<title>Abstract</title> Networking has become a key theme in the research literature, reflecting a shift from government to governance. Though scholarship on this topic has grown apace, little evidence has been produced on the ways in which managerial networking manifests itself across national settings. Given...

<title>Abstract</title> This article tests the independent effects of strategy formulation and strategy content on organizational performance. The formulation variables include rational planning, logical instrumentalism and strategy process absence, and the strategy content variables are prospecting, defending...

Public choice theory provides three main principles for the management of social housing: market structures should be competitive; organisations should be compelled to produce information on their efficiency and effectiveness; and large agencies should be disaggregated into smaller units. Social...

This article argues that Best Value is a form of Total Quality Management (TQM). At the core of Best Value are the TQM principles of customer focus, continuous improvement and team--working. To discover if Best Value will deliver the performance improvements expected of local government, the...

We present the first empirical assessment of the U.K. Labour government's program of public management reform. This reform program is based on rational planning, devolution and delegation, flexibility and incentives, and enhanced choice. Measures of these variables are tested against external...

<title>Abstract</title> Central government in the UK has introduced procedures for assessing and categorizing the performance of public organizations. These procedures assume that performance is attributable to organizational decisions rather than external circumstances. This implies that mismanagement, rather...

<title/> The authors report the results of the first quantitative study of senior management turnover in English local authorities. Consistent with existing management theory, rates of executive succession were found to be higher in an adverse external environment, and where organizational performance...

<italic>When do new chief executives in the public sector make a difference to organizational performance? Theory suggests that executive succession has both adaptive and disruptive effects on public organizations, and the balance between these is likely to depend on the performance of the organization...</italic>

This paper develops and tests a model of variations in local economic policies. The influence of unemployment, financial resources and party politics on economic development expenditures is estimated empirically in the London Boroughs. The statistical evidence indicates that the model provides a...

Conventional analyses of local government structure focus on the revolutionary changes that result from deliberate reorganisations. We propose a new perspective on structural change that emphasises the importance of evolutionary processes as well as radical reforms. Evolutionary changes in...