The impact of planning on organizational performance in the public sector has been widely debated but has never previously been tested empirically. We develop a statistical model of planning effects that contains five explanatory variables: the extent of organizational analysis, the extent of...

Inspection is an important and growing element of the regulation of public services. We develop a theoretical framework for the evaluation of inspection and illustrate the practical relevance of this framework with reference to the new Best Value inspectorate for UK local government. The...

A framework for the explication of the theoretical basis of public management reforms is developed. The framework is applied to the Best Value regime in UK local government. The implicit assumptions of policy makers are that the Best Value regime will generate service improvements through...

<title>Abstract</title> This article tests the independent effects of strategy formulation and strategy content on organizational performance. The formulation variables include rational planning, logical instrumentalism and strategy process absence, and the strategy content variables are prospecting, defending...

This article argues that Best Value is a form of Total Quality Management (TQM). At the core of Best Value are the TQM principles of customer focus, continuous improvement and team--working. To discover if Best Value will deliver the performance improvements expected of local government, the...

Contributing to an emerging literature on solidarity or group-norm effects on union participation, the authors examine the extent to which union citizenship behavior (UCB) can be characterized as a collective phenomenon. Findings from studies of UK local government workers and teachers suggest...

While product attributes serving as quality and value cues have been extensively researched, very little attention has been paid to the performance cues used by consumers when interacting with multiple employee groups during the service encounter: This article reports on a study which examined...

This article empirically tests the effects of exchange relationships between managers and public sector employees working in seven local government departments. Social exchange theory is used as a framework for predicting three outcomes of Human Resource Management (HRM) practice: employee...