Symposium on the Hollow State: Capacity, Control, and Performance in Interorganizational Settings

is an adjective that has described many problems of the twentieth century-from T.S. Eliot's poem Men to Hollow Politics (Economist 1996). Corporation (Business Week 1986) introduced managers to a new organizational form that replaced internal production with a network of subcontractors. The hollow corporation provided the inspiration for my use of the term hollow state as a metaphor to describe the increasing reliance of the public sector on contracting with nonprofit agencies and for-profit firms for the delivery of taxpayer funded goods and services (Milward 1994; Milward and Provan 1993; Milward, Provan, and Else 1993).