<title/> Choice has re-emerged as a key theme in UK public policy. Drawing on a major empirical study of choice in NHS London, the authors report on some important policy implications. First, NHS as well as private sector providers responded to pro choice incentives. Second, the supply-side response was...

The use of contracts is vital to market transactions. The introduction of market reforms in health care in the UK and other developed countries twenty years ago meant greater use of contracts. In the UK, health care contracting was widely researched in the 1990s. Yet, despite the changing policy...

1. Introduction and rationale -- 2. Professional dominance theory restated -- 3. The shock of the new public management : UK health care organizations transformed? -- 4. Network governance reforms : a post-NPM-reform narrative? -- 5. Governmentality and health care organizations -- 6....

We employ complexity theory to analyse the English National Health Service (NHS)'s organisational response to resurgent tuberculosis across London. Tennison (2002) suggests that complexity theory could fruitfully explore a healthcare system's response to this complex and emergent phenomenon: we...

<title>Abstract</title> This paper introduces a selection of papers on contemporary developments in public sector management which come from a research conference held in 2004. This paper starts by introducing the New Public Management (NPM) and governance paradigms as alternative high level approaches. Such...

<title>Abstract</title> In the critical arena of public management and policy debates several schools currently try to make sense of governance structures and processes, although one has so far had the strongest impact in terms of academic and policy influence in particular in the United Kingdom: network...

<title/> There has been increased interest in the UK in network-based modes of organizing in the public services, as opposed to markets or hierarchies. One supposed advantage of the network form is a greater capacity for the transfer of evidence-based or ‘best’ practices across the network and...