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This chapter considers how relationships between the state and individual citizens are being structured increasingly through social control contracts in the fields of unemployment and employment services, criminal justice, and education. It evaluates the responsiveness of these regulatory arrangements with reference to the common contract norms of reciprocity, consent, choice, and power. It distinguishes between social control strategies based on centrally determined regulatory frameworks and the more organic development of contractual techniques by professionals in the spheres of probation and social work. The agendas and rationales are shown to be entirely different, with greater governance problems being anticipated in the case of state-imposed measures.

This chapter begins by distinguishing the core behavioural, legal, and rhetorical dimensions of the concept of contract. It traces the historical movement from traditional public procurement to contemporary government by contract, showing how the modern state pursues a wide range of policy purposes through various forms of ‘contract’ and ‘agreement’. It then discusses a subset of government by contract — the New Public Contracting — characterised by the delegation of powers to public agencies in contractual arrangements preserving central government controls and powers of intervention. Three main types of the New Public Contracting are distinguished: administrative contracts, economic contracts, and social control contracts. The chapter ends with an outline of the key issues in the relational analysis of the New Public Contracting.

This chapter considers how legal procedural reforms might help increase legitimacy and effectiveness by controlling the pace and extent of contractualisation in contemporary Britain. It suggests that a major role for responsive law should be to structure the exercise of discretion by ministers and officials in respect of both the development of general policy and its implementation by public agencies in particular instances. The availability of information at all levels of decision making on public contracting is shown to be an essential component of proceduralisation. The chapter also explores how legal frameworks might be reformed in order to help increase effectiveness and fairness through the strengthening of institutions governing administrative contracts, economic contracts, and social control contracts.

This chapter lays the foundations of the socio-legal regulation perspective which informs the substantive investigation of administrative contracts, economic contracts, and social control contracts. It focuses on the necessarily limited capacities of the state in achieving regulatory goals, and on the vocabularies, technologies, and techniques through which power is exercised in contemporary societies. It demonstrates how the New Public Contracting operates by rendering responsible or ‘responsibilizing’ social agents through contractual commitments and obligations undertaken across a whole range of administrative, economic, and social relationships.

This chapter situates the New Public Contracting fully in a regulatory perspective. It considers a range of problems of unresponsiveness associated with legitimacy deficits in the policy process. It then explores regulatory relationships through the notion of ‘contracting regimes’. It suggests that the success of such regimes depends on an appropriate balance being struck between central direction on the one hand, and autonomy on the part of the bodies charged with performing public service functions on the other. It also argues that the effectiveness of the New Public Contracting is dependent on the quality of the contract norms governing relationships between public purchasing agencies and providers in economic contracts, between public authorities and individual citizens in social control contacts, and between government bodies in administrative contracts.