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The purpose of the paper is to examine features and impact of recent reforms introduced by the Philippines government to deal with the longstanding shortcomings in its procurement system.

The research for the paper is based on reports by international organizations, official documents of the Philippines government, surveys by international and domestic organizations, interviews with relevant officials and media reports.

The findings show that the reforms have focused on fostering competition, increasing transparency, standardizing procedures, enhancing end‐product quality and contractor reliability, ensuring proper planning and budgeting, combatting corruption, and strengthening accountability. These reforms were intended to create a procurement system more in line with international best practices. However the paper shows that the impact has been less than promised. This is due to limitations of certain provisions of the reforms and weaknesses in both implementation and in the accountability of the procuring entities. A key factor in undermining the reforms is widespread corruption, which continues to affect many aspects of the procurement system. The article identifies two important and related reasons for such failings: elite capture of the government and bureaucracy by a powerful network of business leaders from well‐established landed families, who have close links with the political establishment; and second, a long‐established culture of informal influence in the Philippine state bureaucracy (what may be termed the informal bureaucracy), which has been used to maximum effect by the elite network of business leaders. As a result, this network has been able to influence the reforms to serve its own interests and ensure its continued dominance of the procurement market.

The value of the paper is to show how administrative reforms, no matter how well formulated they are, may be readily undermined in the process of implementation by elite groups able to influence government bureaucracy through an informal culture.

The award of a Commonwealth Visiting Fellowship enabled the writer to investigate preparation programmes for educational administrators in twelve prominent Canadian universities. Interviews with professors, students and practising administrators, participation in lectures, seminars and assessment procedures provided the basis for the writer's impressions. An analysis of pre‐Master's, Master's and doctoral programmes revealed that, in general, students must select courses from (i) organization and administration theory, (ii) educational personnel supervision, (iii) education in Canada and (iv) a series of options. Evidence of a combination of discipline, theory, problems and career‐based approaches was found in most programmes. The writer argues that Canadian professors of educational administration are (i) anxious to improve the quality of the courses offered and grappling with the problem of programme relevance, (ii) not generally concerned with teaching as a skill and restricted in methods used, particularly simulations, (iii) somewhat insular in outlook and (prior to the establishment of CASEA) lacking an adequate means of inter‐departmental communication. Future developments in the preparation of educational administrators are foreshadowed by the writer.

In detailing the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War, Breton and Wintrobe (1986) Breton and Wintrobe describe the Nazi bureaucracy as a flexible microstructure that zealously carried out the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish question”. In this model of bureaucracy, superiors accomplish their aims not by dictating rigid top‐down orders to passive subordinates, but by allowing competition among parts of the bureaucracy and trading “informal services” for “informal payments” over time. The present research adds to the Breton‐Wintrobe argument by presenting anecdotal/empirical evidence showing how the murder of 6 million Jews was carried out in a flexible organization, wherein subordinates devised creative solutions to the “Jewish question”. Also provides evidence detailing how the quid pro quo operation resulted in dramatic payoffs for those subordinates proffering the most creative and/or efficient solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the modern economic theory of bureaucracy developed by economists Breton and Wintrobe is a heretofore unrecognized precursor to the new public management (NPM) construct.

After presenting a comparison of the modern economic theory of bureaucracy to the basic principles of NPM, this paper offers a treatment of Breton and Wintrobe's modern economic theory of bureaucracy that uses the compelling episodic example of the 1944 attempt by the Nazi SS to deceive, through the now infamous Theresienstadt “Embellishment,” the International Red Cross and world communities about the existence of the Nazi Holocaust bureaucracy.

The comparison of the conceptual elements of the two models and the integration of the historical episodic example support the view that the modern economic theory of bureaucracy is a precursor to NPM.

This is the first study to date to present the modern economic theory of bureaucracy as a precursor to the principles of NPM. As such, future research in either area that recognizes the connection made in the present study is potentially enhanced.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the challenges facing Iranian women in the workforce. While Iranian women's participation in higher education is exceptionally high, their participation in the workforce, especially the public sector, is low.

The paper compares the bureaucratic structures in public organizations with the “ideal” type of bureaucracy as defined by Weber (1922). Moreover, occupational segregation, which limits women's choices, is examined as another barrier for Iranian women's participation in the workforce.

The paper argues that the main reason for the low participation of women in public organizations is the ill-structured bureaucracies in these organizations. Also, occupational segregation limits the career choices of Iranian women. Some of the challenges caused by these two factors are the result of discriminative rules and regulations.

The paper contributes to the limited knowledge concerning the issues faced by Iranian women attempting to enter and progress in public organizations. While literature suggests that western women also face the same challenges in organizations, the unique characteristics of Iranian public organizations calls for separate analysis of these barriers in the Iranian context. By introducing readers to this unique subgroup of employees, the paper represents a starting point to an important area of research.

Many bureaucracies still exist, and not just in the public sector. Increasingly, however, we would argue that they are more likely to evolve towards polyarchic forms because of the growing centrality of stakeholder resistance, especially that which is premised on empowerment of key employees. We suggest that managerial responses to this resistance are transforming bureaucracies through process of accommodation: upper echelon managers invent responses to contentious acts and voices so as to reintegrate ‘resisters’ while rewarding them for contesting decisions in a cooperative way. Understanding these processes help us understand why traditional bureaucracy is currently transforming itself as a result of the emergence of new forms of resistance in the workplace.

The purpose of the paper is to use a case study setting involving the implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to expose and analyze the conflicts in the characterizations of the post bureaucratic organisation (PBO) in the literature. ERP implementations are often accompanied by increasing levels of stress in organizations that place pressures on organizational relationships and structures. Additionally, ERPs are regarded as introducing their own techno‐logic of centralization, standardization and formalization that provides an apparent contrast to the exhortations about employee empowerment.

A case study of ERP implementation in a medium‐sized entity is presented. The paper explores aspects of ERP and PBO from the context of postmodern organization theory.

Some concerns about PBO identified in the literature are reflected in the case situation. For example, there is a commitment to give up private time and work flexibly by some employees. The paper also provides evidence of the way the management team substitute their reliance on a key individual knowledge worker for that of an ERP system and external vendor support. Paradoxically, trust in that same knowledge worker and between core users of the system is essential to enable the implementation of the system.

This paper adds empirical insight to a predominantly theoretical literature. The case evidence indicates some conflicting implications in the concurrent adoption of PBO and ERP.

A review of literature has documented that accessing formal credit and other banking services has always been a crucial challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The alternative, therefore, tends to be informal channels. However, the credit constraint vis-à-vis informal channel link does not appear to be well documented in the literature. This study aims to investigate whether credit constraints significantly affect the probability of accessing informal credit, as well as the credit values of Vietnamese SMEs.

This study uses a trinary approach and correlated random-effects Probit and Tobit techniques to avoid the incidental coefficients problem.

The results suggest that relative to unconstrained and partially constrained firms, fully constrained firms tend to be more active in the informal credit markets, shown by their higher probability of informal credit access and larger credit values.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on Vietnam that takes a different approach to credit constraints and examines their impact on informal credit access. Policy implications arise and are discussed.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2017-0543

This chapter examines the way corruption in the public procurement of goods, services, and public works has been commonplace in Southeast Asian states over many years (with the exception of Singapore), and considers the measures taken to combat such practices. It also examines why so often those efforts have not been fully effective. Three reasons are given to explain these failings. These are the following: (a) elite capture of the procurement process by influential politicians, business leaders and senior bureaucrats; (b) the informal bureaucracy in the procuring agencies which allowed corrupt practices to be followed; and (c) lack of political will to enforce measures to combat corruption