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The purpose of this paper is to explore the institutional challenges of coordinating regulatory agencies and the costs associated with compliance requirements in Tanzania’s tourist industry.

This paper is based on qualitative research conducted in the northern tourism circuit of Tanzania. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with owner-managers of tourism enterprises, heads of regulatory agencies and leaders of business associations (n=60). The findings were analysed through triangulating the data from various sources to establish emerging themes and patterns in accordance with the theoretical underpinnings and research objectives.

The findings show that tourism enterprises are governed by a multitude of national, sub-national and sectoral institutions mandated to impose several taxes, fees and levies on enterprises. As a result, tourism enterprises are required to obtain duplicate licences and are subjected to uncoordinated inspections. The poor treatment by regulatory agencies, the unclear basis for estimating taxes and levies, inadequate tax education and closure of businesses were also reported as key regulatory challenges. Most challenges emerge from agentification of the public sector and the lack of a legal framework in which to formally facilitate coordination and information sharing amongst government agencies.

The paper proposes streamlining the functions of divergent institutions governing the industry by increasing intergovernmental coordination through delegating some functions, sharing information and enforcing formal inter-ministerial and cross-government consultation structures.

This paper adds value to previous regulatory assessments by empirically analysing the specific sector and showing how the principal–agent relationship for the public sector can be improved through enforcing coordination of the multiple agencies governing the tourist industry.

The aim of the research is to discuss the design and development of a mobile application using two technologies known as software agent (SA) and mobile web services.

The objectives were achieved by testing the integration of SAs and mobile web services into mobile applications. The approach suggested in the paper has relied on some modeling techniques such as service chart diagram and addressed some security issues.

It was found in the course of the work the necessity of being aware of the limitations of mobile devices, despite all the major developments that are happening. In addition, it was found that it is deemed appropriate to provide some modeling techniques which suit the development of mobile applications.

The paper discusses the concept of mobile web services. The paper is particularly useful to those who are in the field of mobile computing.

This review frames the state of agencification studies to explore the development and results achieved to date (Q1: what has been done?) and identify future directions (Q2: what could be done?) of the studies.

A systematic approach is carried out to summarize how agencification is adopted, variability of implementation, and its effects, from literature published in the past 48 years (1973–2020). Eligibility criteria include a combination of literature quality (number of citation) and source reputation (journal impact factor). From this, 84 articles and 9 books were included in the review.

The review finds various country-specific adoptions of agencification and some similarities and differences of agencification practice across various administrative settings. Studies on the effects of agencification is limited and offer mixed results. Meanwhile, little attempt was made to reveal how micro-processes are happening in the everyday practice of agencification. The paper outlines a set of research agenda and possible alternative approaches for future studies.

This review provides an avenue for scholars and practitioners to pay more attention to the “street level” of agencification. Future studies may challenge New Public Management's view of agencification by proposing new perspectives based on a direct observation.

This study contributes to the growing amount of agencification studies by synthesizing theoretical and empirical works across countries covering developed and developing economies in local, regional, and national levels of government.

This chapter examines the role and importance of leadership in public management reform through the experience of Hong Kong. It aims to identify the gap between leadership in public organizations and public management reform in both theory and research and to make recommendations on how the gap can be bridged, particularly under the Asian context. It is a major irony that while both leadership and public management reform have a common concern of fostering positive change in public organizations, these two streams of research are separated, incompatible, and even conflicting. While leadership study is influenced by disciplines such as the psychology and emphasizes a multifaceted approach, most public management reforms are based on the New Public Management (NPM) model which is economics-oriented and structure-driven. Through studying the role of leadership in the public management reform in Hong Kong, it is argued the hollowing-out of leadership in reform is often one of the leading causes for the failure to achieve the expected outcomes. This chapter will elaborate its argument in the following sequence. First, it will review the generic literature on leadership to highlight the importance and relevancy of leadership for public organizations. Second, it will point out the leadership crisis in public management reform caused by the dominance of the NPM model. Finally, it will discuss the negative impact of the hollowing-out of leadership on public management reform and how this problem should be tackled.

A number of studies and indicators have ranked European countries in terms of the performance of their public sectors. This paper aims to demonstrate that there are important conceptual problems with such rankings and comparisons.

Using the existing indicators, the paper first shows how European countries' public sectors are ranked. It then goes on to show how conceptual problems with these indicators may lead to incorrect conclusions.

Countries' public sector performance cannot be summarised using a single indicator because of inability to define “the public sector” and the disagreement on what it means for public sectors to perform.

Despite increasing demand and supply in policy circles for international public sector indicators, the existing ones are unreliable.

This paper extends the assessment of international public sector indicators beyond a mere technical evaluation.

The notion, technologies and organizational elaboration of traceability have become more prominent and more systematic in recent years in many different fields, notably food. This chapter argues that traceability has many faces: it is a programmatic value embedded in norms and regulations; it is a frontier of technology development such as blockchain, and it is a continuous processual and political dynamic of organizational connectedness, leading also to resistance. These different aspects make up “traceability infrastructures,” which embody a number of tensions and dynamics. Three such dynamics are explored in this chapter: the tension between organizational entities and meta-entities, problems of agency and the distribution of responsibility, and dialectics of connectivity and disconnectivity. These three dynamics generate three testable propositions, which define a prolegomena for a new subject of “traceability studies.” Overall, traceability is argued to be an ongoing process of connecting discrete agencies – a process of “chainmaking” – and is formative of more or less stable forms of distributed agency and responsibility.

This chapter provides a summary of the main findings, indicating that none of the public service reforms studied has worked particularly well. It then looks at ‘The Way Forward’ by analysing current proposals of the Ramaphosa government to reform the public sector. There are legislative proposals to give HoDs powers to appoint and dismiss staff, along with provisions devolving administrative powers to HoDs, while retaining strategic powers. There is a provision for the EA to intervene in the event of HoDs failing or refusing to fulfil a power or duty in terms of the proposed Act. This does provide a back door for Ministers to intervene in administration. Further, there is likely to be resistance against proposals to reduce politicians’ role in human resources, including members of the President’s own political party who are reluctant to lose delegation powers. Finally, it is suggested that the government should move away from centralised policies, particularly in respect of performance management, towards network governance-type approaches which promote a non-hierarchical approach to Public Administration.

Transnationalism is a multi-faceted phenomenon which has impacted on society and challenged, inter alia, the paradigm of national affiliations. The trasnationalisation of the European field has arguably contributed to a political arena where embryonic post-national identities and new forms of belonging are being negotiated, challenged and legitimised. By investigating the discourses of members of a transnational NGO of ‘active’ citizens, this chapter seeks to understand how current European identities are discursively constructed from bottom up in the public sphere. Appropriating CDA, this chapter offers insights into how discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the speakers and predicated on the indexicality of transnational frames, construct Europe and patterns of belonging to it. This chapter suggests different conceptual dimensions of transnationalism enacted by members in discourse which are conveniently summarised as nation-centric, Euro-centric and cosmopolitan.

This chapter discusses the cross-sectional relationships between national and local government, citizens and hybrid organisations via a historical case study, that of the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) during its existence 1933–1948. It finds that the LPTB was a good example of hybridity located in an earlier time period than most research examines, and that the arrangements by which it was governed resulted in some counter-intuitive outcomes which challenge the findings from research located in more recent periods concerning the performance of hybrid organisations. However, it supports other research proposing that the role of elites as well as institutional contexts is a key factor in the creation and operation of semi-autonomous organisations, and it accepts that objectively measuring the performance in order to make meaningful comparison is not only extremely problematic but may even inhibit performance.