Rohit Lekhi

This practitioner report outlines the nature of constraints to the development of ICT markets in Kenya, and identifies the cause of key market failures to grow domestic capacity. Results of an initiative to improve Kenyan ICT capacity though mentoring, international collaboration and the use of Agile project management methods are discussed. Based...

Democratic Management is a theoretically informed and empirically evidenced practical lever for change. It seeks to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of public organisations and to provide the much needed legitimacy for such enhancements. Democratic Management aims to fill the gap between what have become the largely empty ideals of public e...

Power comes in many forms: physical, economic, political, cultural and personal. So does it have differing effects. Power can thus be hierarchic, it can take the form of capacity and it can make things happen. Ownership of a resource convenes power, for it enables the owner – via the assertion of property rights – to ‘trump’ the wishes of other sta...

A Research Report for The Work Foundation’s Knowledge Economy Programme

For democracy to function effectively, public services must be responsive to citizen-user opinions and needs. Yet at the same time, elected officials and senior public managers must work to inform the opinions of the public so that their demands are realistic, fundable and something more than special interest. Democracy should thus be a two-way str...

Stress is everywhere, but as a relatively new phenomenon. How can we define it and how can we explain its extraordinary cost to both business and government? The suffering induced by stress is no fi gment of the imagination but can we accurately examine the relationship between stress and ill-health? Whatever stress is, it has grown immensely in re...

The challenge of how to marry the new culture of individualistic consumerism with the ethic of public service (necessarily more solidaristic and oriented around citizenship) besets all advanced economies. The vigorous and sometimes highly polarised debate in Britain is mirrored across the West. We want hospitals, museums and libraries to discharge...

This paper reviews the existing evidence on user satisfaction with and citizen expectations of public services. It highlights the so-called ‘delivery paradox’, where satisfaction with services is not rising in line with delivery improvements. The paper explains why the delivery paradox exists across many services before concluding with an analysis...

The discussions in this session of the conference have focused on how to show what it is that is particularly valuable about heritage. Value for money is important, but the public bodies represented here at this meeting are clearly providing other kinds of value that cannot be so easily quantified by New Public Management, with its emphasis on tech...

The community discourse around public service reform is both complex and wide ranging. Community and locality feature prominently across the full spectrum of policy and dominate large areas of most of the social science disciplines. Of particular interest is the recent shift in policy development towards the ‘redemptive power’ of community, localit...

This paper summarises the ndings of the literature review on politics and public management and sets out the theoretical background that underpins the concept of public value. It explores its potential as a theory of public management, which aims to guide the actions of public managers delivering services to the public funded through taxation.

This article examines notions of globalization through the conceptual lens of risk. Adapting the framework employed by Frank H. Knight, the article identifies three variables that help to explain how the role of risk and risk management is understood across a variety of (often antagonistic) literatures on globalization – these variables are boundar...

It is now a commonplace to suggest that class politics is at an end. In the face of widespread social and economic change, class has become increasingly marginal to the theoretical and practical concerns of those engaged in emancipatory struggle. This is discernible most clearly in the recent proliferation of emancipatory projects constituted aroun...

This examination of the use of the Internet in African American politics begins with an investigation of how access to and wider structural forces in United States society and economy shape usage of the Internet within African America. The second part examines the qualitative experiences of African American on-line. It looks at a variety of resourc...

Class now occupies a marginal position in much of contemporary social and political theory and (it seems) in politics in general. This is discernible most clearly in the proliferation of emancipatory projects constituted around non class axes where class appears to be of little (if any) relevance. This article suggests that class is still important...