Compare methods

	Comparative Public Administration	Transaction Cost Analysis in the Public Sector
Field	Public Administration	Public Administration
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1964	1981
Originator	Fred W. Riggs	Oliver E. Williamson
Type	Cross-system comparative analysis	Institutional-economics analysis
Seminal source	Riggs, F. W. (1964). Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN: 9780395067352	Williamson, O. E. (1981). The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach. American Journal of Sociology, 87(3), 548–577.
Aliases	Comparative Administrative Analysis, Cross-National Public Administration Study, Comparative Bureaucracy Analysis	Public Transaction Cost Economics, Make-or-Buy Analysis in Government, Transaction Cost Governance Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Comparative public administration is the systematic study of administrative systems across countries, regions or historical periods in order to explain similarities and differences in how states organise and run their bureaucracies. Fred Riggs, a pioneer of the field, argued in his 1964 Theory of Prismatic Society that administration cannot be understood apart from its ecological context — the social, economic, political and cultural environment in which it is embedded. The method compares administrative structures, behaviours and performance while situating each case in its setting, guarding against the assumption that arrangements which work in one country will transfer to another. Its purpose is to build generalisable knowledge about administration that is sensitive to context rather than ethnocentric.	Transaction cost analysis in the public sector applies the economics of organisation to decisions about how government should structure the provision of goods and services — in house, by contract, or through hybrid arrangements. Oliver Williamson's 1981 article The Economics of Organization set out the transaction-cost approach, arguing that the choice of governance structure should economise on the costs of negotiating, monitoring and enforcing exchanges, not just on production costs. The method identifies the relevant transaction, assesses its attributes such as asset specificity and uncertainty, enumerates the governance alternatives, and aligns the structure to the transaction so that total cost is minimised. Its purpose is to explain and guide make-or-buy and contracting decisions in public administration.