Organizing Marketization

This chapter elaborates and defines the concept of marketization, relates it to broad historical trends of public management reform and to theories that help understand the global diffusion of marketization in public management reforms in recent decades. Marketization is a broad societal phenomenon, but we delimit the analysis to its role in public sector reforms and its importance for the historical evolution of the public sector. We conceptualize marketization as related to, but different from privatization. At its core, marketization in public management reforms is about using competition and user choice to enhance efficiency and responsiveness in public service delivery. Reforms have introduced a number of Market-Type-Mechanisms (MTMs) and models for managing and organizing marketization and we include these in our conceptualization of marketization. Marketization is compared to other models of public management reform and its analysis is related to the other chapters of the book.