Money and the Organisational Process: Organisational Capability and the Relationship between Structure and Agency

Abstract

“Romance without finance is a nuisance”, as “Tiny” Grimes’ early bebop song had it. That policies cannot be implemented without finance — either new money or money taken from existing programmes — is hardly news. It is common enough to find studies of failed implementation that report either insufficiency of resources or weaknesses in financial management as key contributory factors in explaining non-implementation. These tend to highlight three sorts of impact that money can have on the delivery of national policy at a local level:

• directly, when a programme is attempted with budgets that make the goals unaffordable (e.g. Beck, 1999);

• indirectly, as when organisations cannot make use of the money given to them (e.g. Sabbat, 1997); and,

• more broadly, as resource constraints that reduce morale, commitment and care in following procedures (e.g. Blackmore, 2001).