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INTRODUCTION E-government initiatives embracing new Web technologies as tools for public service delivery and democratic participation have become a key component of public sector reform worldwide. The Bush Administration, for [...]

Many microcredit programs have been created in the United States in the past decade that replicate design features of their counterparts in the third world. Yet few systematic studies have been carried out to examine what determines these programs' loan repayment performance. We attempt to fill this gap by studying the determinants of loan repayment for four of the oldest group-based microcredit programs in the US. Our findings suggest that these programs are faced with a set of social and institutional environments that are both similar to and different from those faced by their third-world counterparts. On the one hand we find that higher levels of education and proximity to the lending agency increase the chances of loan repayment. Low transaction costs for accessing loans and high borrower-costs in the event of default also enhance loan repayment performance. On the other hand key variables such as gender and homogeneity of borrowers are not significantly related to loan repayment. We conclude by examining the implications of these findings for program design in the US.

This paper critically examines the recent reinventing government movement from an institutional perspective, focusing on principal-agent problems in management and political contexts of public agencies. based on this perspective, it analyzes the problems and prospects of the National Performance Review in the United States and suggests that an institutional perspective can prove useful in redesigning government - not by achieving a single set of insights common to all contexts, but rather by focusing attention to particular situations and institutional contexts.

Differences between organizational types within sectors are likely to be more significant determinants of employee commitment than the presumed sectoral distinctions between public and private. This was gleaned from an examination of the possible relationships between different types of commitment and a variety of organizational settings. A set of propositions linking the four organizational types of production, procedural, craft and coping organizations to different types of organizational commitment were developed to prove that different types of organizations need to rely on different types of commitment to ensure favorable performance and that managerial actions need to be consistent with these needs to be effective.

What is the role of commitment in collective action? Peter J. Robertson and Shui-Yan Tang examine how this question is addressed from two major theoretical perspectives - organizational behavior and rational choice. The two perspectives differ in the way they define the concept of commitment and in their foci and assumptions regarding the role of commitment in collective action. Despite these differences, both perspectives A set of cooperative norms can be established and emphasize the importance of informal structures and mechanism for generating and maintaining commitment. Robertson and Tang compare the two perspectives with respect to three general strategies - social processes, Leadership, and structural design - for fostering commitment in organizational settings. These ideas are then used to analyze the role of commitment in school-based management. The authors conclude by discussing the relative merits of the two theoretical perspectives and by identifying several research questions derived from their comparison., Powerful environmental forces are transforming the way organizations operate. In particular, forces such as innovations in information technology, demographic changes, and globalization (Drucker, 1988; Naisbitt, 1982; Peters, 1990; Toffler, 1990) [...]

The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future by Elizabeth C. Economy. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2004. 272 pp. Cloth, $29.95,' paper, $17.95. In the past decade, [...]