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This article examines recent initiatives to reform the planning system in the UK. It adopts a Regulationist approach to locating the reform initiatives in a political-economic context and assessing their scale and nature. The main concepts and arguments of the Regulationist approach are summarized, then applied in interpreting three main phases of UK planning ‘modernization’. It is concluded that planning reform has been conducted in a poorly understood context, whilst shackled to the legacy of its immediate post-war origins. Consequently, key elements of the UK planning system appear increasingly adrift from contemporary conditions, and outmoded in relation to new imperatives. The Regulationist approach offers a point of departure in the search for planning frameworks addressed to contemporary challenges.

This article explores organizational restructuring in one large public institution as a situated response to the instabilities brought on by globalization. Drawing upon ethnographic research with the Los Angeles public school system, I argue that a process of fragmented centralization is taking place, whereby decision-making authority is becoming more centralized while accountability for centrally made decisions is becoming more distributed. This process is propelled, in part, by the rise of a new occupational group of information technology (IT) specialists that is integrating itself into places of power and altering all aspects of organizational operations, transforming the school system into a post-Fordist organization.

The transition from the Fordist hegemonic model to post-Fordism is a complex process. It is not the unavoidable result of technological changes, but the contingent consequence of a hegemonic, political, struggle taking place at the different spheres of the social. This article studies the transformations that took place in the Israeli health care system during the last two decades in order to exemplify the political and contradictory character of the transition to post-Fordism. The article emphasises the contradiction between the partial commodification of financing and the privatisation of certain health care facilities, and the legislation of the National Health Insurance Law, which guaranteed the right to access to public health care services.

In many parts of the world, including Victoria, Australia, public schools are undergoing changes to the way they are administered, funded, and staffed and are being asked to accept a different mission and a different set of responsibilities. This paper points out that these structural changes to public school systems are explained and legitimized by their proponents through reference to post-Fordist arrangements of labour, capital, and technology, not through reference to educational discourses per se. At the same time computer-based technologies are being asked to play an increasingly prominent role in education, and it is argued that this computing-in-education project is a key strategy in moving aspects of post-Fordist reform from the administrative wing, down the corridor and through the classroom door. Finally, it is argued that both structural and technological change in school systems contribute to and are nurtured by the prevailing culture, best understood as the postmodern condition.

This paper discusses the current radical changes in the Australian education policy. Central to the argument is the claim that the radical restructuring of the public sector hastened the loss of the possibility of any critical evaluation of national policy.

Presents data from recent research examining work organization in seven countries. Addresses the question of whether the contemporary workplace is characterized by management practices which might be termed post‐Fordist, involving an extension of employee discretion and autonomy, or whether traditional practices of direct hierarchical control are more in evidence. Data suggests that the latter practices are more likely to prevail in all of the countries examined despite assertions in the literature that new, more flexible work arrangements are transforming the old methods of production. Concludes with an evaluation of the opportunities which exist for the empowerment of trade union members at the workplace level under these circumstances.