Purpose – Recently, the operations management academic literature has seen articles focusing on the transfer of “lean” thinking or kaizen concept from the private to the public sector. In Spain, during the last 15 years, some local councils have also followed similar improvement...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide details on how the Capital Projects Division within Alberta Infrastructure, in the provincial government of Alberta, started its journey to excellence by following Excellence Canada's framework. The framework focusses on systematic approach to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the applicability of care quality concepts as contract award criteria for public procurement of health and social care, using the case of Sweden. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a literature review, European and Swedish legal texts,...

Purpose – By utilizing the two most commonly used approaches to generate “best practice frontier” to estimate efficiency of observed units, the purpose of this research paper is to estimate technical efficiency for total population of 200 Slovenian municipalities for the 2011 fiscal year....

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on the local government accountants’ perspective towards their current and potential role in the sustainability reporting process and to explore potential factors influencing the further development of their role. Design/methodology/approach – A mail...

Personnel and HRM must face up to the challenge of the Government′s Citizen′s Charter and the implications of BS5750. Looks at the role of HR professionals in local authorities and how areas of operation will alter. The importance of justifying their role in the changes will be a major...

Points out that it is difficult to work learning directly with an organization′s strategic goals and needs. Reports on Scotland′s Central Regional Council′s approach which suggests that strategic goals and eeds should be examined before a learning programme can be implemented. This is done...

This book is a history of outdoor advertising control in Britain between the early-nineteenth century and the beginning of the 1960s. It considers the development of primarily legislative and governmental approaches to controlling commercial signage, billboards, posters and hoardings in rural...

Gives a practical approach to setting up a training programme, delivering that training, and how that approach may be imitated by other cities. Memphis is a city of about three‐quarters‐of‐a‐million population, with all the problems of a growing city. Governing a city is difficult at...

Why should local government show an interest in service quality? Attempts to answer this question by examining the history of quality improvement in local government and by illustrating the findings of a detailed survey of current practice throughout England and Wales. By focusing on the latter...