Through interviews conducted with nonprofit agency managers in the New York City metropolitan area, Susan Bernstein vividly describes their experiences with "contracting out," the principal way that the "reluctant" American welfare state has of providing public services through the private sector. The agency administrators look upon this as a nightmarish game and their stories illuminate how welfare state mechanisms work in practice as well as the tangled nature of bureaucracies Bernstein illustrates and analyzes these administrators’ strategies for managing the administrative, ethical, and political issues of contracted services. Managing Contracted Services is one of the first books to examine how administrators manage contracted services in a bureaucratic and political environment.

Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action.

In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works.