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The Public Procurement Rules in Action: An Empirical Exploration of Social Impact and Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2017

Amy Ludlow
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Abstract

Governments are increasingly turning to the market to provide public goods, works and (perhaps most controversially) services. Markets, and market values, have come to govern our lives as never before and the financial crisis appears to have done little to dampen governments’ faiths in markets. The public procurement rules define some of the parameters within which governments must engage with the market but the ideology of these rules, particularly how much ‘space’ they afford Member States to pursue non-commercial policies in their procurement decision-making, is deeply contested. This chapter argues that there is a missing empirical dimension to these ideological discussions. It seeks to partially redress this by presenting findings from an ethnographic study of a competitive tendering exercise at a British prison, from which it is argued that a more complex ideological picture emerges than appears from doctrinal analyses of the rules.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies , Volume 16 , 2014 , pp. 13 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Centre for European Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge 2014

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References

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25 I acknowledge though that the procurement rules have an internal market legal basis and the Court has used this before as a means of prioritising internal market objectives over competing social objectives. See for example interpretation of the Posted Workers’ Directive (96/71/EC), which is based upon free movement of services. See further Blanpain, R, Freedom of Services in the European Union: Labour and Social Security Law (The Hague, Kluwer Law International, 2006) 184–85Google Scholar and Novitz, T, ‘UK Implementation of the Posting of Workers Directive 96/71/EC’ in Evju, S (ed), Cross-Border Services, Posting of Workers, and Multilevel Governance (Oslo, University of Oslo, 2013) 329–57Google Scholar.

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