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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which Malaysia’s most recent public service reform has improved service delivery and governmental performance. It also endeavors to identify critical success factors that explain reform performance and draw lessons based on the Malaysian experience.

The paper adopts a case study approach and draws on data from both primary and secondary sources. Besides a thorough review of official documents and existing literature, the author conducted 20 individual interviews with key informants representing government officials, academics and civil society organizations.

The study shows that despite some pitfalls and misgivings, the Government Transformation Program (GTP) has produced concrete improvements in service delivery areas where previous reforms failed. One of the factors that underpin GTP’s relative success is the detailed performance management framework, which helped foster inter-agency collaboration and enforce accountability for results at various levels.

The GTP success highlights the significance of adapting reform content to local situations especially when reforms are based on external models; sanctions from the highest political office; a dedicated unit to drive the implementation and an effective performance management framework through which individuals and agencies would be held to account for results achieved.

Despite many and varied reform initiatives attempted in the past, cases of successful reform are rare, especially in developing countries. Little is known on what makes a reform work, a gap exacerbated by notable absence of systematic research on this topic. The paper contributes to address this by reviewing Malaysia’s innovative approach to reform and the insights that the Malaysian experience offers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore mental health service users’ experiences of involvement in a clinical psychology course.

Five participants were recruited from a service user and carer group aligned to a university professional clinical psychology course. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and data were analysed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

Four superordinate themes, group processes, advocating, transforming and power, were drawn from the data, with ten subthemes emerging capturing experiences on the personal, professional and group levels.

The study is not generalisable and has a small number of participants. However, many of the themes have resonance with existing literature.

Service user initiatives need to consider the personal and contextual issues that service users may have experienced prior to their involvement. The needs of service user initiatives may change over time. Such initiatives must evolve in conjunction with the personal and political journeys of participants.

Few studies have explored the experiences of mental health service users in clinical psychology training using a robust methodology. The current study suggests that eliciting these experiences highlights factors that facilitate involvement as well as the barriers.

The purpose of this paper is to observe the nature of documentation and the description used in object biographies by an auction house catalogue and an online museum collection database in relation opera costumes. This research aims to discuss the issues of cultural and economic value in relation to objects in the art world, and examine examples of object biographies for opera costumes that are sold at an auction and exhibited in a museum.

The object biographies are compared from an auction house catalogue and the online museum collection database, based on two factors: costumes worn by a famous singer and costumes designed by a famous designer.

This study identified the valuation methods of auction houses and museums, including accounting for the market value and fair value, as well as social and cultural values. The nature of the documentation also clearly shows the different purpose of the object biographies. For auction houses the biography needs to be short and specific as it provides sufficient information and is read out at the auction, while art catalogues can also be used by experts as part of the conversation to understanding heritage value, and will also be viewed and used by researchers, investors, other auction house specialists and art world professionals.

By comparing two institutions, auction houses and museums, this study has shown that the information that is documented and how it is presented in object biographies is determined by the goals of the institutions. These goals may vary or overlap in providing information, demonstrating cultural importance, to be spoken allowed to an audience and make sales, or to educate, conserve and preserve.

This study shows that to some extent museum online databases display their collection removed from cultural context, with an isolated image of the item, and in an organised, digitally accessible manner. A potential implication is that museums should not only digitally catalogue an item, but also provide discussion and the cultural background and significance of the item.

Auction catalogues are written for a specific event (the auction), while the online museum collection database is meant to be a permanent record, which aims to digitally preserve objects and provide access to images and information to a general audience, and further could be edited with amendments or new information when future research or events lead to potential updates.

This study adds to the discourse on approaches to the understanding of costumes as an art object of significance and their potential cultural, economic and heritage value, particularly as represented in the documentation of object biographies.

This project of derivation that I have just described may seem strange, but is not. In this as in many respects Plato set the fashion for the millennia to come. The ideal state sketched in the Republic is not only an analogy to the soul (though it is that too); it is an implication of Plato's conception of human mental capacity, a conception that is ontological as well as epistemological. It was Plato who, according to Aristotle, first separated a universal (i.e., a concept) from particulars (i.e., a concept's physical embodiments or expressions). There are a multitude of chairs, very different in size, shape, color, and design, yet there is also a concept of the “chair,” in which all the physical chairs participate. The concept has no physical body and therefore in a sense exists outside time and space – it is immaterial and eternal. But Plato believed, reasonably as it seems to me, that it is real. It is real in the same way that a line or circle in Euclidean geometry is real even though it is not identical to any physical line or circle and cannot be – the Euclidean line has only one dimension, and the Euclidean circle only two, and there are no one-or two-dimensional objects in the physical world (although electrons are dimensionless), as far as we know.

The purpose of this article is to explore the export of new public management (NPM) to developing countries and to describe and evaluate the introduction of these initiatives in very different environments from their origins.

The article traces the introduction of performance agreements into the public service of Vanuatu. Performance agreements are identified as an initiative typically promoted by NPM. The Vanuatu case is set within a review of the origin, use and record of performance agreements in countries such as Australia, the UK and the USA.

The adoption of performance agreements has been slow and has enjoyed limited success. Among the difficulties encountered are suspicion, lack of incentives, an unreceptive environment, and possible identification as being donor‐driven. It is difficult to see performance agreements in their current form making an impact on performance improvement in the Vanuatu public service.

NPM initiatives must be carefully considered before being transferred to other countries. They may offer benefits but what has worked in one environment will often need considerable modification, certain preconditions and lengthy lead‐in time to be effective in another environment.

There are few case studies of attempts to transfer NPM‐style reforms to developing countries and none on performance agreements, yet many countries in the Pacific and elsewhere are becoming interested in this mode of performance management. This case study helps to fill this gap through description and analysis of the Vanuatu experience and provides practical lessons for others considering policy transfer of NPM initiatives such as performance agreements.

Margaret Thatcher enjoys an international reputation as a conviction politician. In her latter years as Prime Minister, and ever more since her resignation she has come to symbolize “principled politics” in contrast both to her own successor and her political opponents, who are perceived more ambiguously, bowing to public opinion and/or party pressure. Yet, in her early years as leader, it was Mrs Thatcher who was criticized as a “packaged politician”. Argues that she entrenched political marketing in modern British politics and her campaigns provided the model which her opponents have now followed. Set within a historical context, Examines the uses, successes and failures of marketing under Thatcher and argues that she managed to reconcile the superficially contradictory couplet of marketing and political conviction.

The purpose of the paper is to outline and analyse the limitations and opportunities of decentralised human resource management (HRM) in the public sector.

The paper is based on a case study of the Estonian Central Government.

It is demonstrated that the absence of a central human resource strategy, combined with fragmentation, insufficient coordination and a lack of common values throughout the public service as well as with other limitations related to the country's post‐communist legacy has hindered a systematic approach to public service HRM. However, the paper also reveals that a decentralised setup of HRM has enabled Estonia to flexibly conduct major reforms on the organisational level during the transition of the 1990s and in the following Europeanisation period.

Although the case study method limits the extent to which findings of the study may be generalised to other countries and settings, there are still several lessons to be learned from the Estonian case of no central HR strategy.

The practical recommendations are related to the applicability of the strategic HRM model, path dependency of the development of HRM and the strategic fit between a country's HRM model and the wider context in which it is applied.

The paper provides a new look to the macro‐level HR policies and to the institutional setup of central HR coordination in the context of fast reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for an integrated explanation of financial fraud. Greater emphasis must be placed on the structural and situational factors that are the elements of fraud risks and fraud.

The paper is based on a review of the literature on the explanation of financial fraud. Both micro- and macro-theoretical explanations of fraud were analysed to allow for a broader picture of the types of individuals that were involved in fraud, the rules governing their conduct and the types of law they broke.

The main reason why people commit fraud is that their crime propensity interacts with the elements present in criminogenic environments. Indeed, because most of the research on structural theories of fraud focuses on general criminality, not much has been done in the area of financial fraud. More research needs to be carried out to excavate the subterranean cluster of narrative on fraud risks and fraud.

To address the future contingency of fraud risks, the paper adopted a similar position of prior accounting research on financial crimes. The structural explanation of fraudulent behaviour considers individuals’ actions to be less the result of individual deviance and more the cause of societal forces. Structural theories take into consideration the individual psychology of the offenders and position it to reflect the various realities – institutional, structural and cultural life – they are caught up in. Future research must endeavour to address these concerns.

The manuscript is among a new stream of literature that addresses the structural elements of financial fraud.

In part-I of this review series, research from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka was reviewed. The purpose of this paper which is part-II of the series, is to review management research from India and Pakistan over a 25-year period from 1990 to 2014.

A systematic review approach was adopted for this research. As a quality standard for inclusion, articles were restricted to journals rated A*, A, or B by the Australian Business Deans Council in 2013 and either Q1 or Q2 in the Scopus/Imago classification system. The divisions and interest groups of the Academy of Management were used as framework to organize the search results.

A total of 1,039 articles related to India (n = 930) and Pakistan (n = 112) emerged from the search process, with three articles being related to both countries. The research was published in 163 different journals that met the quality criteria. The period under review coincides with the advent of economic liberalization in India and this emerged as a major theme in the India-related research. Other context-specific insights for these two countries are also derived from an ecological and institutional theory perspective.

This research represents the first comprehensive and systematic review of management research in India and Pakistan. As in part-I, the unique review approach allows for strict adherence to a predetermined quality standard while including a wide variety of journals and research traditions.