Research interests
- Public contracts and procurement
- Commercialisation and marketization of public services
- Cross-sector partnerships
- Policy implementation
- Digital government
Alice’s broad research interests are in the politics and practice of public sector organisation design, particularly decisions about the boundaries between the public and private sectors and questions of public ownership. She is interested in the ways in which public management decisions can have wide-ranging consequences for people’s experience of government and the effects of public management reforms on the quality and responsiveness of public services.
Current projects
Alice has two ongoing research streams. The first, based on her doctoral research explores government-contractor relationships in outsourced public services and how they effect and are affected by market competition. She explores how more flexible contractual arrangements, based on trust and collaboration, are being used to manage the risk and uncertainty involved in outsourcing public services. She uses online survey experiments and administrative datasets processed using machine learning to analyse the evolution of government contracting relationships over time. She examines the effects that these practices have on competition for public contracts and on the quality of services being provided.
The second research stream examines the impact of cross-sector collaborations . Alice is currently working, with colleagues from University College London, on a project investigating how collaborative community planning processes, involving community organisations, local government, and businesses, are changing relationships between public organisations and local people. She is also working on a survey experiment examining the effects of different contracted and partnership delivery models on support for and engagement with public services.