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Intelligence—artificial or otherwise—bombards us from all directions. It's not surprising that Steve Martin, playing a cutting‐edge neurosurgeon in “The Man With Two Brains,” saw a major business opportunity. Entire rooms, floors, even buildings are dedicated to the kinds of technological advances Dr. Hfuhruhurr couldn't begin to imagine…and that's not counting the “flesh and blood” thinkers.

The article considers the challenges involved in measuring the performance of local public service networks through an empirical analysis of Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAAs), a short-lived but pioneering attempt to gauge the effectiveness of local governments, health trusts, police and fire services in England.

Primary data about the implementation and impact of CAAs were gathered using a mixed method approach, including surveys of local public services, inspectorates and residents together with focus groups and semi-structured interviews in 12 case study areas.

CAAs encouraged agencies to strive to achieve better partnership working but did not provide sufficiently robust comparative data to enable managers to benchmark their performance against other areas or identify good practice elsewhere. Policy makers hoped that citizens would use CAAs to hold services to account but the process failed to attract media or public interest.

The logic of a more ‘joined-up’ approach to performance assessment of local partnerships is compelling. But in practice it is difficult to achieve because institutional arrangements at a national level mean that different sectors work within very different budget systems, professional networks and performance frameworks. Assessing the outcomes achieved by local partnerships also presents new challenges for inspection agencies and requires them to use new kinds of evidence.

This is the only attempt to date to evaluate CAAs and adds to an understanding of the challenges of assessing the performance of local public service partnerships. It highlights new questions for researchers and policy makers about the types of evidence needed to measure partnership performance and the extent to which the public may use the results.

A number of studies have highlighted the problems and challenges that have been encountered with the analysis of best value and partnering tenders carried out in the UK public sector. One of the principal issues is that client organisations and decision makers have to assess numerous diverse quality attributes as part of the contractor selection process. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of research, which aimed to identify the core factors, which could be used to differentiate bids in the context of social housing.

A questionnaire was sent to a cross‐section of stakeholders within the social housing sector asking the respondents to rank the importance of 35 attributes with respect to selecting a successful contractor. The responses were subjected to principal component analysis to detect a structure in the relationship between the attributes and classify the attributes into a set of factors.

The results indicate that the 35 attributes could be grouped together and reduced to ten core factors.

Application of the results could enable the stakeholders to streamline the tender analysis procedure allowing the high volume of tenders to be dealt with more effectively and efficiently.

It is not expected that client organisations would limit their tender analysis to the ten core factors only. They are not intended to be prescriptive and the paper only provides a starting point in using them in the choice of contractor selection quality attributes.

Cultural portraits usually begin with a description of the context, but as this material is covered elsewhere in this volume, this introduction will be mercifully brief. At any time during the last four decades, there have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Stanford University faculty and doctoral students interested in studying organizations. They have been scattered across the campus, often in small groups within larger schools and departments. They have been based in the Sociology Department and the Organizational Behavior and Strategy areas at the Graduate School of Business. There were always a handful at the Education and Engineering schools, as well as a scattering of individuals doing related work in Psychology, Political Science, and Anthropology. In spite of their numbers, before the Stanford Center for Organizational Research (SCOR) was founded in 1972, many of these faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students felt rather isolated. They had little contact with colleagues across campus who shared their interest in organizations and little collective clout when resources were being distributed.

Draws upon detailed empirical work undertaken with elected members and senior officers from a sample of 30 UK local authorities. Its focus is on the ways in which authorities have responded to rapid changes in the economic, social and political contexts and the profound challenges which these present to traditional modes of policy making and public management. Suggests that existing theoretical frameworks give insufficient attention to implications of changing local governance for the roles of elected members and that, in practice, most councillors feel ill‐equipped to respond to these changes. Local authorities need therefore to develop training and support for local politicians in fulfilling their rapidly changing and increasingly demanding roles. In particular they should look at ways of supporting elected members in working with external agencies so that they bring the “added value” of locally accountable political leadership to the work of partnerships involving public, private and voluntary sectors agencies. This will require them to embrace new forms of communication and methods of learning which are likely to be one of the key ingredients in attempts to revitalize local democracy.

James G. March rejected relevance as a criterion for social science research, but he was concerned about the social implications of social science models. He argued that a focus on truth alone as a criterion for evaluating models meant that social scientists miss the implications of their models for beauty and justice. Here, we explore all three criteria to see what they bring to the practice of building social science models and how they interact in the models and in the world. We argue that the choices that social scientists make about these three criteria shape what they select to study in the models, what they see in the world, and what they imagine for the world. We also argue that how social scientists approach truth, beauty, and justice has implications for how they understand and engage the world.