Current Workshop research has its origins in earlier work on patterns of organization for water resource development and the organization of government in metropolitan areas that provided points of departure for a series of empirical inquiries concerned with how different patterns of organization affect the delivery of public services in metropolitan areas. Careful studies of structure and performance in the provision of police services challenged much of the conventional wisdom with respect to the study of local government and public administration. Drawing on these early studies, inquiries were pursued about how to conceptualize patterns of interorganizational arrangements as these apply to public economies as distinguished from market economies. The critical problems requiring recourse to governmental organization concern the consumption or use of public goods and services. Once consumption or use is collectively organized, diverse options are available for producing public services.
Private enterprises have a potentially important place to enhance performance in public economies.
A shift to multiorganizational arrangements, as units of analysis in the public sector, opened possibilities for better understanding the performance characteristics of federal systems of governance. Coproduction came to be understood as a fundamental process in the relationships among officials, public employees, and citizens in the delivery and use of public services. Citizens are essential coproducers of many public services in the same way that students are essential coproducers of educational services. The Workshop's empirical inquiries about the relationship of alternative patterns of organization to performance in the delivery of public services led logically to more basic constitutional issues about the terms and conditions for organizing systems of governance. It is here that political theory addresses the constitutional level of analysis where constitutions are viewed as specifying the terms and conditions of government.