Chapter Summary

Chapter 7 focuses on American governmental reforms while acknowledging that reform efforts are a fixture of governments everywhere. American reform efforts have been pulled mostly from the private sector and from state and local government experiments. There has been surprising convergence around the basic approaches of downsizing, reengineering, and continuous improvement. Yet reformers have mixed and matched these reforms with little regard for their contradictions.  

Downsizing assumes that government is too big and that one should do whatever is politically possible to make it smaller. Although downsizing has limited the growth of government spending and tax revenues in the United States, its effect on the quality of services and the efficiency of administration is anything but clear. Reengineering emphasizes radical redesign of work processes to increase efficiency. Both the customer service movement and performance management are associated with reengineering. In place of the discontinuous, top-down, revolutionary change that the reengineers recommend, the continuous improvement champions have advocated a more gradual, continuous, bottom-up movement. This movement is strongly associated with total quality management and emphasizes better quality to improve cost through motivation. These are the three major theories associated with American public administration reforms.