Measuring value for money in public private partnerships: a review of the public sector comparator in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and United Kingdom
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Do Public-Private Partnerships Create Value for Money for the Public Sector? The Portuguese Experience
Over the last few decades, public-private partnerships have been increasingly used by governments around the world to finance and manage complex operations. Doubts about their efficiency have been raised, however. Criticism of public-private partnerships reflects the fact that governments tend to use them as “off-budget” operations, to avoid fiscal constraints. Do they generate “value for money” to the public sector? The literature is less than unanimous. How one assesses value for money in these types of arrangements has become extremely important for public managers.
Old topics, old approaches? ‘Reception’ in television studies and music studies
The question of reception is closely linked to the history and the roots of audience studies. But what is ‘reception’ and what exactly does it mean? As audience studies have developed from a contested novelty to a now established academic field, what do we do with a concept that defined our interests in the past and may now be too wide or even obsolete? This article deals with this issue by mapping how the concept of reception was conceptualized and researched in audience studies of the past ten years, with a focus on studies of music and studies of television. We find that in music, strong focus remains on music reception in the context of performances and events, and this lies in contrast to a small number of studies which instead focus on a framework of music in ordinary life and the audiences’ contextual localities. Concerning reception of television, much of the scholarship starts from the cultural studies tradition and looks at television viewing as a means to construct identities. Discussing these findings, we inquire whether the hybridization of media also implies a hybridization of research traditions and methodologies, and what consequences it has for the balance between textual, production and audience approaches.