The authors report the results of the first quantitative study of senior management turnover in English local authorities. Consistent with existing management theory, rates of executive succession were found to be higher in an adverse external environment, and where organizational performance is...

Surveys are an important methodological tool in public management research. Multiple informant surveys are held to have considerable methodological advantages over elite surveys (the practice of surveying a top manager, e.g., a chief executive). Although in principle multiple informant surveys...

Miles and Snow, among others, argue that strategy content is an important influence on organizational performance. Their typology, applied recently to public organizations in the United Kingdom, divides strategic actors into four general types: prospectors, defenders, analyzers, and reactors....

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...

Problems of public service 'failure' are high on the political agenda in the UK, and many national and local organizations are searching for effective turnaround strategies. Although little research on turnaround in the public sector has been undertaken, there is a substantial number of studies...

The fate of careers, morale, financial assistance and future freedoms depend on English local councils' places in Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) groups. This article explains why the organizational attributes of local authorities are weak predictors of CPA outcomes. The authors'...

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...

A conceptual framework for evaluating statutory performance indicators for local authorities is developed. The framework, which contains 14 dimensions of organizational performance, is then applied to the indicators set for local government from 1993/94 to 2001/02. The results show that the...