No reader of professional journals, agency reports, or the daily press needs to be told that Professors Gibelman and Demone have assembled a vol- ume of contributions to a very lively debate. The two words highlighted, "privatization" and "contracting," sum up the prescriptions of many for social service reform and the anxieties of others who question the new strategies. The pace and scale of developments over the past 2 decades sometimes allows us to forget that the subject has a long history. Privatization may be thought of as involving public turnover to the private sector of responsi-...