Within schools of public policy, there is general recognition that public management mediates the relationship between policy analysis and policy making, on the one hand, and the concrete, documentable outcomes of public policies, on the other. Understanding this mediating process toward...

Promoting innovative government has attracted a bipartisan constituency. But if the concept of innovation is watered down to encompass any promising idea or any program change that hasn't been tried before, it will lose its power as a device to stimulate non-trivial improvements in governmental...

The U.S. Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) was enacted to promote strategic planning and performance management in the U.S. Federal Government. This act and its effects to date are considered in three contexts: (1) of recurring efforts by U.S. political leadership to improve...

During his relatively short tenure in office, Illinois Department on Aging (IDOA) Director Victor Wirth performed an apparent managerial miracle. Inheriting an agency ridden with internal conflicts and in bad repute with its contractors and constituencies, Wirth successfully refocused his...

Following a review of the American Experience with administrative reform in the federal government, concentrating on reforms since the 1960s, the American approach to public administration is compared to that of France. The two nations appear to have quite dissimilar administrative cultures if...

How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This general question is the concern of officials in all branches and at all levels of the public sector: legislators, elected and appointed executives, and judges at federal,...

This paper sets forth the following ideas: (1) The New Public Management (NPM) is both a paradigm for administrative reform - a set of answers - and an organizing theme for public administration scholarship - a set of questions. (2) At one end of a production continuum at which publicly-provided...

Institutional reform litigation places significant, and, at times, inappropriate constraints on the public manager’s ability to balance individual and collective justice. An exemplary misuse of such litigation was the recent New York child welfare case of Marisol A. v. Giuliani. The U.S....

For a decade, public administration and management literature has featured a riveting story: the transformation of the field's orientation from an old paradigm to a new one. While many doubt claims concerning a new paradigm–a "new public management"–no one questions that there was an old...

This paper addresses the widely-held belief that effective public management is inherently strategic and entrepreneurial, i.e., concerned with the formulation and achievement of overarching goals that transform and redirect government agencies. Evidence suggests, however, that statutory,...