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We investigate how the reorganization of the service-delivery 'machine' is resulting in a hybridization of NPM and post-NPM principles. We compare reform trajectories in Italy and Spain to illustrate and interpret a combination of reorganization recipes that, from both the provision and production sides, affected service delivery; and how the NPM and post-NPM principles have been followed. Our analysis of how organizational structures for public service delivery have been reformed shows that reformers are increasingly induced to adopt a shopping-basket approach, leading them to use different menus and ingredients, mixing them, to create recipes that are better suited to domestic tastes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporatization has gained scholarly attention in recent years, yet little is known regarding why many corporations are eventually terminated, and what happens to their form and functions thereafter. Reinternalizing services is one option local governments may pursue. This paper focuses on the impact of tensions (systemic contradictions) on this final resolution reached: Do local governments choose or refuse reinternalization? Conducting machine learning, I predict termination outcomes based on an original dataset of 244 ceased English and German companies (2010–2020). The results show that macrosystemic tensions are more relevant for resourcing decisions and reinternalization is less likely to be caused by formal ownership issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporatization is a trend in local public service delivery. However, research into how public values can be preserved after corporatization has lacked. This study analyses what factors underlie the presence of 'public values' in municipally owned corporations (MOCs). I find that the best predictor of stewardship to society in MOCs is their strategic managerial autonomy. This finding challenges the literature on public value failure, which argues that government by proxy should lead to lesser public values. Instead, it is plausible that increasing autonomy after corporatization can shield service delivery from political rent-seeking, which can protect public values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational publicness is likely to have important implications for the mortality or survival of local authority companies. Majority-owned companies and those experiencing more political control may be less prone to dissolution due to greater government commitment to their survival, than their minority-owned and more politically autonomous counterparts. Using survival analysis to test these ideas, this study finds that dissolved local authority companies in England are more likely to be minority-owned, but have more politicians on their board of directors. They also have fewer directors in total, and tend to take a not-for-profit rather than a profit-making form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the relationship between privatization and corruption in Europe over the period 1995 to 2013, taking into account the problems surrounding the issue of causality. There have been researches into the role of privatization in reducing corruption, but decisions about privatization itself are made by politicians, and so corruption could also affect decision making about privatizations. The empirical findings suggest that perceived corruption decreases as the number of privatization transactions increases, but the effect is contrary when privatizations are a more important in terms of annual revenues. Furthermore, our results indicate that overall, privatizations carried out since the early 1980s have not been effective in reducing corruption in Europe. Indeed, privatizations reforms are more carried out in the less corrupt countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, Australian universities have corporatized. Encouraged by government policies, universities adopted modernization practices that have been widely questioned. 'Collegial entrepreneurialism' is an approach that builds on collegial processes to protect academic values from the excesses of modernization. This paper examines the perceptions of business academics about the impacts of modernization in autonomous graduate schools of business. The research was undertaken prior to the most recent wave of higher education reform under which most of these schools disappeared. Their experience of three consequences of modernization, 'hard' managerialism, academic consumerism and fragmentation of work, provides insight into whether collegiality and academic values can exist within an entrepreneurial academic unit. Results indicate that overt manifestations of modernization are not threatening to 'collegial entrepreneurialism'. However, in the absence of academic leadership, the more covert influences of consumerism and fragmentation pose a threat to the survival of 'collegial entrepreneurialism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article is aimed at analysing reforms in public service delivery and management at the local level of government in Germany and France from a cross-countries comparative perspective. Particular attention is paid to the results and effects these reform initiatives have caused with regard to the administrative organization, steering capacities, and output performance. Two major approaches of reform will be addressed: privatization, contracting-out, and 'corporatization' of local services on the one hand and public management reforms on the other. Proceeding from the distinct 'starting conditions' of reforms in the two local government systems, the question will be pursued, as to whether there has been an increasingly convergent or divergent development in French and German local service provision, and how these evolutions can be explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last few years, the local government sector in European countries has undergone a number of important changes. Among the various reform initiatives has been the externalization of public services, such as corporatization, contracting-out, public-private partnerships and privatization. The key goal of this article is to describe and explain the evolution of local public services provision in the two selected countries, with a particular focus on 'corporatization'. The article seeks to draw a picture of the actual municipal landscape with the administrative core and its various corporations. Furthermore, it will discuss the reasons for corporatization trends and their impact on the corporate governance structures of municipalities in Germany and Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Hong Kong's experience in modernizing and corporatizing public healthcare governance in order to enhance management autonomy and service efficiency, against the background of a previous regime of centralized departmental control and amid the worldwide trend of new public management. The reform, culminating in the establishment of a hospital authority, is found to be wrought with intense intra-bureaucratic conflict, as well as rivalries between professional and administrative bureaucrats, between professionals of different sectors, and between medical and para-medical providers. Instead of breaking up traditional professional monopoly and opening up the system to non-medical general management, corporatization has resulted in an unplanned entrenchment and re-empowerment of medical professional power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the management of the telecommunications company, Tele Danmark, in the period from 1990 to 1998. Two theoretical perspectives are introduced; a rational-technical perspective and a cultural perspective. The theoretial perspectives are used in the empirical analysis of management strategies inTele Danmark. Three phases are identified: the government enterprise (1990–3); the hybrid organization (1994–7); and the private rider (1998–) when Tele Danmark is fully privatized. The management's strategy is evaluated and the challenges ahead are examined, including life under the new owner, the American company, Ameritech. The article concludes that Tele Danmark's management has achieved its objectives in transforming the company into a modern private communications company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]