A content analysis of the public-private partnership literature: 1979-2017 period

Since the 1980s, the New Public Management (NPM) has led to radical changes in public administration. In the background of these changes, the principles of the NPM such as the downsizing of the state, the use of business-like management techniques and the marketization of public services are included. During this process of change, the idea of public and private sector collaboration in the provision of public services has come to the forefront. This collaboration, conceptualized as the Public-Private Partnership (PPP), spread rapidly around the world after its implementation in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. Today, PPP has been applied in various countries and sectors with its various sub-models. Parallel to this development, the international literature on PPP also has expanded considerably. In this context, the present thesis aims to analyze the academic and analytical orientations in the literature of PPP in the world. Within this framework, in the database of Web of Science (WOS), 385 articles out of 769 articles, containing the wording "Public-Private Partnership" or "PPP" published in English and full-text selected through a systematic sampling method, have been analyzed. Content analysis method was used in this thesis. The study covers the articles published from 1979 to June 2017. The articles were analyzed according to the criteria such as the years of publication, number of authors, the countries studied and where they were published, the number of citation they received, the journals in which they were published, their qualifications, the methods used, the data collection techniques, the secondary data types used, the data analysis methods, the software programs used in data analysis, the organization focused on or government level, the sectors they focused on and the aspect of the PPP. Consequently, the orientations and patterns in the PPP literature have been addressed. In the present study, within the framework of the findings obtained from the international literature, suggestions have been presented for the literature on Turkish PPP.