Public market -: Political firms

The main argument in this paper is that private companies become an integral part of the political system when public services are contracted out. Private companies begin to compete for influence on political goals to strengthen their positions for future tenders. Firms that are subcontractors to the public sector find that everyday financial decisions may have an impact on the political process. It becomes necessary for a private fir in the public market to internalize the logic of politics. The system theory developed by Niklas Luhmann is the theoretical point of departure, while the empirical study examines the Danish firm Scan Care and its attempt to construct a market for services for elderly people in the first half of the 1990s. The author of this article believes that when public services are contracted out to the private sector, the size of both sectors changes, as does the quality of the relationship between public and private and the semantic meaning of both terms. Contracting out not only leads to a larger market, but also to more politics. Politics explode out of the framework of the public sector into the private sector and become a basic condition for the involvement of firms in public markets. (C) Scandinavian Sociological Association 2000.