Loopholes to Load-Shed: Contract Management Capacity, Representative Bureaucracy, and Goal Displacement in Federal Procurement Decisions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Federal contracting is complicated by the conflict between system maintenance and the more intangible, normative goals of government. This study focuses on a federal procurement program that explicitly pursues equity as a normative goal in the contracting of services from small and disadvantaged businesses. For many federal agencies, low contract management capacity makes the pursuit of this goal difficult, prompting these agencies to focus on goals that are more proximate, easily achievable, and tangible. We argue that both behavioral and representative bureaucracy theories help explain how organizations can synthesize goals in this particular context, thereby reducing the propensity of federal agencies to displace equity for the more proximately achievable goal of system maintenance. Our findings indicate support for this argument. We discuss the contributions of this study to studies of goal displacement and, more generally, to theory integration in public management scholarship.