When Are Local Incentive Constraints Sufficient?

We study the question of whether local incentive constraints are sufficient to imply full incentive compatibility in a variety of mechanism design settings, allowing for probabilistic mechanisms. We give a unified approach that covers both continuous and discrete type spaces. On many common preference domains—including any convex domain of cardinal or ordinal preferences, single‐peaked ordinal preferences, and successive single‐crossing ordinal preferences—local incentive compatibility (suitably defined) implies full incentive compatibility. On domains of cardinal preferences that satisfy a strong nonconvexity condition, local incentive compatibility is not sufficient. Our sufficiency results hold for dominant‐strategy and Bayesian Nash solution concepts, and allow for some interdependence in preferences.     

Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools: the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and Local Strategy Practice?

While much of the literature on strategy and strategy as practice (SaP) focuses on traditional strategic tools, technologies and discursive practices of managers, this paper extends the understanding of strategic change implementation by proposing that mundane material tools, understood as text, translate global strategic discourse in ways that make sense to workers and orchestrate successful global strategy implementation at the local level. Based on a rich case study within one branch of a national bank, this paper demonstrates how a middle manager's materializing practices developed local strategy practice while simultaneously transforming work and producing strategic figures or indicators that satisfied senior management's global strategic change objectives. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) it advances the understanding of the multimodality of materiality by identifying the influence of three types of mundane tools produced locally by a middle manager as he performed his sense of the senior managers’ strategic discourse; (ii) it reveals how these three types of physical texts materialized the manager's sense of this discourse, facilitating frontline workers’ engagement and coupling materiality and orality in a coherent way that allowed workers to embody the company's global strategy in their ‘sayings and doings’; and (iii) it highlights the importance of managers’ ability to materialize a strategic discourse.     

Bridging the Gap? The Role of Regional Governance in Delivering Effective Local Public Services: Evidence from England

Between 2004 and 2010 local area agreements (LAAs) represented a key part of the New Labour Government's agenda for local government in England, which centred on increasing the level of involvement that local areas had in the issues affecting them. To deliver this agenda, New Labour deployed government offices for the regions (GOR) to negotiate with localities on behalf of central government. As part of a broader consideration of the role of regional governance structures in delivering local public services, this paper draws upon the results of a national survey of LAA practitioners in England, and findings from more detailed case study work, to consider the role of GOR in the LAA process. These findings examine the role GOR played in negotiating LAA targets and the extent to which these negotiations allowed local areas to respond to local issues and priorities. Then, by considering local enterprise partnerships and the recently established combined authorities, the paper will consider how localism policy under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government, who came to power in 2010, has responded to the lessons of the LAA. In doing so, the paper seeks to fit into the wider discussion about how local public services can be delivered effectively and draw out the challenges faced by those trying to link local and central policy together.