The first part of the book, focuses on the comparative analysis of the performance of the alternative institutional regimes. Part II, discusses institutional change, and focuses on the post-Communist transition, started in the late 1980s.
Our principal objectives are to describe and explain a process of management reform. We achieve this mainly (though not exclusively) by analysing a mass of case study material - much of it our own, but some of it drawn from the work of others. Such analysis cannot proceed wihout , first, aset of organishing concepts and, second, some guiding theory or theories.
This book is about local government in Britain and does not deal with the position in Northern Ireland. The main reason for not considering Northern Ireland is that the system of local government in the province is substantially different from that operating in the "mainstream" British contex.