Christopher Hood – författare

The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. In The Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenomenon is not all bad, Hood demonstrates that it can actually help to pin down responsibility, and he examines different kinds of blame avoidance, both positive and negative.Hood traces how the main forms of blame avoidance manifest themselves in presentational and "spin" activity, the architecture of organizations, and the shaping of standard operating routines. He analyzes the scope and limits of blame avoidance, and he considers how it plays out in old and new areas, such as those offered by the digital age of websites and e-mail. Hood assesses the effects of this behavior, from high-level problems of democratic accountability trails going cold to the frustrations of dealing with organizations whose procedures seem to ensure that no one is responsible for anything.Delving into the inner workings of complex institutions, The Blame Game proves how a better understanding of blame avoidance can improve the quality of modern governance, management, and organizational design.

This volume identifies and compares ''fiscal squeezes'' (major efforts to cut public spending and/or raise taxes) in the UK over a century from 1900 to 2015. The authors examine how different the politics of fiscal squeeze and austerity is today from what it was a century ago, how (if at all) fiscal squeezes reshaped the state and the provision of public services, and how political credit and blame played out after austerity episodes. The analysis is both quantitativeand qualitative, starting with reported financial outcomes from historical statistics and then going behind those numbers to explore the political choices and processes in play. This analysis identifies some patterns that have not been explained or even recognized in earlier works on retrenchment andausterity. For example, it identifies a long term shift from what it terms a ''surgery without anaesthetics'' approach (deep but short-lived episodes of spending restraint or tax increases) in the earlier part of the period towards a ''boiling frogs'' approach (episodes in which the pain is spread out over a longer period) in more recent decades. It also identifies a curious reduction of revenue-led squeezes in more recent decades, and a puzzle over why blame-avoidance logic only led to outsourcingpainful decisions over squeeze in a minority of cases. Furthermore, the volume''s distinctive approach to classifying types of fiscal squeezes and qualitatively assessing their intensity seeks to solve the puzzle as to why voter''punishment'' of governments that impose austerity policies seems to be soerratic.

This volume identifies and compares ''fiscal squeezes'' (major efforts to cut public spending and/or raise taxes) in the UK over a century from 1900 to 2015. The authors examine how different the politics of fiscal squeeze and austerity is today from what it was a century ago, how (if at all) fiscal squeezes reshaped the state and the provision of public services, and how political credit and blame played out after austerity episodes. The analysis is both quantitativeand qualitative, starting with reported financial outcomes from historical statistics and then going behind those numbers to explore the political choices and processes in play. This analysis identifies some patterns that have not been explained or even recognized in earlier works on retrenchment andausterity. For example, it identifies a long term shift from what it terms a ''surgery without anaesthetics'' approach (deep but short-lived episodes of spending restraint or tax increases) in the earlier part of the period towards a ''boiling frogs'' approach (episodes in which the pain is spread out over a longer period) in more recent decades. It also identifies a curious reduction of revenue-led squeezes in more recent decades, and a puzzle over why blame-avoidance logic only led to outsourcingpainful decisions over squeeze in a minority of cases. Furthermore, the volume''s distinctive approach to classifying types of fiscal squeezes and qualitatively assessing their intensity seeks to solve the puzzle as to why voter''punishment'' of governments that impose austerity policies seems to be soerratic.

Forging a Discipline analyses the growth of the academic discipline of politics and international relations at Oxford University over the last hundred years. This century marked the maturation and professionalization of social science disciplines such as political science, economics, and sociology in the world''s leading universities. The Oxford story of teaching and research in politics provides one case study of this transformation, and the contributors aimto use its specifics better to understand this general process. In their introductory and concluding chapters the Editors argue that Oxford is a critical case to consider because several aspects of the university and its organization seem, at first glance, to militate against disciplinary development andgrowth. Oxford''s institutional structure in which colleges enjoyed autonomy from the central university until quite recently, its proximity to the practice of government and politics through the supply of a steady stream of senior administrators, politicians and prime ministers, and its emphasis on undergraduate teaching through intensive small group tutorials all distinguish the development of teaching and research on politics in the university from such competitors as Manchester or the LSE asexplained in one of the contributions. These themes inform the book''s chapters in which the contributors examine the founding of the first dedicated position in political science in the university, the study of the British Constitution and the development of electoral studies, the introduction andconsolidation of international relations into the Oxford social science curriculum in contrast to the way in which war studies emerged, the commitment to research and teaching in political theory, the careful harvesting of area studies, particularly of Latin America and Eastern Europe including Russia, and the distinctive role of Oxford''s two social science graduate colleges, Nuffield and St Antony''s, in fostering a graduate programme of study and research. What emerges from these historicallyresearched and analytical accounts is the surprising capacity of members of the politics discipline at Oxford to forge a leading place for their scholarly perspectives and research in such core parts of the discipline as political theory, the study of comparative politics as a subject rather than asan area, ideas about order in international relations and the scientific study of elections in Britain and comparatively. That these achievements occurred in a university lacking the formal system of hierarchy and, until the last decade, departmentalization makes this volume a valuable addition to studies of the professionalization of social science research and teaching in modern universities.

The UK is said to have been one of the most prolific reformers of its public administration. Successive reforms have been accompanied by claims that the changes would make the world a better place by transforming the way government worked. Despite much discussion and debate over government makeovers and reforms, however, there has been remarkably little systematic evaluation of what happened to cost and performance in UK government during the last thirty years.A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? aims to address that gap, offering a unique evaluation of UK government modernization programmes from 1980 to the present day. The book provides a distinctive framework for evaluating long-term performance in government, bringing together the ''working better'' and ''costing less'' dimensions, and presents detailed primary evidence within that framework.This book explores the implications of their findings for widely held ideas about public management, the questions they present, and their policy implications for a period in which pressures to make government ''work better and cost less'' are unlikely to go away.

Why does regulation vary so dramatically from one area to another? Why are some risks regulated aggressively and others responded to only modestly? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? These key questions are explored in The Government of Risk. This book looks at a number of risk regulation regimes, considers the respects in which they differ, and examines how these differences can be justified.Analyzing regulation in terms of ''regimes'' allows us to see the rich, multi-dimensional nature of risk regulation. It exposes the thinness of society-wide analyses of risk controls and it offers a perspective that single case studies cannot reach. Regimes analysis breaks down the components of risk regulation systems and shows how they interact. It also shows how different parts of the same regime may be shaped by different factors and have to be explained and understood in quite different ways. The Government of Risk shows how such an approach is of high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

The traditional understandings that structure the relationships between public servants and the wider political system are said to have undergone considerable change. But what are these formalized and implicit understandings? What are the key dimensions of such bargains? In what conditions do bargains rise and fall? And has there been a universal and uniform change in these bargains?The Politics of Public Service Bargains develops a distinct perspective to answer these questions. It develops a unique analytical perspective to account for diverse bargains within systems of executive government. Drawing on comparative experiences from different state traditions, this study examines ideas and contemporary developments along three key dimensions of any Public Service Bargain - reward, competency and loyalty and responsibility.The Politics of Public Service Bargains points to diverse and differentiated developments across national systems of executive government and suggests how different ''bargains'' are prone to cheating by their constituent parties. This study explores the context in which managerial bargains - widely seen to be at the heart of contemporary administrative reform movements - are likely to catch on and considers how cheating is likely to destabilize such bargains.

This book explores the unintended and unanticipated effects associated with ''modernization'' projects and tackles the key question that they provoke - why do policy-makers persist in such enterprises in the face of evidence that they tend to fail?Paradoxes of Modernization first discusses what is meant by ''modernization'' and ''unintended consequences'', placing public policy reform within more general intellectual and social trends. It presents eight case study ''modernization'' projects. Their architects promised faster trains, a more efficient and reactive health service, a more motivated public service, better performing local government, enhanced information for prospective US university students, reduced rates of childmalnutrition in developing countries, and a free, open, safe, interconnected cyberspace for people to conduct their social and political life. Each case provides a neat story with a paradox that varies the modernization theme and tackles the question: why was the project pursued? The conclusion categorizes the casesin terms of their outcome, from success to disappointment, and suggests some strategies for a more balanced version of modernization for current and future policy-makers.

This book explores the unintended and unanticipated effects associated with ''modernization'' projects and tackles the key question that they provoke - why do policy-makers persist in such enterprises in the face of evidence that they tend to fail?Paradoxes of Modernization first discusses what is meant by ''modernization'' and ''unintended consequences'', placing public policy reform within more general intellectual and social trends. It presents eight case study ''modernization'' projects. Their architects promised faster trains, a more efficient and reactive health service, a more motivated public service, better performing local government, enhanced information for prospective US university students, reduced rates of childmalnutrition in developing countries, and a free, open, safe, interconnected cyberspace for people to conduct their social and political life. Each case provides a neat story with a paradox that varies the modernization theme and tackles the question: why was the project pursued? The conclusion categorizes the casesin terms of their outcome, from success to disappointment, and suggests some strategies for a more balanced version of modernization for current and future policy-makers.

The Way the Money Goes traces out what happened to the UK''s fiscal constitution - the framework for planning and controlling public spending - under three different governments (Conservative, Labour, Conservative/Liberal Democrat) from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. The book tells the story of what happened under each government and combines narrative with vignettes that range from the funding of a new Treasury building to efforts to ''crowdsource'' ideas for spending cuts. It also includes chapters devoted to different domains of spending control, namely capital spending, spending by subnational governments, running cost expenditure, fiscal forecasting, and the development of new accounting metrics. This book is based on over 120 in-depth interviews of civil servants and ministers who were involved in public spending over the period, as well as documents from the same timeframe. It explores how and why, despite much talk of change and reform in everything from parliamentary procedure to bureaucratic processes, many of the underlying features of the UK''s fiscal constitution persisted, including arrangements for formula-funding of the different countries within the union designed as a temporary stopgap in the transition to devolution. To put UK developments into perspective, the book includes a discussion of how the UK system was rated in reports from international bodies over the period, which suggests that in such exercises the more ''political'' parts of the fiscal constitution were rated differently from the more ''technocratic'' parts. Given several volcanic-type political eruptions in the UK over recent years, the book concludes by exploring some different possible scenarios for the future of its fiscal constitution in the light of those and other possible eruptions to come.

The Way the Money Goes traces out what happened to the UK''s fiscal constitution - the framework for planning and controlling public spending - under three different governments (Conservative, Labour, Conservative/Liberal Democrat) from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. The book tells the story of what happened under each government and combines narrative with vignettes that range from the funding of a new Treasury building to efforts to ''crowdsource'' ideas for spending cuts. It also includes chapters devoted to different domains of spending control, namely capital spending, spending by subnational governments, running cost expenditure, fiscal forecasting, and the development of new accounting metrics. This book is based on over 120 in-depth interviews of civil servants and ministers who were involved in public spending over the period, as well as documents from the same timeframe. It explores how and why, despite much talk of change and reform in everything from parliamentary procedure to bureaucratic processes, many of the underlying features of the UK''s fiscal constitution persisted, including arrangements for formula-funding of the different countries within the union designed as a temporary stopgap in the transition to devolution. To put UK developments into perspective, the book includes a discussion of how the UK system was rated in reports from international bodies over the period, which suggests that in such exercises the more ''political'' parts of the fiscal constitution were rated differently from the more ''technocratic'' parts. Given several volcanic-type political eruptions in the UK over recent years, the book concludes by exploring some different possible scenarios for the future of its fiscal constitution in the light of those and other possible eruptions to come.

'Transparency' is widely canvassed as a key to better governance, increasing trust in public-office holders. But transparency is more often preached than practised, more often referred to than defined, and more often advocated than critically analysed. This volume exposes this fashionable doctrine to critical scrutiny from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including political science, philosophy and economics. The volume traces the history of transparency as a doctrine of good governance and social organization, and identifies its different forms; it assesses the benefits and drawbacks of measures to enhance various forms of transparency; and examines how institutions respond to measures intended to increase transparency, and with what consequences. Transparency is shown not to be a new doctrine. It can come into conflict with other doctrines of good governance, and there are some important exceptions to Jeremy Bentham's famous dictum that 'the more closely we are watched, the better we behave'. And instead of heralding a new culture of openness in government, measures to improve transparency tend to lead to tighter and more centralised management of information.

The politics of cutting public spending or raising taxes (or both) has dominated politics in many democracies in recent years. A new era of conflict has developed, with old political alignments being tested and new battles emerging over whose expectations are to be disappointed and who should be blamed for fiscal squeeze.Do parties who cut spending always go down to defeat in elections? Are there 'best practice' cases that every government should follow when it has to cut spending or raise taxes to balance its public finances? Such issues have mainly been analysed from an economic or financial perspective and in the context of recent cases. By contrast, this book focuses on the politics of fiscal squeeze and takes a longer view.It combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine cases ranging from the fiscal squeeze in the United States in the 1830s/40s (when half of the states then in the Union defaulted) to the squeeze following the 2001 Argentinian default. It assesses who were the winners and losers, who got the blame and what were the longer-term effects on politics and government. It argues that 'how to do it' approaches to fiscal squeeze in democracies, based on apparently successful cases, often fail to take into account profound differences in circumstances.

Why does public management - the art of the state - so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service? What are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services? Are the forces of modernity set to produce world-wide convergence in ways of organizing government? This important new study aims to explore such questions, central to current debates over public management. Combining contemporary and historical experience, it employs grid/group cultural theory as an organizing frame and method of exploration. Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services. And contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues that variety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management.

Regulation Inside Government analyses the army of inspectors, auditors, grievance-chasers, standard-setters and other bodies overseeing contemporary public organizations. Based on an unprecedented two-year inside study of British government by a team of leading scholars, this book provides an original analytical perspective on regulation within government. The book begins by examining the size of internal government regulation to reveal a structure comparable in size to government regulation of business. The book then goes on to show how internal government regulation grew in size despite the fact that public bureaucracy elsewhere were being sharply cutback. Given the limitations of orthodox constitutional checks on executive government, the courts and elected members of the legislature, regulation inside government deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. As one of the first comprehensive accounts of regulation inside government, this book begins to fill the gap.

Why does public management–the art of the state–so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service? What are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services? Are the forces of modernity set to produce worldwide convergence in ways of organizing government? This important new study aims to explore such questions, central to current debates over public management. Combining contemporary and historical experience, it employs grid/group cultural theory as an organizing frame and method of exploration. Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services. And contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues that variety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management.

Regulation has become a key form of state activity and an area of burgeoning academic concern, both in Public Law and Economics. This collection makes available to the reader a number of indispensable readings. The text considers the central topics of regulation and looks to theory as well as practice, enforcement as well as rule-making, and supra-national as well as domestic concerns. Particular attention is paid to the ways that regulatory developments can be explained, the choices of technique that confront regulators and the varieties of regulatory style that are encountered within and between different regimes. The introductory essay considers the maturation of regulation both as a practice and as a discipline. it examines regulation as a topic for study, reviews major developments in regulation and outlines central themes. This book is intended as a resource for upper-level undergraduate students and teachers of regulation as part of degree courses in law, economics, business, public policy and politics, but also for those involved in or subject to regulation on a daily basis.

This volume identifies and compares 'fiscal squeezes' (major efforts to cut public spending and/or raise taxes) in the UK over a century from 1900 to 2015. The authors examine how different the politics of fiscal squeeze and austerity is today from what it was a century ago, how (if at all) fiscal squeezes reshaped the state and the provision of public services, and how political credit and blame played out after austerity episodes. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, starting with reported financial outcomes from historical statistics and then going behind those numbers to explore the political choices and processes in play. This analysis identifies some patterns that have not been explained or even recognized in earlier works on retrenchment and austerity. For example, it identifies a long term shift from what it terms a 'surgery without anaesthetics' approach (deep but short-lived episodes of spending restraint or tax increases) in the earlier part of the period towards a 'boiling frogs' approach (episodes in which the pain is spread out over a longer period) in more recent decades. It also identifies a curious reduction of revenue-led squeezes in more recent decades, and a puzzle over why blame-avoidance logic only led to outsourcing painful decisions over squeeze in a minority of cases. Furthermore, the volume's distinctive approach to classifying types of fiscal squeezes and qualitatively assessing their intensity seeks to solve the puzzle as to why voter'punishment' of governments that impose austerity policies seems to be so erratic.

The Way the Money Goes traces out what happened to the UK's fiscal constitution - the framework for planning and controlling public spending - under three different governments (Conservative, Labour, Conservative/Liberal Democrat) from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. The book tells the story of what happened under each government and combines narrative with vignettes that range from the funding of a new Treasury building to efforts to 'crowdsource' ideas for spending cuts. It also includes chapters devoted to different domains of spending control, namely capital spending, spending by subnational governments, running cost expenditure, fiscal forecasting, and the development of new accounting metrics. This book is based on over 120 in-depth interviews of civil servants and ministers who were involved in public spending over the period, as well as documents from the same timeframe. It explores how and why, despite much talk of change and reform in everything from parliamentary procedure to bureaucratic processes, many of the underlying features of the UK's fiscal constitution persisted, including arrangements for formula-funding of the different countries within the union designed as a temporary stopgap in the transition to devolution. To put UK developments into perspective, the book includes a discussion of how the UK system was rated in reports from international bodies over the period, which suggests that in such exercises the more 'political' parts of the fiscal constitution were rated differently from the more 'technocratic' parts. Given several volcanic-type political eruptions in the UK over recent years, the book concludes by exploring some different possible scenarios for the future of its fiscal constitution in the light of those and other possible eruptions to come.

Why does regulation vary so dramatically from one area to another? Why are some risks regulated aggressively and others responded to only modestly? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? These key questions are explored in The Government of Risk. This book looks at a number of risk regulations regimes, considers the respects in which they differ, and examines how these differences can be explained.Analysing regulation in terms of 'regimes' allows us to see the rich, multi-dimensional nature of risk regulation. It exposes the thinness of society-wide analyses of risk controls and it offers a perspective that single case studies cannot reach. Regimes analysis breaks down the components of risk regulation systems and shows how these interact. It also shows how different parts of the same regime may be shaped by different factors and have to be understood in quite different ways. The Government of Risk shows how such an approach is of high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

The traditional understandings that structure the relationships between public servants and the wider political system are said to have undergone considerable change. But what are these formalized and implicit understandings? What are the key dimensions of such bargains? In what conditions do bargains rise and fall? And has there been a universal and uniform change in these bargains?The Politics of Public Service Bargains develops a distinct perspective to answer these questions. It develops a unique analytical perspective to account for diverse bargains within systems of executive government. Drawing on comparative experiences from different state traditions, this study examines ideas and contemporary developments along three key dimensions of any Public Service Bargain - reward, competency and loyalty and responsibility.The Politics of Public Service Bargains points to diverse and differentiated developments across national systems of executive government and suggests how different 'bargains' are prone to cheating by their constituent parties. This study explores the context in which managerial bargains - widely seen to be at the heart of contemporary administrative reform movements - are likely to catch on and considers how cheating is likely to destabilize such bargains.

Why does regulation vary so dramatically from one area to another? Why are some risks regulated aggressively and others responded to only modestly? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? These key questions are explored in The Government of Risk. This book looks at a number of risk regulation regimes, considers the respects in which they differ, and examines how these differences can be justified.Analyzing regulation in terms of 'regimes' allows us to see the rich, multi-dimensional nature of risk regulation. It exposes the thinness of society-wide analyses of risk controls and it offers a perspective that single case studies cannot reach. Regimes analysis breaks down the components of risk regulation systems and shows how they interact. It also shows how different parts of the same regime may be shaped by different factors and have to be explained and understood in quite different ways. The Government of Risk shows how such an approach is of high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

This book explores the unintended and unanticipated effects associated with 'modernization' projects and tackles the key question that they provoke - why do policy-makers persist in such enterprises in the face of evidence that they tend to fail? Paradoxes of Modernization first discusses what is meant by 'modernization' and 'unintended consequences', placing public policy reform within more general intellectual and social trends. It presents eight case study 'modernization' projects. Their architects promised faster trains, a more efficient and reactive health service, a more motivated public service, better performing local government, enhanced information for prospective US university students, reduced rates of child malnutrition in developing countries, and a free, open, safe, interconnected cyberspace for people to conduct their social and political life. Each case provides a neat story with a paradox that varies the modernization theme and tackles the question: why was the project pursued? The conclusion categorizes the cases in terms of their outcome, from success to disappointment, and suggests some strategies for a more balanced version of modernization for current and future policy-makers.

This book explores the unintended and unanticipated effects associated with 'modernization' projects and tackles the key question that they provoke - why do policy-makers persist in such enterprises in the face of evidence that they tend to fail? Paradoxes of Modernization first discusses what is meant by 'modernization' and 'unintended consequences', placing public policy reform within more general intellectual and social trends. It presents eight case study 'modernization' projects. Their architects promised faster trains, a more efficient and reactive health service, a more motivated public service, better performing local government, enhanced information for prospective US university students, reduced rates of child malnutrition in developing countries, and a free, open, safe, interconnected cyberspace for people to conduct their social and political life. Each case provides a neat story with a paradox that varies the modernization theme and tackles the question: why was the project pursued? The conclusion categorizes the cases in terms of their outcome, from success to disappointment, and suggests some strategies for a more balanced version of modernization for current and future policy-makers

Forging a Discipline analyses the growth of the academic discipline of politics and international relations at Oxford University over the last hundred years. This century marked the maturation and professionalization of social science disciplines such as political science, economics, and sociology in the world's leading universities. The Oxford story of teaching and research in politics provides one case study of this transformation, and the contributors aim to use its specifics better to understand this general process. In their introductory and concluding chapters the Editors argue that Oxford is a critical case to consider because several aspects of the university and its organization seem, at first glance, to militate against disciplinary development and growth. Oxford's institutional structure in which colleges enjoyed autonomy from the central university until quite recently, its proximity to the practice of government and politics through the supply of a steady stream of senior administrators, politicians and prime ministers, and its emphasis on undergraduate teaching through intensive small group tutorials all distinguish the development of teaching and research on politics in the university from such competitors as Manchester or the LSE as explained in one of the contributions. These themes inform the book's chapters in which the contributors examine the founding of the first dedicated position in political science in the university, the study of the British Constitution and the development of electoral studies, the introduction and consolidation of international relations into the Oxford social science curriculum in contrast to the way in which war studies emerged, the commitment to research and teaching in political theory, the careful harvesting of area studies, particularly of Latin America and Eastern Europe including Russia, and the distinctive role of Oxford's two social science graduate colleges, Nuffield and St Antony's, in fostering a graduate programme of study and research. What emerges from these historically researched and analytical accounts is the surprising capacity of members of the politics discipline at Oxford to forge a leading place for their scholarly perspectives and research in such core parts of the discipline as political theory, the study of comparative politics as a subject rather than as an area, ideas about order in international relations and the scientific study of elections in Britain and comparatively. That these achievements occurred in a university lacking the formal system of hierarchy and, until the last decade, departmentalization makes this volume a valuable addition to studies of the professionalization of social science research and teaching in modern universities.

The UK is said to have been one of the most prolific reformers of its public administration. Successive reforms have been accompanied by claims that the changes would make the world a better place by transforming the way government worked. Despite much discussion and debate over government makeovers and reforms, however, there has been remarkably little systematic evaluation of what happened to cost and performance in UK government during the last thirty years. A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? aims to address that gap, offering a unique evaluation of UK government modernization programmes from 1980 to the present day. The book provides a distinctive framework for evaluating long-term performance in government, bringing together the 'working better' and 'costing less' dimensions, and presents detailed primary evidence within that framework.This book explores the implications of their findings for widely held ideas about public management, the questions they present, and their policy implications for a period in which pressures to make government 'work better and cost less' are unlikely to go away.

This important new work updates the arguments of Christopher Hood's classic work The Tools of Government for the Twenty-First century. Comprehensively revised throughout, it includes increased coverage of how government gets information and an assessment of how the tools available to government have changed over time.

This important new work updates the arguments of Christopher Hood's classic work The Tools of Government for the Twenty-First century. Comprehensively revised throughout, it includes increased coverage of how government gets information and an assessment of how the tools available to government have changed over time.

The loss of a loved one is a traumatic event. If the loved one is your child, the emotions are further tested. Imagine having to cope with all of these feelings when also adding into the mix the challenges when the death happens on the other side of the planet in a country with a different language and culture. This is what one man had to face when his son died in the world’s largest single plane crash. Peter Mathews lost his son Kimble, who was travelling with his fiancée Masako Nishiguchi, in the flight JL123 crash on 12 August 1985. From the time of the first phone call through his trip to Japan until his return back to the UK, Peter kept a diary and took photographs. Using these materials as a basis, this book provides an amazing insight into the events of August 1985. The book also includes details of the experiences and lessons learned by the JAL employee, Keith Haines, who was assigned to accompany the Mathews family to Japan. Their story is as relevant today as it was in 1985.