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Knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs henceforth) rely heavily on knowledge as the primary resource to provide public services. This study deals with a specific kind of KIPO in the judiciary system: the courts. The paper aims to explore the court’s managerial and organisational change resulting from the national recovery and resilience plan (NRRP) reform in response to Covid-19, focussing on how this neglected KIPO responds to change, either by showing acts of resistance or undergoing a hybridisation process.

The paper adopts a qualitative research design, developing an explorative case study to investigate the process of a court’s managerial and organisational change caused by NRRP reform and to shed light on how this neglected KIPO reacts to change, showing resistance acts and developing the hybridisation process. Thirty-one interviews in six months have been conducted with the three main actors in Courts: judges, clerks and trial clerks.

The paper shows that in this understudied KIPO, judges fiercely resist the managerial logic that decades of reforms have been trying to impose. The recent introduction of an office for speeding up trials (Ufficio Per il Processo (UPP)) was initially opposed. Then, the resistance strategy changed, and judges started to benefit from UPP delegating repetitive and low-value tasks while retaining their core activities. Clerks approached the reform with a more positive attitude, seeing in UPP the mechanism to bridge the distance between them and the judges.

Considering their relevance to society, courts must be more addressed in KIPOs' studies. This paper allows the reader to enter such KIPO and understand its peculiar features. Secondly, the article helps to understand micropractices of resistance that may hinder the effectiveness of managerial reforms.

This chapter describes the audit of local government in Italy. In Italy, as elsewhere, local audit has been affected by the implementation of new public management based reforms. There is an increasing trend towards collaboration and cooperation between the audited authority and the auditor. Audit has begun, as in other jurisdictions to widen its remit, so that it focusses on performance as much as financial and compliance issues. This change in role brings with it opportunities for the auditor to help public sector improvement but also challenges – as new skills are required for the new roles that the auditor takes on and audit independence is complicated by the cooperative nature of modern local government audit.

This paper narrates the efforts made in Italy after the end of the Second World War to develop an economic and social model in between corporate capitalism and planned economy, on the one hand, and shareholder versus stakeholder capitalism on the other. The result was the institutional infrastructure that supported the Istituto per la Ricostruzione industriale (IRI), a state-owned public holding in charge of managing the funds of the so-called Marshall Plan. The history of IRI illustrates the importance of a pragmatic approach to dealing with institutional constraints and opportunities when faced with the need to reconstruct destroyed economies in a context of very fragmented societies such as those of post-war Italy. The result was the resistance to an acritical adoption of the corporate American model and the definition of a more balanced form of capitalism. In an era of new recovery plans, there is a lot we can learn from IRI’s history.

To understand whether new public management and public value theory are sufficient to guide the strategic behaviours adopted by public sector organizations for their service delivery companies.

This article uses a longitudinal case study of a joint stock company running an airport service in Tuscany.

Public value theory should be further developed to guide managerial behaviours in a very complex decision-making environment.

Only one case study is used so results cannot be generalized in a proper statistical way.

Public managers could learn the usefulness of managerial theories for their decision-making.

Theories aimed at providing managers with insights into decisions made in complex situations should be tested in the real world before being accepted or refused.

This article analyzes a case study operating under and applying the concepts proposed by new public management and public value theory. It therefore offers insights on their applicability, shortcomings and usefulness for decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of new public management‐based reforms on public accountability in two countries, Italy and Sweden, explaining what strategies can be used to enhance accountability toward citizens.

Two case studies have been analysed in order to compare how public accountability has been enhanced in different cultural and geographical contexts.

In both countries, the enhancement of public accountability is at stake both in the political debate and in the public policies, but the strategies implemented resulted are path dependent especially in the choice between more disclosure and more citizen participation.

The paper uses only two case studies and therefore results can hardly be generalised; also the selected cases are both examples of best practice in the two countries.

The comparison offers critical insights on the adopted choices to enhance public accountability in two different contexts, also emphasising the role of IT and their possible use.

From a theoretical point of view, the paper offers an original framing of the possible strategies to improve accountability toward citizens: more accountability through more disclosure and more accountability through more citizen participation. The empirical analysis analyses the solutions adopted in two different countries aimed at improving accountability toward citizens and their advantages and limitations.

For more than a century, the corporation has shaped our thinking of organizations. This deeply institutionalized form is still regarded as both the iconic business organization and the core structural unit of our economic order. Today, however, it stands at a crossroads. Economic, social, and environmental failures of the recent past as well as misconduct and scandals are widely linked to inadequacies in this corporate form and its governance. The aim of this volume is to spark a debate within the field. In this introduction, we provide an outline of the current crisis and an overview of the interdisciplinary set of articles presented in this volume. We conclude with a view ahead and a plea for the acknowledgement of “alternatives.”