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There are significantly more New Zealand women in senior management positions in the public sector than in private businesses. This study draws on the experiences and perceptions of 30 women executives who have considerable managerial experience in either sector. Success factors for the individual women are outlined before the cultures of the public and private sectors are described. Through the eyes of respondents, the public and private sectors have distinguishable organizational cultures; both of which provide parallel but different sites for advancement. The private sector businesses have a focus on competition and the public sector has a strong ethos of service, in spite of restructuring. The findings are discussed in the context of a country that has strong women leadership in the political sphere.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the anti-corruption campaign, “Hunting the Tigers,” incurs a significant short-term loss of shareholders’ returns.

A sophisticated event study approach is employed.

The results show that the “Hunting the Tigers” has incurred a significant short-term loss of investment returns for shareholders in China’s main stock market board. In addition, the beginning of a new assault on China’s official mogul corruption in another round of political anti-corruption cycle after the 18th National Congress of the CPC has reduced this price significantly.

This finding should be perceived as the price of the corruption of official-business collusion within capital markets in contemporary China.

The purpose of this article is to examine the increased public pressure on corporations to express a point of view on social politics such as same-sex marriage that have no intrinsic connection to their line of business.

By analyzing recent cases in which corporations have suffered from negative public sentiment regarding their policies on social issues, the authors adduce some guidelines for handling the intersection of corporate reputation and private politics.

This analysis led the authors to propose four strategies for coping with reputation assaults relating to private politics: dynamic sentiment mapping, developing points of view, continuous consumer conversations and decision clarity.

There is existing literature on this subject, but few recommendations for how to handle the issue.

This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.

Uses the distinctions Max Weber draws between means and ends of economics and politics in Economy and Society to explore why the discussion of ends may be neglected in current conversations on privatization and reinvention. Includes a discussion of possible relationships between public and private based on Weberian concepts of the life spheres of politics and economics and the contrasting types of status and purposive contracts. Suggests that to increase emphasis on ends, as well as means, public dialogue should focus on giving an account as well as on holding organizations to account. For public management to focus on giving an account, more attention needs to be given to appreciating a public law framework, understanding the relationships in different types of contract, and creating conditions favourable to communicative rationality.

Shows how Machiavelli influenced modern management in much more fundamental ways than simply his well‐known advice to be ruthless, upon which many management writers focused. First, it explains his reputation for advising ruthlessness by discussing his life and times and the subject‐matter on which he wrote. Second, it details his positive teaching with regard to the modern world, the division of that world into a public and a private sector, and his foundation for the modern executive. In that context, ruthlessness is a tool for his executive figure to maintain stability in the public sector, so that people can focus more of their attention on the private sector in a modern world devoted to people serving their own needs.

The article investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated and deepened the presidentialization of politics in Italy. It examines how a series of innovative rules and procedures adopted by the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to face the extraordinary event are part of a permanent presidentialization dynamic.

This study analyzes the role of prime minister in coping with the pandemic in Italy within the analytical framework of the personalization of politics. Section 1 investigates how the prime minister has resorted to autonomous normative power through intensive use of the Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers (DPCM). Section 2 observes the establishment of a more direct relationship with citizens through extensive use of digital communication and high engagement. Section 3 analyzes the “personal task force” appointed by the prime minister and highlights a new balance between technocratic/private roles and politics undermining democratic accountability.

By examining three main aspects of the personalization of politics, the article observes that the COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated the movement to presidentialization of power in Italy. It argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened political and institutional trends already in place before the crisis.

The article expands the comparative research on the presidentialization of politics. The Italian case clearly underlines how the pandemic crisis represented a further step of progressive dominance of the “executive” over the other branches of government. The article suggests an agenda for future cross-institutional and cross-national analysis.

Despite the ongoing increase of women in the top positions, they are still underrepresented in politics. The studies that primarily focus on women’s underrepresentation in politics neglect the role of gender as a category that structures and makes sense of social practices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary gender order in politics through discourse analysis and the contribution of the critical feminist perspective.

The study is based on 30 biographical interviews with Italian politicians and focuses on the account of their political experiences and on the meanings attributed to these.

The results of this paper underline the tendency to either absolve or blame women for gender inequality in politics through different interpretative repertoires: “Women’s disinterest toward politics,” “Politics as masculine context” and “Politics–family unbalance.” The analysis allowed to unravel the way in which the discursive practices create and reproduce the hegemonic gender order in politics.

The research is limited to 30 qualitative interviews, and so results cannot be generalized.

The findings of this paper highlight the importance of exploring issues relating to the gender gap in politics and stress the need to implement actions to promote gender equality in politics.

The paper contributes to an understanding of women’s underrepresentation in politics and offers causes for reflection on a phenomenon that has profound implications for our society.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively investigate the combined influence of a firm's political connection and diversification on corporate performance, and to explore whether firm's political connection has an impact on the diversification effect, and whether this diversification effect would promote its performance significantly or not.

The research used a regression model to explore the correlation among political connection, diversification strategy, and corporate performance. The research subjects are the private enterprises listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in China for the period 2002‐2005.

The study found that: first, for those firms without political connections, the relationship between diversification strategy and corporate performance displayed an “inverted U” curve; for firms with political connection, the relationship was a “reverse L”. Second, firms with political connections are more likely to implement a diversification strategy, especially unrelated diversification. Third, when implementing an internationalization strategy, private enterprises with political connections are more likely to expand through unrelated diversification strategy. Fourth, the diversification of the enterprises with political connection are more likely to promote the short‐term accounting performance than those without political connection, but the unrelated diversification of politically connected enterprises would have a negative impact upon its future performance, that is to damage the company's market value.

The paper expands the literature on the relationship between diversification and firm performance. It contributes to the research about the influence of political connection upon corporate performance.

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are viewed as a reform tool for resolving inefficiency and absence of dynamism in water supply delivery in developing countries. However, the requirements for their successful implementation have received very little attention. This paper aims to describe a set of critical success factors (CSFs) that, when given special and continual attention, would ensure a successful project implementation and to provide a predictive tool to aid implementers to evaluate the likelihood of a successful PPP water supply project.

Fourteen perceived CSFs were initially derived from project cases and extant literature, and verified through a two-round Delphi survey. Factor analysis established five critical success factor groups (CSFGs) that were then used to develop a fuzzy synthetic evaluation tool for assessing the chance of a successful project.

The five key CSFGs are commitment of partners, strength of consortium, asset quality and social support, political environment, and national PPP unit. The model output showed that, overall, these factors have a “very high” positive impact on a successful implementation of a water supply project. Hence, there is an excellent correlation between achievement of the CSFGs and project success. Success indices of individual principal factors are also “very high”.

The study presents a tool to public clients and private audience, and it is hoped that the study will trigger policy development towards PPP practice in developing countries, because these findings have wider implications for legal and regulatory systems, public capacity, financing, public procurement and politics.