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In this article, the reinventing government movement is compared with the new public administration along six dimensions. A strongly felt need to change bureaucracy informed each movement, although each would change bureaucracy differently. Both movements seek relevance and responsiveness, but in different ways. Issues of rationality, methodology, and epistemology are more important in the new public administration than in the reinventing government movement. Both movements conceptualize organization similarly. The reinventing government movement has a stronger commitment to market approaches for the provision of public services and to mechanisms for individual choice. Reinventing government is popular electoral politics for executives (presidents, governors, mayors) and is more radical than new public administration. The new public administration prompted subtle incremental shifts toward democratic management practices and social equity. The results of reinventing government, so far, are short-run increases in efficiency purchased at a likely long-range cost in administrative capacity and social equity.
No movement associated with the administrative aspects of modern American government has had the visibility of reinventing government. The phrase reinventing government has entered the lexicon of government, and the constellation of ideas associated with it appears to have been extensively influential in the practices of government management at all levels (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; Report of the National Performance Review, 1993). Only time will tell if the reinventing movement will be the revolution its advocates seek and will have the staying power of the progressive reform movement of the turn of the century, out of which much of modern public administration emerged, or the positive government era of the 1940s and 1950s, which shaped the character of the modern field.
American public administration is alive with debates, arguments, and discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the reinventing government paradigm (Kettl, 1994; DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl, 1993; Goodsell, 1993; Moe, 1993; Rosenbloom, 1994; Carroll, 1995; Nathan, 1995). Because this is not the first attempted revolution in the field, it is useful to compare it with earlier movements. Here I compare the new public administration that started in the late 1960s and has a continuing literature (Marini, 1971; Frederickson, 1980; Waldo, 1971; Frederickson and Chandler, 1989) to the reinventing government movement of the early 1990s.1
I compare new public administration with reinventing government along six...