Modernising Management Processes in Elderly Care

This study investigates the process of modernising the management of elderly careservices by using competitive contract tendering, referred to as CCT, for the firsttime in Finland. The conceptual approach is based on the framework of circuits ofpower. Data, based on document analysis, interviews, meetings observation andcontinuous interactions with key informants in their organisational settings, arefrom intensive field research conducted in a Finnish city from 2008 to 2013. Find-ings show that the process of introducing CCT to modernise management of publicelderly care exposed that political decision makers and public managers lack pro-fessional skills to limit procurement risks in designing and implementing the CCTprocess. As a result, the total costs of using CCT to outsource aged care servicesbecame much higher than expected. A contribution is to show the ways in whichmodernisation of public services by using free market mechanisms, such as CCT, isa field of inter-organisational circuits of power whose outcome cannot be assumedto save costs to the community when political decision makers and public manag-ers are incompetent and unable to think and act as business minded actors.