The primary aim of the thesis was to investigate the theoretical implications of extending relationship marketing to a sector where it had not previously been applied, namely local government in England. The secondary research aim was to investigate the nature of relationships between service providers and service users in the context of a London Borough, with a view to making recommendations on appropriate marketing strategies for different local government services. The research design was based upon a review of elements of the academic literature on relationships, relationship marketing, and local government. The review led to the identification of a new way of describing marketing relationships, namely the 'model' of a relationship. Eight such models were identified in the literature and seven were used in the data collection phase of the study. An embedded case study approach was used to collect and analyse the data, with the London Borough of Barnet acting as the overall case, and three different services provided by the Borough Council serving as the embedded cases. The three services, chosen to reflect the wide range of different activities carried out by a London Borough, were Libraries, Environmental Health and Benefits. Within each of the three embedded cases there were two quantitative, self-completion surveys - one for the service providers and one for the service users. The surveys were used to obtain numerical scores for each of the seven relationship models. The study presents the relationship model scores for the six surveys and shows how they form a picture of the relationships between the providers of a particular service and the users of that service. In particular it is shown that while users do not perceive any relationship between themselves and the service providers, the providers do perceive a relationship - described by either the Taken for Granted relationship model (providers in both the Environmental Health and the Benefits services) or the Weak Ties model (Library service providers). The main finding of the study in respect of the primary research aim is that while there are no theoretical objections to extending relationship marketing into local government, in practice attempts to do so are unlikely to succeed because the service provider/service user relationships involved in the local government contexts examined in this study are typified by levels of interpersonal interaction which are too low to permit the creation and maintenance of viable relationships. The study also notes that the inappropriateness of one form of marketing does not rule out all other forms of marketing in local government, and in particular the concept of marketing Taken for Granted services is discussed in the context of the secondary research aim. One of the characteristics of this type of service is a degree of dissociation in the service user's mind between the service itself and the organisation supplying it. A set of recommended strategies for marketing this kind of service, adapted for local government from the literature of Taken for Granted marketing, is put forward. The marketing implications of the other relationship models are also briefly discussed. The limitations of this thesis are outlined in the conclusion and some avenues for future. research are suggested, including investigation of the possibility that the providers of Taken for Granted services might feel taken for granted, not just by their service users but also by their own employers.

This thesis examines responses to displacement and suffering among a small Muslim population presently resident in post-Soviet Russia. The Meskhetian Turks were deported from Georgia in 1944, and resettled in Central Asia. In 1989, violent attacks led to further migration of most Meskhetian Turks in Uzbekistan. Some moved to Krasnodar in southern Russia, where they continue to suffer discrimination by the region's authorities. The thesis examines how Meskhetian Turks live in diaspora, and how their traumatic experiences have been integrated into and mediated through everyday and life-cycle practices. It critiques the representation of post-Soviet and post-displacement lives as dominated by crisis, arguing that Meskhetian Turks rather emphasise continuity and the mundane experience of life in diaspora. The events of 1989 and 1944 are rarely discussed, are not commemorated and do not consolidate a political community. I argue that this absence of discussion of suffering in this context is consistent with wider Meskhetian Turkish practices of restraint in the verbal expression of personal feelings and desires. While silence must be examined as a language for expression of pain, absence of commemoration can also be integral to the continual process of living ordinary lives in diaspora. Such continuity is partly obtained through stressing the importance of being a related person. The construction of new kin at marriage occasions the most significant Meskhetian Turkish celebrations, which themselves highlight the value attached to mundane domestic practices constitutive of Meskhetian Turkish persons and households. Rather than being blamed for their suffering, the Soviet Union is celebrated, and its disappearance provides the basis for acceptable public expression of loss. But neither the positive affiliation with a state, nor village association as a form of relatedness, rely on identification with a physical place. The thesis thus questions the assumption of refugees' and others' territorial identification.

In the latter part of the 20th century ICT has been broadly employed in an effort to enhance the quality of service provision to the public. In the light of this, both public and private sectors have recognised the necessity of adopting technology and its applications in their potential. However, using ICT facilities for development facing various factors such as; establishing technical infrastructures, users and employees’ awareness, legal framework for interactions with public authorities, security, privacy, trust, digital divide, along with organizational issues should be taken into consideration. Therefore, all these challenges should be considered and discussed if continuing progress is to be maintained because missing a few issues and only discussing some of them will lead to a waste of resources. Currently, most of the developing countries suffer from the lack of transparency, accountability, and increasing corruption in government administration. E-government has appeared as a potential solution to reduce the level of corruption by enhancing the services to its citizens effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, e-government has the potential to enhance and organise the relationships between stakeholders which include; citizens, government, and business. So, thriving implementation of e-government will improve accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness of government institutions and also may decrease corruption at both federal and regional levels. This research proposes a novel e-government stage model based on the citizen’s participation of improvements in the delivery of governmental services. In other words, find the importance of putting citizens’ insights and their requirements in the context of e-government development along with the potential use of a multi-channel delivery of services. It is expected that the model will enable more transparent and effective communications with businesses. Thereby, reducing bureaucracy and by implication, may result in a reduction in corruption. To accomplish this, the researcher investigates in the literature to find out the existing models and experiences in the area of e-government in order to identify the drawbacks reasons and limitations of the failure. The researcher also set out to investigate and analyse iii one of the well established e-government stage models, to identify possible opportunities to adopt for use in regional government in developing countries. The proposed model has been evaluated by adapting the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) decision making method and integrating it with the SWOT analysis method. SWOT factors were identified through interviews with experts from various ministries in the KRG. The proposed model were evaluated by adopting a qualitative case study strategy such as IT projects, taking the expert’s opinion of the proposed model by using qualitative method. Moreover the researcher, by using a qualitative case study strategy such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), observes the proposed model in various government institutions in the KRI. The analysis of pragmatic data leads to a narrative inclusive model for e-government initiatives in the public sector that can be assisted in different ways. The advantage of this model is to decrease the uncertainty of e-government implementation in the public sector by recognising the consequence of the institutional readiness, adoption processes, the needs of ICT tools, and the factors that influence the implementation process. The model might also assist policy makers in government to offer a clear vision for e-government. Ultimately, any conclusions could be useful to other researchers in the developing world who are seeking to explore the potential of similar initiatives.

Government reform projects fail at an alarming rate (Cabinet Office, 2014), wasting billions of pounds in public spending and sustaining what has been termed the “performance paradox” (Flyvbjerg et al,. 2003, p.3). The paradox suggests that despite ever increasing numbers and magnitudes of major projects, the rate of failure continues to grow too. In addressing this paradox, this research responds to Flyvbjerg’s (2001), call for phronetic social science that concerns itself with society’s improvement and enters into public dialogue and praxis. In so doing, the research promotes a second order approach to understanding project failure to challenge taken-for-granted evaluation processes and concerns itself with working towards improving what and how we learn lessons. The study presents a detailed and reflexive account of an exemplar case of Government project failure, from an alternative perspective. The case exposes the political conceptualisations underpinning unsuccessful attempts to regionalise parts of the English fire service via the structural reform project called ‘FiReControl1’. The FiReControl project was initiated in 2004 under the Labour Government and was cancelled by the Coalition Government in 2010. The Public Accounts Committee inquiry into the failure of FiReControl labelled it one of the worst cases of project failure that the Committee had seen (Hodge, Public Accounts Committee, 2011), and blamed project and ministerial department staff for the failure. The research challenges the adequacy of taken-for-granted evaluations of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), that typically finds project delivery agents to blame after reform projects are considered to have failed. A phronetic approach would be sceptical of the PAC methodology alone to provide definitive answers after reform projects fail, since social and particularly political actions from which reform projects emerge, are complex and unfold over time in the unobservable realms of Government institutions. A truer understanding of reform projects requires knowledge of both their context and their history emergence (Archer, 1995), that is not accessible through theory alone (Flyvbjerg et al. 2012). The intention of this study was to explore these concepts of time and context to ascertain if alternative theoretical perspectives and analytic methods can help us to understand more about 1 The FiReControl logo will be written as such throughout this manuscript for consistency. The capitalisation represented the ‘Fire and Resilience’ section of Department of Communities and Local Government and Control being the fire service function that was to be regionalised under the reform. 11 why many large-scale public reform projects do not complete successfully, or are considered failures. A fundamental concept underpinning the research was ontological, asking not just where project failure begins, but also, what exactly is project failure. The study premised its perspective of reform project failure on the idea of it being a loss of support, or a loss of legitimacy and not an objective state of reality (McConnell, 2003). The study departs from traditional ‘flat ontology’ of much foundationalist and resource-based research and evaluation in the field and set out to explore where and how legitimacy for FiReControl began, what sustained it and by what power the final, contested reform idea was approved. The approach sought to reveal more of the power-relations that underlie policy reforms, working beneath the more obvious levels of policy-effectiveness assessment found in conventional post-project evaluation approaches. Using the overarching philosophy of critical realism, the realist social theory method approach of the morphogenetic sequence (Archer, 1995), is adopted, as well as critical hermeneutic methods, to operationalise the idea that society consists of parts and people, the social and the individual, structures and agents. The methods revealed changing situational logics (Archer, 1995), as organisational relations ebbed and flowed across the sequence of events. The logics influenced the decisions and actions of agents which served their vested interests to a greater or lesser extent, depending on which groups held more agency at the time. The hermeneutic analyses of key texts revealed how the Government was not only predisposed to act by the institutional legitimacy of new public management, but also how powerful legitimating devices were deployed to further their ideas over any alternatives. The methods gave explanatory power to understanding the emergent properties of mechanisms of legitimacy and institutionalism in building support for structural reform. Moreover, the methods revealed the power by which Government ideas finally succeeded in 2004, where they had failed in 1999, by the morphogenesis (transformation), of corporate agency. Corporate agents promote their own interests to define and redefine organisational goals; they “pack more punch in defining and redefining structural forms” (Archer, 1995, p. 191). The influence of these mechanisms in shaping the FiReControl project, regardless of any reliable evidence to suggest the reform could succeed, was not explored by the Public Accounts Committee.

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This thesis investigates the expectations placed on voluntary sports clubs (VSCs) in exchange for Lottery funding awarded by Sport England. the resulting effects of those pressures on VSCs' organisational structures and VSCs' responses to these pressures. Using institutional theory as a framework. it is argued that receipt of funding from Sport England's Lottery Fund exposes VSCs to the normative prescriptions of the sports policy sector to a greater extent than they ever were before applying to the Fund. These normative pressures are reinforced by Sport England through coercion and the provision of legitimate models for VSCs to mimic resulting in a more bureaucratic structure for VSCs in receipt of funding.· The research was conducted in three phases. Phase one constituted the identification of institutional pressures exerted by Sport England through its Lottery Fund on VSCs through semi-structured interviews with Sport England staff and analysis of Lottery Fund documents. A survey of VSCs in receipt of Lottery funding from Sport England was conducted in phase two to establish any change in the VSCs' structures since receiving funding. Finally. in phase three. six case studies of VSCs were selected from phase two. Pairs of VSCs from three sports were selected for qualitative investigation. One of the pair exhibited an increased level of structure while the other demonstrated no change or a reduction in its level of structure. The majority of VSCs surveyed in phase two experienced an increase in structure to some degree after receiving Lottery funding. However. the case studies in phase three demonstrate that the changes in VSCs' level of structure cannot be attributed only to receipt of Lottery funding from Sport England. Two of the six case studies also made resistant responses to the institutional pressures of Sport England's Lottery Fund.

The introduction of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in the English regions in 1999 presented a new set of collaborative challenges to existing local institutions. The key objectives of the new policy impetus emphasise increased joined-up thinking and holistic regional governance. Partners were enjoined to promote cross-sector collaboration and present a coherent regional voice. This study aims to evaluate the impact of an RDA on the partnership infrastructure of the West Midlands. The RDA network incorporates a wide spectrum of interest and organisations with diverse collaborative histories, competencies and capacities. The study has followed partners through the process over an eighteen-month period and has sought to explore the complexities and tensions of partnership working 'on the ground'. A strong qualitative methodology has been employed in generating 'thick descriptions' of the policy domain. The research has probed beyond the 'rhetoric' of partnerships and explores the sensitivities of the collaboration process. A number of theoretical frameworks have been employed, including policy network theory; partnership and collaboration theory; organisational learning; and trust and social capital. The structural components of the West Midlands RDA network are explored, including the structural configuration of the network and stocks of human and social capital assets. These combine to form the asset base of the network. Three sets of network behaviours are then explored, namely, strategy, the management of perceptions, and learning. The thesis explores how the combination of assets and behaviours affect, and in turn are affected by, each other. The findings contribute to the growing body of knowledge and understanding surrounding policy networks and collaborative governance.