The recent economic and fiscal crisis provides an opportunity for learning lessons of general and practical relevance about how governments face shocks affecting their financial conditions. This article draws on the resilience concept to investigate the organizational capacities that are deployed and/or built by local governments (LGs) to respond to such shocks, looking at their combinations and interactions with environmental conditions. The article presents the results of a multiple‐case analysis of 12 European LGs across Austria, Italy and England. The analysis allows us to highlight and operationalize different patterns of financial resilience, that is, self‐regulation, constrained or reactive adaptation, contented or powerless fatalism, that are the result of the interaction and development over time of different internal and external dimensions.

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In recent years, empirical research on performance information use has gained momentum, but quantitative studies, which include different actor groups, are less widespread. Building on prior research within this field, our study offers insights into various antecedents for performance information use -including individual, performance-measurement-specific, and organizational context factors. By applying a quantitative survey of different actor groups at the local government level in Austria, we draw a picture of different user profiles for mayors with administrative authority, chief officials and chief financial officials. Hence, we are able to confirm findings from former studies with other national backgrounds and contribute to a better understanding regarding some new individual aspects influencing discretionary performance information use in a strategy formulation context. Points for practitionersIt is important to gather insights on the factors driving performance information use, as the latter is a crucial indicator for whether the introduction of performance measurement is worth the effort. Moreover, the results show that the performance information use intensity of mayors, chief officials and chief financial officials is driven by different factors. The study not only contributes to a better understanding of performance measurement utilization in general, but also points to the existence of different user profiles, therefore offering implications for the development of performance management implementation strategies.

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