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Public libraries, in common with other local government services, are obliged to obtain best value by striving for customer service of the highest quality and greatest efficiency. This article draws on data gathered from the Developing Research in Public Libraries (DRIPL) project, which shows how an understanding of research methods is increasingly required by public library managers to move services forward in strategic and operational terms. Following a description of the principles of best value, research areas are indicated which contribute to the achievement of best value in public libraries. The article notes areas where research could usefully be incorporated and shared more widely, and suggests publicly available resources which could be used by managers for performance measurement and user consultation.

This article aims to examine the effects of the best value policy initiative on the human resource function in Scottish local government. The article examines whether best value provides the human resource function with the opportunity and ability to perform strategically, rather than in a reactive and opportune manner. In addition, it will examine whether the policy will enable the human resource (HR) function to move from the mechanistic, repetitive activities HR specialists report consume their time, towards the “softer”, more consultative tasks associated with the HR function.

This paper explores employee experiences concerning job security/insecurity, workload, job satisfaction and employee involvement in the aftermath of Best Value reviews in a local authority.

Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques employees' experiences of Best Value reviews in a local authority are compared and contrasted with council staff employed elsewhere in the authority to establish the extent to which workplace partnership principles have taken hold under a Best Value regime.

Little evidence of positive outcomes was found from partnership at work under a Best Value regime. The constraints imposed by central government, under which managers in the public sector operate, contributed significantly to partnership at work remaining little more than a hollow shell.

This paper provides a recent in‐depth case study of the experience of workplace partnership, which was developed not discrete from but as part of the Best Value modernisation programme in a local authority.

Procuring best value should be one of the key objectives in public sector construction projects. Best value depends upon sound “selection” strategies which ensure that the outlined project procurement objectives, including client/user demands are met. Examples of “best value” procurement are presented to demonstrate their usefulness and acceptance in principle. Further conceptualizations of various aspects of best value and the “dominance vectors” influencing the ultimate value definitions are developed, in accordance with basic public sector procurement principles. Presents a structured best value based contractor selection framework to optimize realizable value in public sector construction projects.

Best-value supply chains characterized by agility, adaptability, and alignment, have become a crucial strategic means for firms to create and sustain competitive advantage in today’s turbulent environment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate linkage between best-value supply chains and firms’ competitive performance.

In Study 1, survey data from 76 firms is used to test the impact of the three qualities of best-value supply chains on firms’ competitive performance. In Study 2, to test if a firm’s competitive advantage can be sustained through building best-value supply chains, a long-run performance analysis is conducted, which is based on a stock portfolio of firms identified from the American Marketing Association’s annual list of “Supply Chain Top 25.”

The results of Study 1 indicate that the three qualities of best-value supply chains are positively related to firms’ competitive performance. The results of Study 2 show that firms having best-value supply chains generate significant and positive abnormal returns for shareholders over time.

This is a multiple-method research, providing two-level empirical evidence to the investigation of theoretical linkage between best-value supply chains and firms’ competitive performance.

This paper seeks to address the question, “How can private home care providers compete and drive their businesses forward to deliver best value to the community?” Public sector managers in local authorities need this question answered so that they can provide their part of the solution, facilitating best value.

A review was performed of relevant literature on the commissioning (outsourcing) of home care and of best value. This indicates that the future of home care services, taking into consideration commissioning and how best value will be achieved, has not been researched widely. Therefore, an exploratory approach to research was adopted here using in‐depth analysis of a small number of particularly informative local authorities and private providers selected by purposive/judgemental (extreme and critical case) sampling. Personal contact was deemed necessary in order to perform an intensive investigation to pursue in‐depth information.

To improve value one can cut costs and/or increase quality. It is argued here that there is little immediate opportunity for private home care providers to cut costs and with fixed pricing substantial improvements in quality cannot be funded by increased prices or cost cutting elsewhere. To address this impasse, two solutions have been identified; increased economies of scale through consolidation in the marketplace and radical improvements in efficiency through the exploitation of information and communication technology (ICT). Both of these strategies have major ramifications for the “enabling local authority” taking actions to see best value delivered to its community.

This paper presents the findings of exploratory research. A more detailed study covering many more local authorities, private care providers and an international prospective will be conducted over the next two years.

This paper provides timely guidance to public sector managers in local authorities and private home care providers seeking best value in home care through commissioning.

Little has been found in the literature on strategies by which private home care providers can deliver best value, yet such strategies are needed urgently to achieve best value. This paper is a timely contribution to addressing this need.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate procedures and practices to promote transparency in best-value procurement for the design and construction of highway projects with the goal of improving this evolving procurement method.

The review of published empirical studies, a national survey of transportation agencies, and case studies of highway agencies form the basis of the conclusions in this research. In addition to the national survey, with 46 of 52 agencies participating, the research presents case studies from seven highway agencies in the USA including: California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and Utah. These seven case studies were selected from agencies that employ mature best-value procurement methods. The case studies involved a thorough procedural review and structured interviews of agency personnel. The agencies then validated the results and conclusions.

The results showed that evaluation committees should include technical members who do not have a personal interest in the outcome of the selection to maintain transparency in best-value projects. The committees should receive best-value procurement training, which necessitates the development of consistent and transparent best-value selection procedures. Debriefing meetings should be conducted to provide comments about strengths and weaknesses of each proposal to enhance fairness and transparency of the best-value selection process.

Knowledge of the best-value procurement procedure will allow researchers to better understand the impact of procedures and practices on transparency in selecting best-value projects. The chief limitation of this research is that the primary data were collected from highway agencies in the USA. Any future research should include more data to enhance the validity of this study outside of the public transportation sector.

The result of this research will help transportation agencies and other public owners to improve their best-value procurement procedures. The findings of this research also address the construction and consulting industry’s concern about transparency and fairness of a best-value selection process.

This research is the first attempt to examine the impact of the evaluation committee, best-value training, and debriefings on transparency of best-value selection.

Examines the practical experience of benchmarking in the UK local government sector during the period leading to the introduction of an important policy initiative for local government under “New Labour”. Argues that, under conditions of fiscal control, benchmarking has been subsumed under the wider practice of performance measurement in the sector. A critical factor is the primacy of the role of performance monitoring in local government, which in turn results from the controlling nature (in fiscal and political terms) of UK central government. The corollary is a conflation of two distinct views of benchmarking: benchmarking as a rigorous and challenging scrutiny of local government processes; and benchmarking as an instrument of central government control. Such a state of affairs would appear to offer a number of advantages to those policy makers whose blueprint for the reform of local government encourages the use of benchmarking across the sector.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how employee satisfaction affects firm value around the financial crisis.

The authors use the 2008 financial crisis as exogenous shocks to firms to mitigate endogenous concern that employee satisfaction and firm value can be jointly determined. The authors compare firm value of two groups of firms: the firms on the Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” and matched firms that are not on the list. The authors employ difference-in-difference approaches in the tests.

The authors find that when the crisis happens, the best companies experience larger decreases in firm value than comparable firms. In addition, such decreases in firm value only exist among the best companies with high financial flexibility. The authors also show that job satisfaction alone does not create firm value during the financial crisis; only when interacted with high financial flexibility, employee satisfaction leads to high firm value. Finally, the authors document that best companies do not have any advantage in the recovery of firm value after the crisis, regardless of their level of financial flexibility.

There is considerable debate on whether job satisfaction leads to performance or performance leads to satisfaction (Luthans, 1998). The authors show that the impact of employee satisfaction on firm value changes over time. The authors also identify a crucial factor that impacts the value-creation of employee satisfaction: financial flexibility. The findings suggest that the ambiguous results documented in prior literature can be due to the different sample periods and the failure to identify the impact of financial flexibility in previous studies.

The findings provide helpful implications to the business community. The evidence suggests that to reap the benefits of employee satisfaction, companies need to manage their financial flexibility to buffer against potential negative shocks while having strong corporate governance mechanism to mitigate agency concerns. Moreover, the study provides an investment recommendation to socially responsible investment (SRI) and suggests that it is better off implementing dynamic SRI investment strategies according to economic condition.

The evidence suggests that the economic value of employee satisfaction is related to firms’ financial flexibility and economic conditions.

The authors contribute to the literature by showing that the impact of employee satisfaction on firm value changes over time. The test design not only allows the authors to study the effect of employee satisfaction on firm value at a particular point in time, but also helps the authors examine the variation in the effect over economic cycles. This paper also contributes to the literature on SRI. The authors identify a crucial factor that impacts the value-creation of employee satisfaction: financial flexibility.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm called HelixPSO for finding ribonucleic acid (RNA) secondary structures that have a low energy and are similar to the native structure.

Two variants of HelixPSO are described and compared to the recent algorithms Rna‐Predict, SARNA‐Predict, SetPSO and RNAfold. Furthermore, a parallel version of the HelixPSO is proposed.

For a set of standard RNA test sequences it is shown experimentally that HelixPSO obtains a better average sensitivity than SARNA‐Predict and SetPSO and is as good as RNA‐Predict and RNAfold. When best values for different measures (e.g. number of correctly predicted base pairs, false positives and sensitivity) over several runs are compared, HelixPSO performs better than RNAfold, similar to RNA‐Predict, and is outperformed by SARNA‐Predict. It is shown that HelixPSO complements RNA‐Predict and SARNA‐Predict well since the algorithms show often very different behavior on the same sequence. For the parallel version of HelixPSO it is shown that good speedup values can be obtained for small to medium size PC clusters.

The new PSO algorithm HelixPSO for finding RNA secondary structures uses different algorithmic ideas than the other existing PSO algorithm SetPSO. HelixPSO uses thermodynamic information as well as the centroid as a reference structure and is based on a multiple swarm approach.