Public agencies in the UK and elsewhere are increasingly required to set outcome targets as a strategy for improving their services. A crucial element of this 'results orientation' is a clear definition of the desired outcomes and a specification of appropriate performance indicators. A recent...

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...

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...

We present the first empirical assessment of the U.K. Labour governments program of public management reform. This reform program is based on rational planning, devolution and delegation, flexibility and incentives, and enhanced choice. Measures of these variables are tested against external and...

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...