Suchergebnisse

The Labour Government has introduced legislation to place a new duty of Best Value on local authorities, and abolish compulsory competitive tendering. This work identifies the differences between the two systems and evaluates the development of the new regime, using case studies

National policy makers and local service managers are striving to identify strategies to improve the performance of failing public organizations. However, little academic research on public service turnaround is available to inform their efforts. By contrast, substantial work has been conducted on the reversal of decline in the private sector. A model of the turnaround process is developed from this literature, and evidence on the effectiveness of different turn-around strategies is reviewed. The private sector evidence suggests that recovery from failure is associated with strategies of retrenchment, repositioning, and reorganization. The potential feasibility and impact of these strategies in the public sector is evaluated, and major research questions on public service turnaround are identified.

Research in the broad field of public administration has paid insufficient attention to public service performance. Moreover, the impact of public management variables on performance has not been extensively theorised or tested. A framework for assessing the impact of public management strategies or organizational performance is presented, and the fragments of empirical evidence on this topic are identified and synthesised. The existing evidence suggests that management does matter, and that further research in this area would have theoretical and practical benefits.