In this article, we examine the role that formal strategic planning plays in determining the success of strategy implementation in a set of more than 150 public service organizations from Canada. We also analyse the mediating effects of managerial involvement in strategic planning and the moderating effects of stakeholder uncertainty on the planning-implementation relationship. A structured online questionnaire was used to collect the data. Our findings suggest that formal strategic planning has a strong positive relationship with implementation, which, though mediated by managerial involvement, becomes even more salient in the face of stakeholder uncertainty. Several implications of these findings are discussed.

Debates about the merits of publicness have dominated the public administration landscape since the foundation of the modern state. The extent of organizational publicness (ownership, funding, and control) has waxed and waned in developed countries: it rose following the postwar settlement and fell under the policies of New Right government and the popularity of the notions of New Public Management. We argue that publicness effects are likely to diminish in the face of organizational and contextual characteristics and that what matters for performance is management and organization. To this end, we examine the evidence base by undertaking a review of academic studies of publicness and organizational performance. The results suggest that publicness makes a difference to efficiency and equity, but the magnitude and direction of this effect varies with the characteristics of the empirical studies. Our findings clearly point toward the need for research that includes all dimensions of publicness, a variety of performance measures, and the moderating effects of management, organization, and external constraints.

Organization theorists suggest that the social capital within organizations is a potentially powerful resource for improving organizational performance. In addition, organizational structures may strengthen or weaken the effects of social capital, by furnishing greater or fewer opportunities for its growth. This article explores the independent and combined effects of organizational social capital and structure on the performance of over 100 organizations between 2002 and 2005, using panel data. The statistical results suggest that cognitive and relational dimensions of social capital are positively related to performance, but that the structural dimension of social capital is unrelated to service outcomes. Further analysis revealed that organizational structure has complex and contradictory effects on the impact of each dimension of social capital.

The relationship is analysed between size, local government structure and administrative overheads in English local authorities. Size and structure effects are tested while controlling for a range of other variables, including the relative prosperity of the local population and the diversity of their service needs. The empirical results show that population size consistently has a linear negative effect: central administrative costs are lower in larger local authorities. The results also show that, controlling for size, administrative overheads are higher for councils in the lower tier of the existing two-tier system. The analysis provides support for arguments that economies of scale might be achieved by amalgamating smaller councils into larger units and by combining counties and districts into unitary authorities.

This article tests the independent effects of strategy formulation and strategy content on organizational performance. The formulation variables include rational planning, logical instrumentalism and strategy process absence, and the strategy content variables are prospecting, defending and reacting, which are derived from the work of Miles and Snow ( 1978 Miles, R. E. and Snow, C. C. 1978. Organizational Strategy, Structure and Process, New York: McGraw-Hill. [Google Scholar] ). The model, which also controls for past performance and service expenditure, is tested upon forty-seven service departments in Welsh local government. The statistical results indicate that logical incrementalism and strategy absence have negative consequences for performance while prospecting and defending are strategies that are likely to result in higher levels of organizational performance. The implications of these findings for public management research are considered.