Search results

In this study, the authors revisit Alberta's public-private partnership (P3) program after 20 years of field level experience by retracing its historical emergence and institutional evolution given its political context. Specifically, the authors adopt a path dependence perspective to reconstruct and reexamine Alberta's P3 program emergence, reflect on the successes achieved, and articulate challenges that must be overcome to institutionalize P3s as part of Alberta's infrastructure delivery environment in the future.

Adopting a constructivist approach and a case-based methodology, the authors (re)analyze the activities of governmental agents, private industry, and other actors as part of a new infrastructure policy introduced in 2002 to transform the provincial institutional landscape to accommodate P3.

The authors find Alberta's P3 emergence was driven by the necessity of its infrastructure deficits, political expediency, and resource scarcity. Furthermore, with well-entrenched conservative political actors as gatekeepers, Alberta's P3 implementation demonstrated stability and incremental change simultaneously, consistent with core elements of path dependency. Following the introduction of P3 in Alberta, the province lacked formal institutional structures that would transition its P3 program from good to great and enable it to become firmly embedded in the public infrastructure delivery landscape. With the subsequent absence of P3-convinced (political) leadership and uncertainty about its P3 policy direction, Alberta was unable or unwilling to consolidate the progress made at the start of the program.

Most recently, the emergence of new political leadership in Alberta has (re)catalyzed policy progress, pointing toward a more methodical program approach, and suggesting a rediscovered confidence in P3s in the province with the establishment of a P3 Office (P3O), including nascent formal rules for unsolicited bids. These recent changes in our view make for a much more anchored policy and could lead to program sustainability and eventual institutionalization. Given the unpredictability of the recent political change, a more robust analysis of the relationship between political party control, leadership, and P3 stability is required to anticipate future policy and organizational obstacles.

In classical perspective, projects under a certain size are not feasible for P3. However, there is an emerging trend on using P3 to deliver projects which are frequently at small- to medium- size to meet ever-increasingly complex social needs, including enhancing lifecycle performance of existing facilities, designing and building for resilience and sustainability, ensuring cost effectiveness of public spending and fostering innovation. In contrast with the increasing implementation, small and medium P3s, especially those in the United States, receive little attention in existing studies. This study aims at answering the question: in the context of US, what features of those small- to medium- sized P3s with success records enable the selection of P3 as delivery method.

By critically reviewing the literature, this study synthesizes and discusses the challenges in classical perspective. The authors use a framework drawn from the transaction cost to propose two types of enabling features that could contribute to the success of small and medium P3s. The proposed enabling features are supported by case study of twelve identified small- to medium- sized P3s which have reached financial closure as of 2018 in the United States.

The results show how the identified enabling opportunities have been used in these cases to enhance the viability of the P3 model in the infrastructure market. The two types of features are high tolerance enabler explained by the expectations on indirect and non-monetary compensations, and cost reduction enablers including: (1) being in the sectors with well-established traditions on using private investments; (2) having developers with expertise on infrastructure finance; (3) being in the jurisdictions with favorable legislative environment and (4) having less-uncertain future project revenue.

This study, for the first time, critically examines the enabling features of the P3 model for delivering small and medium infrastructure projects in the United States. This research sheds light on the credibility and viability of small- to medium- sized P3 and increases the confidence in policy makers to promote this model.

This study adopts an institutional entrepreneurship perspective in the context of public–private partnerships (P3s) to highlight the role of social actors in enacting institutional change in a complex organizational setting. By studying the actions of two prominent social actors, the authors argue that successful institutional change is the result of dynamic managerial activity supported by political clout, organizational authority and the social positioning of actors.

The authors conducted a field-based case study in a complex institutional and organizational setting in Alberta, Canada. The authors employed an institutional entrepreneurship perspective to identify and analyze the activities of two allied actors motivated to transform the institutional environment for public infrastructure delivery.

The empirical study suggests that the implementation of institutional change is both individualistic and collaborative. Moreover, it is grounded in everyday organizational practices and activities and involves a coalition of allies invested in enacting lasting change in organizational practice(s), even when maintaining the status quo seems advantageous.

The authors critique the structural explanations that dominate the literature on public–private partnership implementation, which downplays the role of agency and minimizes its interplay with institutional logics in effecting institutional change. Rather, the authors demonstrate that, given the observed impact of social actors, public–private partnership adoption and implementation can be theorized as a social phenomenon.

This exploratory study aims to look at the policy and public-procurement requirements set forth in state public-private partnership (P3) legislation and their relationship to P3 project implementation.

The research uses both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches. The paper begins by defining P3s and discussing their increasing importance as a form of private-sector delivery of public facilities and infrastructure. The major policy and procurement requirements of state P3 legislation are then identified. Using the public works financing database of 301 P3 project closures between 1996 and 2016, the relationships between state P3 legislative policy and procurement requirements and P3 project implementation are explored.

The study finds positive associations between 15 of 16 state P3 legislative policy and procurement requirements.

This is the first study of its kinds to explore the relationships between state P3 policy and procurement requirements and P3 project implementation (project closures).

The aim of this paper is to employ the perspectives of uses and gratification theory and experiential marketing to investigate the antecedents of virtual community (VC) members’ attitude formation and knowledge‐contribution intention through the sense of virtual community (SOVC) and the interaction between their motivations and experiences in a peer‐to‐peer problem solving (P3) VC.

This study chose a well‐known professional IT VC in Taiwan, the ITHelp community, as the target for data collection. An online survey linked from the homepage of this community was used through the cooperation of the vendor of this community. This study employs the partial least squares (PLS) method to examine the research model.

The results show that members’ attitudes toward their VCs are determined by the interaction between their motivations for and experiences with P3 VC usages. Moreover, SOVC plays full mediating roles in the relationship between attitude toward P3 VC and knowledge‐contribution intention.

VC managers need to aim at creating pleasant experiences for their members and foster their belongingness and consciousness to form higher SOVC. The conclusions are restricted to a VC that involves IT‐related issues, which focuses problem solving rather than being socially oriented. Members of IT P3 VCs are usually highly innovative and enthusiastic about new IT products, which is quite different from the membership of other P3 VCs.

Extant studies seldom considered the effects of SOVC and members’ experiences on knowledge‐contribution behavior. The mediating role of SOVC and the interaction between motivations and experience can enhance our understanding about online knowledge‐contribution behavior.

This paper seeks to examine the insights that the individual agency perspective offers to the study of public‐private partnerships (P3s). It extends prior research, which has primarily adopted an economic and structural perspective, by considering the ways by which individual actors involved in these complex arrangements can shape their evolutionary path.

This conceptual paper identifies the key research issues and questions in the P3 literature and highlights how these concerns can be further illuminated by the insights offered through the individual agency perspective.

The paper identifies four key issues in the P3 literature questions as the antecedents of P3s, pre‐formation processes, governance models and mechanisms, and evolution and adaptation. Introduction of the individual agency perspective to these research concerns highlights additional potentially explanatory factors for P3 formation and successful adaptation. The paper demonstrates that considering this perspective alongside current explanations can extend our current thinking and usefully add depth, breadth and linkage to P3 research.

This research challenges the current conceptions of P3 governance as one of choosing the appropriate structural option. It offers agency considerations at each stage in the sequence of P3 process and argues that individual capability and action can influence the success and effectiveness of these arrangements.

This research introduces a managerial perspective to the study of P3s and reframes the current thinking around governance of these forms. This contrasts with the more economic and structural agendas of public policy research.

This article argues that confusion exists as to exactly what constitutes a public-private partnership (P3). This confusion, it is maintained, creates problems for public procurement professionals when advising elected officials and government administrators on the appropriate uses of P3s. The article looks first at the imprecise language used by organizations (governments and others) to define, describe and discuss P3s. A proposed consensus definition of P3s is then introduced together with an accompanying proposed taxonomy of P3 types. The article then demonstrates how the proposed consensus definition and taxonomy can bring more clarity to discussions about P3s and their uses. The article concludes by suggesting that some public procurement standard setting organization should undertake the task of developing and promulgating more prescriptive guidance on P3s.

The use of public-private partnerships (P3s) for infrastructure delivery, particularly for highway projects, has been increasing in the USA. The purpose of this paper is to empirically evaluate the difference of P3s and non-P3 highway projects, in terms of their costs and efficiency.

An empirical model of highway construction costs was estimated using a linear regression model that explicitly accounts for the cost differential between the contracts. The differences between efficiencies was also evaluated through a two-stage analysis, where projects’-specific technical efficiencies were first estimated using stochastic frontier analysis and data envelopment analysis, and then the difference in technical efficiencies between the two groups were evaluated through non-parametric tests of means.

Controlling for various project characteristics, the P3 highway projects in the USA showed higher initial costs than non-P3 projects. However, the efficiency scores showed no significant difference between the two groups. This inconsistency between initial costs and technical efficiency scores suggests the complexity involved in P3 projects, which are not captured in the efficiency analysis.

Limited availability of P3 project data due to their immaturity (in cases of P3 projects that include operation and management) and their complex engineering specifications may have caused biased results. Importantly, the study analyzed project costs as of financial close; post-financial close variations, such as change orders during construction, cost/schedule overruns, and renegotiation of contract terms, are beyond the scope of the analysis in this study.

The present study contributes to the literature as one of the earliest empirical analyses of the performance of highway P3s in the USA. Also, this is one of the first studies to employ frontier analysis methods that focus on the efficiency of highway project delivery.

Using survey data of nonprofit board members from racial/ethnic minority groups, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how the three work group perspectives toward diversity theorized by Ely and Thomas (2001) – discrimination-and-fairness (P1), access-and-legitimacy (P2), and integration-and-learning (P3) – are associated with minority group members’ inclusion experiences.

The paper investigates how an organization's motivations for board diversity, as perceived by racial/ethnic minority board members, drive various organizational- and board-level practices and behaviors, and ultimately impact their experience of inclusion. The paper uses two different operationalizations of the diversity perspectives to assess their impact on minority board members’ inclusion experiences. The hypothesized model was tested using partial least squares analyses on the responses of 403 racial/ethnic minority nonprofit board members.

Regardless of the measure used, racial/ethnic minority board members experienced increased feelings of inclusion as the perceived operating perspective for board diversity changed from P1 to P2 to P3, while concurrently the mediating factors influencing inclusion experiences changed in significance. Findings support the importance of the integration-and-learning perspective for the experience of inclusion by racial/ethnic minority board members.

Findings indicate that organizations that employ an integration-and-learning approach to diversity and focus on encouraging their majority group members to engage in inclusive behaviors, rather than on policies and procedures, will engender the racial/ethnic minorities’ experience of inclusion.

The paper quantitatively investigated how three organizational diversity paradigms are associated with the individual inclusion experiences of minority nonprofit board members.

The threat posed to the environment by CFC cleaning processes for printed circuit boards has led to an investigation of possible alternatives. In a preselection procedure, surprising results were obtained using propylene glycol ethers (PGE), solvents for the paint industry. In this study these ethers are compared with five other groups of cleaners, which can be divided into four water‐based classes: weak acid, neutral, weak and strong alkaline, and water miscible organic solvent cleaners which are non halogen‐containing and biodegradable. The cleaning power of PGE and other cleaners is tested on fluxes for wave and reflow soldering. Comparative results for the different groups are given, combined with surface insulation resistance measurements. Good results can be obtained using alkaline or solvent cleaners. However, it appears that the cleaning results depend heavily on the type of flux used and the choice of a matching cleaning process.