Purpose – This paper arises from a study examining the causality of change by exploring whether
best value and performance management had caused change within councils’ waste services. The
purpose of this paper is to represent one of the unforeseen findings arising from the research programme.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper was an exploratory, inductive theory-building study
using a practitioner-researcher approach to develop a conceptual model based upon a literature review
and a case study research methodology.
Findings – The paper finds that, despite much publicity, the cases studied did not use performance
management frameworks to structure change and, in this regard, operations management may offer a
better approach by which councils could include operational service delivery within the development
of corporate strategy.