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The transformation of public administration in Latvia represents a commitment to continuous modernization. New Public Management (NPM) has under different names, such as "reinventing government" been proffered as an improvement of productivity and quality in relation to traditional public administration characterized by bureaucracy. In addition to adopting managerial systems from business, advocates of NPM include promises to alter the relationship between public services and the individual. Commitments to transparency and service declarations customarily follow in the wake of new forms of governance marked by privatization and contracting out of public services. This article reports on an empirical investigation of responsiveness to customer requests in a sample of Latvian public agencies at the national and local level. The survey included requests for basic information about the agency regarding the budget, expenditures, staffing, information services, and complaint procedures. In analyzing the findings, it is hypothesized that variation in service levels will correlate with agency type and the language spoken by the client. ; Artikkelen gjengir resultatene av en undersøkelse om villigheten til å besvare enkle spørsmål fra publikum blant offentlige etater i Latvia sett i lys av kravene til brukerorientering i New Public Management ; The research was made possible by a grant from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Eurofaculty, Riga. ; acceptedVersion

As companies struggle to deliver excellent service, many find they need to understand and plan for a diverse array of customer requests. Some requests are unexpected and require employees to go beyond their usual job duties. These requests may be classified as special requests. Knowing how and when to comply with these requests is critical to the firm and the employee, given that failing to comply could negatively affect customer satisfaction, while complying may produce unwanted consequences for the firm. We use grounded theory and content analysis of critical incident special requests from frontline employees to develop a framework and classification scheme that categorizes customer special requests and employee assessments of these requests. Customer special requests were classified into four types of customer deficiencies—physical resources, knowledge, financial, and time. Employee assessments were categorized as positive compliance factors (motivations and ability) or deterrents to compliance, including policy or legal, potential risk, and lack of resources. These findings contribute to theory, as they represent the first effort to categorize customer special requests and employee responses to them. Companies need to be better informed about the types of requests employees receive so that employees can make the most appropriate decisions.

Information is generally believed to be a key component in creating
corporate responsiveness, i.e. being able to anticipate or respond
quickly to customer requests. Most firms are well aware of the need to
become more responsive to customers in order to develop and maintain
long‐term close relation‐ships. A recent survey of the warehouse
industry confirms the hypothesized relationship between information and
responsiveness. Firms that formally collect customer‐related information
and internal service/quality information were found to be more
responsive as evidenced by enhanced ability to accommodate selected
events/ requests. The research also supported a link between
responsiveness and improved operating performance. Responsive firms
indicated greater success in achieving specific operating performance
improvements – improved reliability service, improved customer
service/satisfaction, quality improvements, cycle time reductions,
productivity improvements, reduced costs, improved organizational
structure, and enhanced goal setting – than less responsive firms.

The authors identify specific customer orientation behaviors (COBs) of call center employees and show that these behaviors relate to customer evaluations of service quality. Using qualitative, inductive analyses of 166 telephone service interactions in a retail bank call center, they identify five types of COBs associated with helping customers. The COBs are (a) anticipating customer requests, (b) offering explanations/justifications, (c) educating customers, (d) providing emotional support, and (e) offering personalized information. Using deductive analyses, the authors show that customers rate the quality of service interactions higher when service providers employ COBs. The qualitative findings contribute to the understanding of the specific employee behaviors associated with service quality, and the quantitative findings validate the importance of these behaviors.

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Customs Service's software development maturity and improvement activities, focusing on: (1) the maturity of Customs' software development processes; and (2) whether Customs has an effective software process improvement program."

Telephone-based customer service work is often conceptualized as disembodied. Automatic dialing systems direct callers through menu-driven options, and eventually to a distant customer service worker. Interactions are scripted, and workers have little job discretion to deal with out-of-the-box customer requests. Yet, although the bodies of call center workers and their customers do not come into contact, this article considers whether their interactions are in fact disembodied. Based on interviews with transnational customer service workers in India, I argue that bodies matter in remote customer service interactions. Part of the job of a customer service worker is the transmission of bodies through voice. This involves making sense of how ideal workers are embodied in callers' eyes and using their voices to emulate these imagined ideal workers. I argue that exploring the embodiment of 'voice workers' extends analyses of embodiment to date, which have focused primarily on whole bodies in physical contact with others. The findings presented here highlight the importance of interpellation—specifically the work of 'reading bodies' which is a significant part of service work, especially work which crosses national borders. Bodies are 'read' based on social and historical contexts within which people are immersed and these contexts are influenced by social stratification, state policies, and colonial histories.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify drivers and barriers for adopting Social Accountability 8000 (SA8000), a leading global social management standard.


Design/methodology/approach
The approach involves combining insights from Institutional Theory with a focus on economic performance to study SA8000 adoption by suppliers operating in a developing economy (i.e. India). Data collection involves interviews with adopters and non-adopters, social standard experts and auditors, and archival data on local working conditions.


Findings
This study confirms that customer requests are the major reason for adopting SA8000 in order to avoid loss of business. It is noteworthy, however, that those customer requests to adopt SA8000 are often symbolic in nature, which, in combination with the lack of a positive business case, hinders effective implementation.


Practical implications
The findings imply that symbolic customer requests for SA8000 adoption induce symbolic implementation by suppliers, a "supply chain effect" in the symbolic approach. Substantive requests in contrast lead to more substantive implementation and require customer investment in the form of active support and an interest in the standard's implementation, context and effects.


Originality/value
This study is original in that it addresses social sustainability from a supplier's perspective, using the lens of Institutional Theory. The value lies in demonstrating the "supply chain effects" that arise from the "quality" of customer requests: a purely symbolic approach by customers leading to symbolic implementation vs the merits of substantive customer requests which stimulate substantive implementation.