The influence of early events in the history of a country, a social phenomenon, or an organization on later developments has received significant attention in many social science disciplines. Often dubbed "path dependence," this influence occurs when early events influence later outcomes even...

Senior government executives make many decisions, and not-infrequently these are difficult. By "difficult" decisions, the literature generally means ones characterized by complicated and uncertain information, and hard tradeoffs among conflicting value objectives. In a range of interviews with...

Over the last decade there has been a dramatic expansion in use of performance measurement and performance management in government – using measures as a tool to improve performance along dimensions measured. Using this potentially powerful tool to try to remedy underperformance in government,...

The literature on the use of performance measurement in government has featured prominent attention to hypothesized unintended dysfunctional consequences such measurement may produce. We conceptualize these dysfunctional consequences as involving either effort substitution (reducing effort on...

One of the most-pervasive debates in literature on managing people is whether using "hard" or "soft" approaches produces better organizational performance--those seeking to influence behavior by pressuring or by nurturing. This paper examines this question in the context of a...

How are senior government executives who attempt to execute an ambitious vision requiring significant strategic change in their organizations able to succeed? How do they go about formulating a strategy in the first place? What managerial and leadership techniques do they use to execute their...

Compared with other societies, the United States makes unusually extensive use of adversary institutions for resolving public conflicts-that is, institutions where the job of advocates is to present for a third party the strongest possible case for their own point of view and where...

One answer to the question of why government organizations don't perform better-common in academic “public choice” literature but also in folk wisdom-is that resources come too easily, independent of performance. Some businessmanagement literature suggests that a crisis in resource flows can...