Local Government Management and Performance: A Review of Evidence

PresentationSession 5: Managing CollaborationLocal governments play a critical role in delivering services to the public. Over recent decades scholars have begun to empirically examine the relationship between the management and performance of local governments, locating this in economic, contingency, and resource-based theoretical frameworks. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive assessment of what is currently known about the management-performance hypothesis in local governments by integrating the empirical research that has been published over the past 40 years. We uncover 86 empirical articles that rigorously test the management-performance hypothesis and apply the support score review technique to the findings of these studies. Our analysis suggests that scholars have yet to explore all of the approaches to local government management with the same vigor. The majority of attention has been focused on the concepts of organization size, strategy content, planning, staff quality, personnel stability, representative bureaucracy, and networking. The evidence points toward strong positive performance effects resulting from staff quality, personnel stability, and planning, and moderate support for the benefits of networking, representative bureaucracy, and strategy content. Subanalyses reveal different relationships across dimensions of performance and organizational levels within local governments, and that the British and American scholars that have dominated these studies have largely drawn upon divergent theoretical perspectives. Directions for future research are also considered

Administrative or survey data for measuring organizational performance: what's the difference?

Debate about the best way to measure performance in studies of management in public organizations is longstanding. We address this topic through a review of the evidence from 93 studies that use administrative and/or survey measures of organizational performance. We find that administrative data typically reflect the performance judgements of government (at the central, regional and local level) and regulators, while survey data is based on the perceptions of citizens, service users and public sector managers. We undertake a critical review of the twelve articles that use both administrative and survey measures of organizational performance. This reveals limited differences in the impact of management variables on the two types of performance measures. However, in those studies using survey measures, management variables are more likely to have a positive link with the performance judgements of service consumers than the judgements of managers themselves. This implies that public managers may underestimate their impact on citizens’ perceptions of organizational performance.postprintThe 14th International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) Conference, Berne, Switzerland, 7-9 April 2010

Centralization, organizational strategy, and public service performance

We test the separate and joint effects of centralization and organizational strategy on the performance of 53 UK public service organizations. Centralization is measured as both the hierarchy of authority and the degree of participation in decision making, whereas strategy is measured as the extent to which service providers are prospectors, defenders, and reactors. We find that centralization has no independent effect on service performance, even when controlling for prior performance, service expenditure, and external constraints. However, the impact of centralization is contingent on the strategic orientation of organizations. Centralized decision making works best in conjunction with defending, and decentralized decision making works best in organizations that emphasize prospecting.postprin

Mixture Reactivity Effects on Explosion Venting

Free vented explosions were investigated for 10% methane, 4.2 and 4.5% propane, 6.5 and 7.5% ethylene, 30% and 40% hydrogen in a 10 litre cylindrical explosion vessel for vent coefficients of 4.3 and 21.7. The cylindrical vessel volume was 10L and had a diameter of 162mm and an L/D of 2.8. End ignition was used on the wall opposite the vent. The results are presented against KG and the laminar burning velocity as measures of the mixture reactivity. It is shown that the correlation of the KG effect by Bartknecht does not agree with other experimental data, although the hydrogen results are closer to the present results than the other gases. In contrast the laminar flame venting theory, as used in NFPA68 (2013), does correlate the data well, even though it is not supposed to apply to hydrogen explosions. There was evidence of very fast flames at the vent for hydrogen explosions. Acceleration of the flames towards the vent was demonstrated, due to the expansion of the burnt gases in the direction of the vent. The laminar flame venting theory that is used in NFPA68 (2013) over predicts the measured Pred due to the assumption of the vessel surface area as the area of the flame at Pred. It was shown that the flame arrives at the wall after the flame has vented the vessel and well after the time that Pred occurs. At Kv 4.3 the external overpressure was responsible for Pred, although the difference from Pfv was small for methane, propane and ethylene but for hydrogen the flow through the vent Pfv was the highest overpressure. At Kv = 21.7 the pressure loss due to the unburnt gas flow through the vent was the largest overpressure. For hydrogen sonic flow at the vent occurs and at high Kv sonic flow is predicted to occur using the laminar flame venting equation modified for sonic flow at the vent. Sonic flow at the vent is not taken into account in current venting guidance

Molecular mechanisms regulating formation, trafficking and processing of annular gap junctions

Internalization of gap junction plaques results in the formation of annular gap junction vesicles. The factors that regulate the coordinated internalization of the gap junction plaques to form annular gap junction vesicles, and the subsequent events involved in annular gap junction processing have only relatively recently been investigated in detail. However it is becoming clear that while annular gap junction vesicles have been demonstrated to be degraded by autophagosomal and endo-lysosomal pathways, they undergo a number of additional processing events. Here, we characterize the morphology of the annular gap junction vesicle and review the current knowledge of the processes involved in their formation, fission, fusion, and degradation. In addition, we address the possibility for connexin protein recycling back to the plasma membrane to contribute to gap junction formation and intercellular communication. Information on gap junction plaque removal from the plasma membrane and the subsequent processing of annular gap junction vesicles is critical to our understanding of cell-cell communication as it relates to events regulating development, cell homeostasis, unstable proliferation of cancer cells, wound healing, changes in the ischemic heart, and many other physiological and pathological cellular phenomena

Outcomes of intravitreal methotrexate to salvage eyes with relapsed primary intraocular lymphoma

PURPOSE: To report the outcomes of intravitreal methotrexate (MTX) injections to rescue eyes with relapsed primary intraocular lymphoma (PIOL). METHODS: Retrospective case series of patients with ocular relapse of PIOL who had initially received systemic chemotherapy (all five cases) and external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) to brain and orbits (two cases). Injections of MTX (400 µg/0.1 mL) were given one time per week for 1 month, every other week for 4 months, followed by a maintenance phase of one injection one time per month for 8 months (total of 20 injections in a year). RESULTS: From April 2008 to February 2016, there were nine eyes of five patients (three men; average age at first presentation 62 years) treated with our rescue protocol of intravitreal MTX injections. Ocular relapse occurred at a mean interval of 15 months (range 5-34 months) after the completion of initial systemic treatment. At mean follow-up of 31 months (range 5-104 months), tumour control was achieved in eight out of nine eyes (89%); one eye failed, with persistent retinal infiltrates despite increasing the frequency of injections, resulting in severe keratopathy. The only other complication occurred in one eye, developing cystoid macular oedema from MTX injections that resolved with topical anti-inflammatory medications and reduced frequency of MTX. There were no cases of reduced vision or ocular relapse, but two patients died (one of central nervous system lymphoma). CONCLUSIONS: Intravitreal MTX was a safe and effective treatment modality for relapsed PIOL after systemic chemotherapy and radiotherapy, achieving local tumour control in 89%, and hence represents an optimal choice. However, given the rare nature of PIOL, larger collaborative studies with longer follow-up are needed to corroborate this

Vertex-Coloring with Star-Defects

Defective coloring is a variant of traditional vertex-coloring, according to which adjacent vertices are allowed to have the same color, as long as the monochromatic components induced by the corresponding edges have a certain structure. Due to its important applications, as for example in the bipartisation of graphs, this type of coloring has been extensively studied, mainly with respect to the size, degree, and acyclicity of the monochromatic components. In this paper we focus on defective colorings in which the monochromatic components are acyclic and have small diameter, namely, they form stars. For outerplanar graphs, we give a linear-time algorithm to decide if such a defective coloring exists with two colors and, in the positive case, to construct one. Also, we prove that an outerpath (i.e., an outerplanar graph whose weak-dual is a path) always admits such a two-coloring. Finally, we present NP-completeness results for non-planar and planar graphs of bounded degree for the cases of two and three colors

Creating Awareness of Sleep-Wake Hours by Gamification

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2016, held in Salzburg, Austria, in April 2016