<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...

This paper assesses the impact of central policies on the autonomy of local authorities in Wales since 1979. Several problems in the measurement of central constraints are identified, including the distinction between aggregate and individual autonomy, the specification of central objectives and...