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The purpose of this paper is to capture legitimising principles of recent successions to the throne through narrative time. Further, this study considers leaders’ sense-giving to succession.

This research applies a “temporal narrative analysis” to explicate legitimising principles of narrative time in three recent case studies of royal succession: the kingdoms of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The findings show that royal successions in three modern European constitutional monarchies are legitimised through giving sense to narrative time. The legitimacy of timing succession is embedded in multiple temporal narratives, in which heirs apparent are brought forward as the new generation who will modernise the monarchy.

The paper presents an innovative conceptual framework of sense-giving to succession through narrative time. This framework will be helpful to scholars who aim to grasp legitimising principles of temporal narration in leadership succession.

Information system projects often go awry and when they do internal auditors are often in a position to bring the problems to management’s attention. However, managers are not always receptive to risk warnings, even when internal auditors who are role prescribed to carry out this function deliver such warnings. This phenomenon is known as the deaf effect. This paper aims to examine the actions that internal auditors take to resolve the deaf effect and how these actions affect the auditor–manager relationship.

Based on a multiple case study approach, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with auditors and examined ten cases of the deaf effect from the auditor’s perspective.

The findings revealed three categories of actions that auditors took in response to the deaf effect and how these actions immediately affected the auditor–manager relationship. Further, by analyzing the subsequent sequence of actions taken by the auditor in each case, the authors identified three distinct patterns that capture the dynamics of the auditor–manager relationship over time until the deaf effect was, ultimately, resolved.

Several practitioner studies have shown that internal auditors and managers struggle to build effective relationships, even under the most favorable circumstances and the authors suggest that deaf effect situations are likely to pose an even greater challenge to the auditor–manager relationship. The study contributes to the discourse on internal audit effectiveness in several ways. First, the authors identified three categories of actions that internal auditors took in response to the deaf effect. The authors found that two of these categories of action are related to the two distinct roles that internal auditors can play (inspector or consultant). Second, the authors examined how these categories of actions played out over time, influencing the auditor–manager relationship dynamics.

This paper aims to argue that utilising foresight becomes a more useful tool to organisational management, if the innovative technique of “creative competition” is applied. In an empirical analysis, it seeks to show how the technique of creative competition was used in a scenario‐project. The case study shows how and why the technique of creative competition “worked”. These findings will then be used to explore the broader application of creative competition in organisational foresight.

The study first elaborates theoretically on the difference between “forecast” and “foresight” and explores how the addition of the organisational dimension to these terms changes their meanings. It then focuses on the organisation that commissioned the study – Rijkswaterstaat – and describes its history with respect to exploring the future and certain other relevant contextual elements of the case study, such as how the project was organised. After that, it conceptualises the RWS2020 project as an example of using “organisational foresight” and discusses the concept of “creative competition” as a means of bringing “organisation” and “foresight” closer together. The paper then describes what creative competition was used in the case, how it worked in the case study, and how “the game” of creative competition was played. It formulates conclusions on the basis of this case study and then reflects on the findings.

Application of creative competition adds to the integration of foresight in organizational management and organizational change. It supports a more future orientedness in strategic management. Further analysis of other cases is needed to further strengthen theory about application of the method of creative competition.

The technique of creative competition is relatively new and has not been theorized as yet. Organizational foresight has been used as a concept, but has hardly been theorized and empirically tested as well. The paper does both, in an exploratory way. It provides interesting insight into the working of organizational foresight for both academics and practitioners, and identifies strategic choices for managers conducting organizational foresight studies with or without the use of creative competition.

In these times of financial austerity and the emergence of wicked problems, traditional Public Administration and New Public Management as government's conventional mechanisms to steer society often fail to produce desired societal outcomes. This has made the governments of many Western nations call for civic engagement hoping this will lead to the emergence of a resilient society that can resist and react to even the most major shocks and disasters by being flexible and adaptive (Longstaff, 2005; Meijs, 2004; Wildavsky, 1988). A recent example of this broader trend are the discussions in the United Kingdom on how government can help create a Big Society, in which local people and communities feel empowered to deal with social problems on their own, without the interference of politics or governmental busybodies.

Multifaceted issues such as safety, social inclusion, poverty, mobility, rural development, city regeneration or labour market integration require integrated approaches in their steering. Governments are looking for instruments that can address the boundary-spanning nature of many social problems. In their quest to achieve valued social outcomes, they struggle with their new role, and the inadequacy of both market working and government-led central agency. After three decades of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms, the strengths and weaknesses of this philosophy have become widely apparent. Fragmentation is a prominent observation in many evaluations of the NPM approach. The fragmentation of both policy and implementation lead to unsatisfactory public outcomes and a heightened experience of a loss of control on the part of policymakers. Achieving valued and sustainable outcomes requires collaboration between government departments, private actors, non-profit organisations, and citizens and requires tools that integrate the lessons of NPM with the new necessities of coordinated public governance. The public administration literature has in recent years been concerned with the ‘what's next?’ question, and many alternatives to NPM have been proposed.

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

Examines the ninth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

This contribution argues that there is a fundamental problem for the multi-level governance (MLG) approach in that what the approach is trying to explain has never been fully agreed by the vast group of scholarship that references it. The chapter then examines and proposes that ideas and concepts from network governance, principal–agent (PA) and learning can provide the necessary micro foundations for the MLG approach.

The chapter examines and critiques the original MLG formulations and the later efforts at elaboration. It then reviews the literature and concepts for three public policy approaches that have been associated with European governance to see how core explanations can be elaborated upon in a multi-level context: network governance, principal–agent (PA) and learning.

This contribution suggests that co-ordination, and the resources that help maintain this co-ordination, is the key dependent variable that underpins the MLG approach. With multiple principals and multiple agents, operating at a number of levels of analysis, direct authority and control is harder to evoke. The key explanatory variable underpinning this MLG co-ordination is learning by the participants.

Researchers need to concentrate both their theoretical and empirical efforts in understanding the conditions that support multi-level governance and that sustain its effort.

The contribution outlines some of the key practical questions that policy-makers must face. Can they manage resources and induce learning from all the relevant public and private stakeholders to engage in the MLG effort?

Not only does an effective MLG process involve engaging a wide range of societal stakeholders, these stakeholders have to be persuaded to invest effort in learning about the nature of the governance system, the challenges of the policy problem and the implications of the efforts to resolve these problems.

This chapter isolates the fundamental lacuna at the heart of the MLG project and offers academics and practitioners a conceptual lens for building a clearer analytical structure for studying MLG.

This qualitative interview study compares public value prioritizations of ministers, members of parliament and senior public managers in the Netherlands. This article aims to answer the following central research question: how do Dutch political elites and administrative elites differ in their interpretation and prioritization of public values?

Based on coding and categorization of 65 interviews this article shows how government elites in advanced western democracies interpret and assess four crucial public values: responsiveness, expertise, lawfulness and transparency.

Political elites and administrative elites in the Netherlands are more similar than different in their prioritization and perceptions of public values. Differences are strongly related to role conceptions and institutional responsibilities, which are more traditional than most recent literature on politico-administrative dynamics would suggest.

Our qualitative findings are hard to generalize to larger populations of politicians and public managers in the Netherlands, let alone beyond the Netherlands. However, the testable research hypotheses we derive from our explorative study merit future testing among larger populations of respondents in different countries through survey research.

Experienced values differences between both groups are smaller than their mutual perceptions would suggest.

Most research on public values is quantitative in nature and focuses exclusively on public managers. By adding the politician to the equation we improve our understanding of how public values are enacted in real life and set the tone for a more inclusive research agenda on public values.