional theory to analyse the changing role of accounting and contracting in UK local government as the compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) regime was extended to white‐collar activities such as housing management, finance, legal services and information technology. Employing an organizational fields model, accounting changes were seen to be influenced by a combination of legal coercion, normative and competitive forces, the resistance and manipulation of the large local authorities together with the facticity of the new accounting and contracting regimes. The theoretical framework is applied to field‐work carried out in a large metropolitan authority in the north of England where CCT methodologies directly affected housing management but not other services such as finance. Although resisting CCT for finance, the authority subsequently introduced a radical scheme of voluntary competitive tendering for selected finance processes. The paper examines how accounting and contracting may be adapted to emerging trends in the New Public Management associated with Best Value policies.