Gingivostomatitis (GS) is a significant condition in cats because of oral discomfort and associated periodontal disease. Several infectious agents have been associated with the presence of GS, but a causal relationship is unclear. The cats in this study were housed together, had a history of flea exposure, and were vaccinated with a modified live FVRCP product. There were nine cats with active GS and 36 unaffected cats at the time of sample collection. Serum was tested for feline leukemia virus (FeLV) antigen and antibodies against feline immunodeficiency virus, feline calicivirus (FCV), feline herpesvirus 1 (FHV-1), and Bartonella species (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and Western blot immunoassay). PCR assays for Bartonella species and FHV-1 and a reverse transcriptase PCR assay for FCV were performed on blood and throat swabs. All cats were negative for FeLV. Assay results failed to correlate to the presence of GS in the group of cats studied.
“Administrative intensity” (AI) describes the proportion of total resources that organizations spend on administrative support functions rather than primary service and production processes. We test whether “sharing” administrative activities between organizations leads to a fall in AI due to economies of scale, as is often supposed, using organizational and financial data from more than 300 English local authorities. We employ multi-wave change score regression analysis to relate changes in AI from 2008 to 2016 to levels of shared services participation, and further test whether reform performance varies by category of local authority, type of administration, or degree of structural complexity. Although we find that some measures of AI fell slightly over this period, this was unrelated to shared service adoption for any category of local authority. Sharing of clerical rather than professional types of administration, and sharing by organizations and within partnerships characterized by lower structural complexity, also failed to improve reform outcomes. Faulty assumptions about the extent of administrative scale diseconomies in English local government partly explain this significant reform underperformance.
Shared services are a popular reform for governments under financial pressure. The hope is to reduce overheads and increase efficiency by providing support services like HR, finance and procurement once to multiple agencies. Drawing on insights from organization theory and political science, we identify five risks that shared services won't live up to current expectations. We illustrate each with empirical evidence from the UK, Ireland and further afield, and conclude with suggestions on how to manage these risks.
Administrative decentralization to government agencies (so‐called ‘agencification’) has attracted much attention in recent years, increasingly for its longevity or evolution after the ‘high’ managerialism of the 1980s, and largely through a neo‐positivist epistemology. Drawing on techniques of narrative and discourse analysis, and a model of incremental ideational change, this article identifies the necessity of supplementing those existing large‐N analyses of agencification's expansion and decline with qualitative attention to the endurance of policy meaning. It demonstrates how the original foundations of managerialism, civil service empowerment and decentralization from the UK's seminal ‘Next Steps’ agency programme are eschewed in contemporary reform discourse, where agencification is instead advocated as centralized, politically proximate and departmentalized governance. This substantial reinterpretation of the arm's‐length concept not only challenges existing claims of continuity in UK administrative policy, but also demonstrates the utility of interpretive methods for exploring longevity in public management more widely.
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