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Municipalities in Europe vary enormously in size both between and within individual countries. There is no conclusive evidence, however, that these differences have a significant impact on the efficiency of local public service provision or on the levels of citizen participation in local public life. In this paper it is suggested that flexible and problem-oriented legislative, institutional, and managerial innovation provide meaningful alternatives to local government boundary reform.

The purpose of this article is to present a quantitative analysis of the human failure contribution in the collision and/or grounding of oil tankers, considering the recommendation of the "Guidelines for Formal Safety Assessment" of the International Maritime Organization. Initially, the employed methodology is presented, emphasizing the use of the technique for human error prediction to reach the desired objective. Later, this methodology is applied to a ship operating on the Brazilian coast and, thereafter, the procedure to isolate the human actions with the greatest potential to reduce the risk of an accident is described. Finally, the management and organizational factors presented in the "International Safety Management Code" are associated with these selected actions. Therefore, an operator will be able to decide where to work in order to obtain an effective reduction in the probability of accidents. Even though this study does not present a new methodology, it can be considered as a reference in the human reliability analysis for the maritime industry, which, in spite of having some guides for risk analysis, has few studies related to human reliability effectively applied to the sector.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the servitization process of typical manufacturing companies that already provide after-sales services, by identifying the phases and organizational elements that enable the delivery of more services. Design/methodology/approach – A servitization maturity model for consumer durables companies is proposed. Servitization is an evolutionary process based on customer profiling, company profiling, the nature of the service, maturity of the process and process characteristics. The capacity of maintaining organizational relationships among players in the value chain describes the organizational maturity needed to advance towards the next phase. The research has been conducted as an exploratory study, in which four different case studies of consumer durables companies were performed to validate the proposed maturity model and detail each phase and the critical resources needed to become servitized. Findings – Four category levels of organizational relationships were identified: first, company and customers; second, company and production network; third, company and market, in addition to; fourth, the internal relations of the company. Practical implications – The means to evaluate companies that undergo servitization are also presented to provide a better understanding of their placement in the process and guide managers through the next necessary steps of action. Originality/value – The development and application of this model allowed exploring the levels of servitization as an evolutionary process based on the relationships among players in the value chain by gathering, structuring, organizing several critical requirements and highlighting important attributes that must be examined by companies during the servitization process.