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Whilst there are different types of benchmarking, this article, as a result of our research into TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages), argues for a type of benchmarking that we call generic benchmarking to help develop quality education. The term generic is used to indicate that this type of benchmark is drawn from a detailed analysis and synthesis of extant literature, leading to the development and codification of quality characteristics and standards for an area. As the approach was used in research in TESOL, the context of the research is provided, as is a worked example drawn from the extensive literature review on planning for TESOL. Possible implications for staff development and curriculum improvement are identified.

Public administration is incrementally moving on a reform track that leads from responsiveness to collaboration. Attempts to enrich the discussion on the current state of new managerialism in public administration and to explain why and how it makes progress towards higher levels of cooperation and collaboration with various social players such as the private sector, the third sector, and citizens. Argues that in the end this is a socially desirable trend with meaningful benefits that reach far beyond the important idea of responsiveness. The idea of “collaborative” administration thus challenges “responsive” public administration. Maintains that the collaborative model, whether bureaucracy‐driven, citizen‐driven, or private‐sector‐driven, is realistic and beneficial even if it cannot be fully applied. Goes on to describe two major experiences from the Israeli arena. Finally, summarizes the theoretical and practical experiences that can be learned from these ventures and elaborates on the future of collaboration in modern public administration.

Managerial restructuring of the Australian public service during the period of the Keating Government was designed to provide greater responsiveness on the part of public servants to ministers. Increased use of ministerial advisers and the formalisation of contract employment for departmental secretaries pointed to a possible erosion of responsible government norms, but this process was moderated by tension between the private sector practices being introduced and an adherence to the traditions of responsible government. We suggest that a pragmatic approach to public sector reform partly accounted for this unease and we speculate that the more ideological commitment to managerialism displayed by the Howard Government might indicate that responsible government within the Commonwealth Public Service is in further danger of erosion.

Employee surveys are becoming increasingly widespread among both public and private sector organisations. Yet, while there are many articles and books on the technical aspects of how to carry out an employee survey there is much less contemporary information about the impact of employee surveys on the organisation? This paper examines why local authorities undertake employee surveys and the extent to which these contribute to strategic change. The research is based on a review of the use of employee surveys by 12 organisations using surveys at the corporate level. The research found that surveys are used for a variety of purposes to influence change. Purposes are primarily either concerned with organisational assessment (as a diagnostic prior to change) or to implement organisational changes. These results suggest that employee surveys are both mirrors and makers of organisational change. The paper concludes with some theoretical, methodological and ethical implications for academic researchers in the ways that they use and report surveys.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges faced by local government in Indonesia when adopting a public asset management framework.

A case study within the South Sulawesi provincial government was used as the approach to achieve the research objective. The case study involved two data collection techniques – interviews and document analysis.

The result of the study indicates there are significant challenges that the Indonesian local government need to manage when adopting a public asset management framework. Those challenges are: the absence of an institutional and legal framework to support the asset management application; the non‐profit principle of public assets; multiple jurisdictions involved in the public asset management processes; the complexity of local government objectives; the non‐availability of data for managing public property; and limited human resources.

This research is limited to one case study. It is a preliminary study from larger research that uses multiple case studies. The main research also investigates opportunities for local government by adopting and implementing public asset management.

The paper's findings provide useful input for the policy makers, academics and asset management practitioners in Indonesia to establish a public asset management framework resulting in efficient and effective organizations, as well as an increase of public services quality. This study has a potential application in other developing countries.

Government ministers have stressed that inter‐agency co‐ordination will be crucial to the success of their community care proposals. Yet the history of collaboration between health and local authorities has been one of limited achievements. Notwithstanding this general record there are a growing number of examples of apparently successful co‐ordination; moreover, amongst these are projects involving joint management, which is inter‐agency co‐ordination at its most complex. This article reports on a detailed study of five such projects, across a range of client groups, undertaken on behalf of the Department of Health. We found that the essence of such schemes is their fragility and vulnerability to a range of organisational pressures. We concluded that these pressures are sufficient to threaten the survival of newly established projects unless managers address certain key imperatives which we outline here.

Focuses on the introduction of strategic management into a UK local authority, based on several years of empirical research. Aims primarily to explore conceptual and practical links between strategic management and scientific management. Demonstrates that clear parallels exist between the two models and thereby lends support to those who argue that scientific management remains an important influence on modern management thinking and practice. However, despite their shared origins, strategic management has developed into a more sophisticated and potentially more powerful management tool. In particular, through the distinction drawn between strategic and operational decision making it appears to extend the principle of separating conception from execution into the heart of senior management. A realistic account of the political process of change within the local authority is also provided and subsequent performance following the introduction of strategic management is assessed.

The aim of this paper is to explore an important but relatively uncharted territory: the actual functioning of performance measurement systems (PMS) in their organisational context. The objective of the paper is to document the ways in which managers go about aligning operational measures with their organisation's strategy in practice.

This research adopts an interpretive multiple‐case approach in order to gather rich data on the strategies used in managing operational PMS. Data were collected from detailed interviews with managers and supervisors in four government agencies.

The expectations were that the operations managers would adjust their performance measures to support the changes in strategy. This was not the case. All the interviewees employed one or more tactics to cope with the tensions between strategy and performance measures. The ten tactics identified are collected into three strategies; do‐nothing strategy, pseudo‐realigning strategy, and distracting strategy.

This paper casts some doubt on the practice, rather than the principle, of strategy‐aligned performance management. More work needs to be carried out to ascertain how other, both for profit and public sector, organisations deal with these tensions in practice.

From a practitioner point of view it raises the question as to whether senior managers are exerting sufficient control over the alignment issue or providing suitable tools, methods or indeed incentives to bring alignment about.

The paper highlights a gap between theory and practice and suggests that the way to ensure implementation of “modern management methods,” might be to deal firstly with the issues of relevance, timeliness, structure, integration, and symmetry.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate interest in the use of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF), a self-evaluation quality tool for the public sector, to disseminate relevant experiences from CAF implementation in Europe, to offer ideas about CAF optimization and to provide a basis and direction for further improvement.

The methodology that is followed in the paper is based on the study of best practices (BP) of CAF implementation in European public administrations. The BP were selected in order to cover a wide range of political fields and to prove that CAF can be used by organizations in all parts of the public sector with different characteristics of size and structure.

Studying relevant examples leads to the conclusion that effective CAF implementation can improve the performance of public administration and help establish a quality philosophy. The paper shows that CAF is a tool that can be easily modified and adapted to the organizations' special needs and characteristics.

The study of the selected cases and the related information that is presented in this paper helps to disseminate relevant experiences from CAF implementation in Europe. It offers managers of the public sector ideas and helps on how to implement the CAF model, by providing real examples of organizations that have implemented it. It also helps them understand the benefits from CAF implementation, as well as the obstacles and barriers that may be faced, in order to be better prepared for its successful implementation.

The value of this paper lies in the identification and presentation of several ideas and tools which have been successfully developed by European organizations and may as well be implemented by others. Ideas about modifying CAF and adjusting it into the uniqueness of every organization can be obtained only through careful study and analysis of its implementation.

Change in the New Zealand state education system during the 1980s brought about a transfer of responsibility for school financial management from the centre to the school level. The purpose of this paper is to report an investigation of how aspects of this devolved responsibility have been operationalised and managed in a secondary school setting.

The empirical study is based on four case studies.

The paper concludes that the expectations of an espoused economic‐rationalist approach to school‐based management have yet to fully permeate into the schools' way of “doing” devolved financial management. Accounting and management technologies have come to be used as a tool of rhetoric and have served a useful, political purpose, although not in the way intended by the reform architects.

This conclusion raises a question about the administrative reform and whether the consequential outcomes have yielded the espoused efficiency and educational quality gains.