手稿本. / Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學. / Shou gao ben. / Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue. / Chapter 一 --- 引論 / Chapter 二 --- 南京部院形成之過程 / Chapter 三 --- 兩京都院官吏員額與組織體系之比較 / Chapter 四 --- 兩京都部院之權力關係與人事遷調(上) / Chapter 五 --- 兩京都部院之權力關係與人事遷調(下) / Chapter 六 --- 結語 / Chapter 附一 --- 補明史南京七卿年表 / Chapter 附二 --- 洪武十三年以前中書省轄下之六部尚書年表 / 附御史大夫

Over the last 20 years or so, local government in Britain has been experiencing a relentless, rapidly changing environment. With successive Conservative governments introducing policies to encourage a new and improved managerialist approach during the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a shift away from the bureaucratic and professionally dominated type of administration to a more customer-focused, private sector style of management and service delivery. The impact of these changes has provoked many local authorities to adopt a more strategic approach. This thesis examines the strategy process in one such authority, a London Borough, during the mid-nineties following the appointment of its new chief executive. The process is seen as one essentially driven by the need for the authority to respond more effectively to the internal and external exigencies facing local government. As a case study, it explores the way the leadership, both executive and the political, moved the authority away from the former professional bureaucracy towards a more corporate way of working and management style. The thesis traces the perceptions, speculations and behaviour of the senior elected members of the political administration as well as those of the new chief executive and describes how these influenced the strategy process.

Collaboration provides a way of increasing the capacity of small local governments in providing services without reducing the quality of local democracy. The Thai government has been promoting cross-council collaboration with limited success while it has been widely implemented in England for decades. In the literature, little attention has been paid by scholars to the way in which the formation of collaboration and its implementation interacts. To generate new insights of academic and practical relevance, this study aims to generate insightful explanations about the role of collaborative entrepreneurs and collaborative managers in the initiation and institutional embedding of small council collaboration policy. It employs comparative empirical analysis of two pairs of cases in England and Thailand, set within an original theoretical framework built on the integration of policy-making models, the typology of collaboration on a continuum, and the notion of factors influencing sustainable collaboration. The thesis adds to the literature by distinguishing between and empirically demonstrating two roles – ‘collaborative entrepreneurs’, who initiate collaboration to solve immediate shared problems of resource scarcity and dependency facing small councils, and ‘collaborative managers’, who maintain sustainability of the collaboration and facilitate further integration across councils. It also reveals that the converse of resource/power dependency applies where the council with larger resources can become locked-in to disadvantageous relationships controlled by small councils with fewer resources. Furthermore this thesis shows that collaboration is more likely to occur where it does not challenge the vested interests of citizens and councillors. Building a coalition for change and developing collaborative culture are essential for enduring collaboration.

This study examines the impact of the Korean system of performance budgeting on government spending programmes. It sets out to examine the associations between a programme’s future budget and its past performance and also the impact of performance budgeting on managerial practices. Much of the study uses quantitative techniques – particularly regression analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Regression analysis is used to examine the links between budget decisions and performance, by analysing the impact on budget changes of SABP (Self-Assessment of Budgetary Programmes) scores (or grades) of programmes which the SABP assessed from 2005 to 2007. Secondly, ANOVA is used to examine changes in seven managerial practices: goal clarity, goal difficulty, budget adequacy, budget flexibility, budget participation, procedure formalization, and support from higher management, using perceptual data of 807 administrators in the Korean central government. This thesis found evidence of two main effects of Korean performance budgeting on government operations. Firstly, budget decisions have a statistically significant correlation with the performance of programmes or SABP scores (or grades). Secondly, Korean performance budgeting tends to initiate changes in programme-managerial practices within spending organizations, and to improve programme performance.

Local government globally is evolving in response to rising public expectations, changing socio-demographic factors and a growing focus on efficiency. The asset base used by municipalities in its service provision is changing to reflect this evolution. A new discipline of asset management has emerged prompted by a range of resource and policy influences. Its emergence reflects emphasis on a more strategic, entrepreneurial use of public assets rather than the more technical, stewardship role of property management from which it originated. In the past management of public property has received little critical attention but this has changed and a growing body of material is contributing to the advance of this new discipline. This thesis examines the relationship between rationale, practice and outcomes in asset management in order to understand the change factors that are a feature of this evolution of property management to asset management. An analytical framework was developed to measure why organisations do asset management; how they do it and what they achieve. This framework was applied through case studies to identify the change factors and to derive a simple typology of asset management to position organisations in the transformation process in terms of their approach and results. The case studies identified four change factors. These can be described as: strategic focus, organisational will, portfolio intelligence and an entrepreneurial culture. These characteristics were more evident in cases where organisations had advanced furthest from a traditional, paternalistic stewardship role of assets towards one of public entrepreneurialism.

In the Local Government Act 2000, central government mandated a change in political arrangements within English local authorities. Through introducing a blended separation of powers to the majority of local authorities, with a leader, cabinet and overview and scrutiny committees, the legislation moved the constitutional structure from a form of assembly government to a Westminster-style split between decision-makers and those who scrutinise those choices. One of the goals was to remove the party group grip on decision-making. Given the evidence of the strength of groups in authorities (Maud 1967, Widdicombe 1986, Copus 1999a) there are questions but no clear answers about how group behaviour has changed since this legislation (OPDM, 2002, Ashworth 2003, Copus & Leach, 2004, ELGNCE, 2004, 2006). This research assesses the impact of the change on major political parties. Due to the shift in the institutional environments, this thesis uses a rational choice institutionalist approach to consider how the legislation has affected groups; through assessing methods used to satisfice their goals. Using a mixed-methods approach incorporating survey research and case studies, the research has discovered that despite the reform to remove group influence, the legislation served to make local government more prone to domination by party groups.

This thesis examines how the process of outsourcing of public construction (OPC) projects is influenced by institutions and why. Extant literature focuses on explaining how outsourcing through competition improves efficiency with limited treatment of how institutions actually influence the OPC projects. The thesis develops an analytical framework for process-tracing that integrates institutional and social capital (SC) theories to examine what have hitherto been disparately employed to study their influence in policy reform implementation. By deploying this integrated framework, actors’ decision making in outsourcing process is analysed based on plural rationality at central (CG) and local government (LG) contexts. The thesis argues that actors in OPC simultaneously pursue material gains and SC investments while trying to minimise their transaction costs, in the process engaging in ‘forum shopping’ between formal and informal institutions. Depending on degree of social embeddedness, the process of outsourcing will incline to formality or informality. In the case of Uganda, findings indicate that the informal institutional regime dominates and no major difference in informal practices for both CG and LG levels exist although at CG level it may appear like formal institutions dominate in decision making. The thesis proposes that public policies should take cognisance of informal institutions as well as social structure in their design.

There are an increasing number of opportunities for community leaders to be involved in governing processes. However, the community leader literature fails sufficiently to distinguish the interaction of structure and agency. The thesis establishes a theoretical approach which places community leaders as ‘situated agents’. The thesis establishes a ‘reading-acting-effect’ model to examine how the readings of actors are translated into action and how they interpret the difference this makes. Case studies of two neighbourhoods in Sheffield reveal the changing influence of the community and of the state upon community leaders’ behaviour. In the early stages of development community leaders concentrate on the substantive difference their actions have in their community. The state plays a more significant role as community leaders begin to operate in governance arenas, making compromises to access state resources. State actors play important roles as rule makers and interpreters that affect how community leaders behave. Community leaders face a central dilemma between: modifying their behaviour to work with the state thereby increasing their opportunities to receive funding; and the freedom of working at a distance from the state without such support. Conflict can arise between community leaders as they adopt different positions in relation to the state based on their distinct interpretations of this dilemma.

The creation of eleven directly elected mayors in England between 2002 and 2005, as part of the Labour Government's wider local government reform, altered local governance in those localities. The 1998 White Paper Modern Local Government identified three key weaknesses in the previous local government system: a lack of leadership, legitimacy and accountability. The main question the thesis sought to answer was: what was the political difference made by the introduction of executive mayors in England.? The key issue in this study was to assess if executive mayors have improved the efficiency, the transparency or the accountability of local government. The investigation of the executive mayoral option employed an analytical framework to measure change on three dimensions of efficiency, transparency and accountability. To aid the investigation seven hypotheses were constructed from the government’s White Papers to explore various aspects of executive mayors and assist in providing generalisable conclusions about the introduction of directly elected mayors. Leadership and representation theories were used to operationalise the concepts of leadership, legitimacy and accountability. Models were developed which mapped the locus of power in the council's political space. Given the population of executive mayors was eleven local authorities for the period of the field research, a qualitative approach was adopted relying primarily on interviews augmented with documentary sources and observations. Election results were also analysed using conventional quantitative methods. With regard to elections, the study demonstrates that voters differentiate the office of executive mayor from other political posts. Other findings in this study indicate that one of the main political differences made by the introduction of executive mayors is the creation of a new balance between politicians and officials with the former being more dominant when determining policy matters while the senior officials taking the lead in administration and management. In addition, executive mayors have developed a better capability to challenge professional officers. The strength of executive mayors as leaders within their local authorities over the policy making process demonstrates a change from the operation of the previous system in England. The key person driving policy is now is the directly, clearly identifiable and more accountable executive mayor. This research has shown that directly elected mayors have made positive political differences which can be measured against the core goals of effective, transparent and accountable local government. Executive mayors demonstrate a continuity of governance in local government and have made a difference in the way local councils are run.

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