Municipal Reinvention: Managerial Values and Diffusion among Municipalities

During the last decade, government reinvention along with the new public management (NPM) has driven a managerial reform wave toward market efficiency, entrepreneurship, and performance-based/benchmarking management in the public sector. Using an ICMA mailed survey of more than twelve hundred municipal governments in the United States, this study embarks on an exploratory study of municipal reinvention. The results suggest that reinvention values are widely held by chief city administrators, and various reinvention programs are diffused into many municipal governments. But many chief administrators are cautious about the outcome of reinvention efforts. Preliminary empirical evidence also suggests that the reinvention values of chief administrators as well as socioeconomic (size, economic condition) and institutionalfactors (labor union, government type) are closely associated with the adoption of reinvention programs at the municipal level. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the fifth national Public Management Conference, Bush School of Government, Texas AM Peters and Savoie 1998; Kettl 1998). NPM proponents focused their attention on market efficiency (Terry 1998; Lynn 1998a and 1998b), entrepreneurship (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Moon 1999), and performance-based/benchmarking management (Ammons 1999; Coe 1999; Kopczynski and Lombardo 1999; Poister and Streib 1999) in the public sector. Christopher Pollitt (1993) summarized four major elements of NPM, including use of market-like mechanisms, decentralization, improvement of service quality, and customer satisfaction. In particular, under the aegis of the Clinton administration, reinventing government (reinvention) was 327/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.64 on Mon, 04 Jul 2016 05:13:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms Municipal Reinvention initiated, popularized, and diffused into various public agencies, different levels of government (Gore 1993), and even other countries (Moon and Ingraham 1998). NPM and reinvention are closely related and often used interchangeably, but these two concepts are not necessarily identical. They are different in terms of the scope of and emphasis among various managerial reforms. Developed mainly in the European context, NPM is considered to be an umbrella concept of neomanagerialism that includes various managerial reforms for market efficiency, decentralization, devolution, customer satisfaction, and quality improvement (Pollitt 1993). The term reinventing government reflects a narrower application that indicates an American version of NPM that emphasizes market efficiency, customer satisfaction, public entrepreneurship, and competition. Lawrence Jones and Fred Thompson (1999)2 summarize the difference between NPM and the American reinvention: The new public management wants to privatize services . take advantage of competition where possible, . These concerns are evident to a far greater extent in the non-American than in the American reinvention literature, perhaps because elsewhere so much more needs to be privatized or deregulated and because contracting/tendering is still much rarer . the ties of new public management to economics are more evident in the nonAmerican than in the American reinvention, perhaps because elsewhere institutional choice has greater salience (p. 26). While a set of reinvention values in America-such as efficiency, cost effectiveness, and customer satisfaction-has been forwarded by NPM proponents, an alternative set of administrative values-such as accountability, democratic procedure, and equity-has been reemphasized in reaction to the entrepreneurial government paradigm (Dahl 1999; Wolf 1993). The tension between reinvention values and alternative administrative values seems to remain in the NPM literature and invites a dialectic reaction of reform calling for accountability, equity, and other nonmarket indices. In response to the managerial wave of reinvention, some (i.e., Lynn 1998b; Peters and Savoie 1998) have expressed caution by highlighting the threats to public accountability (L. deLeon and Denhardt 2000; Frederickson 1999; Gilmour and Jensen 1998; Johnston and Romzek 1999; Dicke and Ott 1999; Thomas 1998) and democratic values (deLeon and deLeon 1997). Public servants may have internalized a mixed sense of managercore concepts of NPM, including restrucial values under these circumstances, where two different sets of turing, reengineering, reinvention, contending values-for example, the reinvention values (market realignment, and rethinking. efficiency, competition, and outsourcing) and alternative 328/J-PART, July 2001 This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.64 on Mon, 04 Jul 2016 05:13:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms Municipal Reinvention administrative values (equity, accountability, control, and publicness)-coexist, if not altogether amiably. Despite numerous analyses of the theories and practices of government reinvention through both normative studies and empirical studies, little research has been conducted to assess overall adoption and implementation of various managerial innovations with a broad sample base. Many of the extant studies have been carried out with the use of anecdotal and case study methods, and most of these have viewed reinvention at the federal level.3 Recently, the implementation of government reinvention has been explored at different levels of government with multiple cases or a larger sample. For example, James Thompson (1999) examined multiple reinvention lab programs and their effectiveness, and Jeffrey Brudney and his colleagues (1999 and 2000) studied the implementation of reinvention at the state level. Brudney and his colleagues' state-level study issued a compelling research challenge to examine the diffusion of reinvention programs at the local level. In response, in this analysis we propose to conduct a comprehensive study of chief city administrators' perceptions of various administrative values and their implementation of municipal reinvention. The empirical portion of this study uses the 1997 International City/County Management Association (ICMA) mailed survey of more than twelve hundred municipal governments in the United States. This study has three explicit objectives: to examine managerial values and attitudes of chief administrators, specifically the trade-off between reinvention values and traditional administrative values, as well as their perceptions of the outcomes of reinvention (i.e., accountability); to assess managerial adoption of reinvention programs at the local level; and to study the factors (managerial and political orientation of chief administrators, socioeconomic factors, and institutional factors) that affect the adoption of various reinvention programs. While it is admittedly exploratory, this study provides an opportunity to broaden the understanding of how managerial values are perceived by chief administrators and to extend knowledge of the actual implementation of reinvention programs from the federal and state levels to the municipal level.