System Change through Collaboration…Eight Steps for Getting from There to Here

Family courts and child welfare agencies across the country are charged with protecting the safety of our children. That mission has become more challenging with increasing federal legislation and decreasing funding. In Buffalo, N.Y., the Family Court and the Department of Social Services have teamed up to respond to this challenge. With minimal additional staffing and resources, they have led a collaboration of agencies and service providers to change the way business is done in child welfare. By engaging each other in an interagency system change effort, the amount of time children spend in foster care has been reduced. The collaboration has been able to accomplish in a relatively short time what no agency had previously been able to accomplish on its own. The beneficiaries have been the children and families of Erie County.     

Accountability or Expectations Management? The Role of the Ombudsman in Financial Regulation

Current research of third-party complaint handling institutions evaluates their success in providing redress and advancing service improvement. This focus is driven by a normative predisposition. In contrast, this study is based on an inductive, ethnographic research of the UK Financial Ombudsman Service. This inductive analysis is employed to develop hypotheses to guide future research on third-party complaint handling. It is suggested that current literature may have overlooked the role of third-party complaint handling schemes in managing what, from a professional point of view, are citizen-consumers' excessive expectations for redress. The normative implications of this tentative empirical claim are further discussed.     

Government‐wide Financial Statements and Credit Risk

Now that state governments issue comprehensive annual financial reports in accordance with Statement No. 34 of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, it is possible to generate a consistent and comprehensive set of government‐wide financial information. We use the information to develop financial ratios to benchmark government financial performance from information beyond the traditional general fund, and test the hypothesis that such information is incorporated into the assessment of credit risk. We provide an empirical analysis of the incorporation of government‐wide financial information into state government credit ratings, which provides a positive empirical test of the theory of certification and demonstrates how information from the government‐wide financial statements is infused into financial markets.     

EXCHANGE WITHOUT CAPTURE: THE UK FINANCIAL OMBUDSMAN SERVICE’S STRUGGLE FOR ACCEPTED DOMAIN

This article explores the formation of public organizations’‘domain perception’, that is, their internal interpretation and external articulation of their role and its boundaries. The analysis is based on non‐participant observation research of the UK Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), and archival research of its predecessor organization, which handled consumer complaints regarding the retail selling of financial products. I show that the FOS’s articulation of its domain emphasized the strictly individual and confidential nature of its complaint handling, rather than formulation of general principles to guide firms’ sale practices. This domain perception embodied an implicit exchange between the ombudsman and the retail financial industry on behalf of consumers, and distinguished the ombudsman’s role from that of the Financial Services Authority and the civil courts. The case is employed as means for theory building regarding the nature of public organizations’ domain perceptions and the process by which such constructs develop in regulatory contexts.