The Fall of Wall Street

Globalization may not be coming apart at the seams—yet—but the seams are ever more apparent. Rising fuel prices challenge a model of global transportation based on cheap energy, reinforcing the possibility of decoupling through great regionaliza‐tion of trade. Already, 50 percent of trade among ASEAN plus China and Japan is among each other. The Wall Street meltdown has spread a lack of confidence in the American financial system and the model of deregulation which stimulated rapid globalization of capital flows. Along with other developments, all this raises the question of whether the United States is prepared to operate successfully in a world it no longer dominates. An anti‐globalization leader, a former US labor secretary, a top American intellectual and a Nobel laureate address these issues.     

TWO MYTHS OF CONVERGENCE IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM

The literature on public management reform exhibits two intertwined convergence myths. First, a world‐wide consensus on a new public management (NPM) reform agenda is seen to exist amongst policy reformers and practitioners. If this agenda is not fully implemented in all cases, this is generally explained by political and reform setbacks rather than disagreement on policy aims. Second, this NPM agenda is now seen as challenged and even abandoned and replaced by an emergent post‐NPM or ‘public value leadership’ agenda and/or policy paradigm. We show the NPM convergence is overstated, with a remarkable resilience of existing institutions, and a diversity of public management systems. On the other hand, even within NPM exemplars that have putatively now adopted a post‐NPM agenda, there is debate to what degree NPM has been abandoned, and over the novelty, coherence and resilience of the post‐NPM agenda. Divergence and contextual variation prevail. The role of myth in policy reform is further examined.     

The Strange Birth of Middle England

This article investigates the political meanings of a now ubiquitous media term 'middle England'. It explores its origins in the historical idea of the middle classes as politically moderate, beleaguered and put-upon; and more recently in a neo-conservative, anti-elitist populism, which aims to short-circuit traditional political processes and speak directly to a nominally homogeneous, but actually carefully targeted, 'people'. It argues that the concept of 'middle England' reached full political maturity in the 1990s when increasingly slick party machines began to articulate and exploit these ideas through private polling and focus groups which concentrated on crucial swing voters. 'Middle England' is a product of the increasingly close, but fractious, relationship between these party machines and influential tabloid newspapers, particularly the Daily Mail .     

BUYER-SUPPLIER PARTNERING IN UK DEFENCE PROCUREMENT: LOOKING BEYOND THE POLICY RHETORIC

This article looks beyond the rhetoric in recent UK defence procurement policy to discuss factors that might impact on the practical implementation of buyer-supplier partnering. Various explanations of the difficulty of creating a partnership are identified. The principal explanation explored is that the likelihood of successful partnering is a function of the power relation between a buyer and a supplier. It is argued that partnering is most likely to occur under circumstances of interdependence when each party is highly dependent upon and vulnerable to the other. A case study from naval shipbuilding is used to examine the plausibility of this power explanation. None of the power relations in the supply network discussed is primarily characterized by interdependence and there is no evidence of partnering. This suggests that while the MoD and its suppliers may use the language of partnering, they often find it difficult to translate this into meaningful action.