Reinvention in the States: Ripple or Tide?

In 1990, the term "reinvention" seldom, if ever, emerged in everyday discourse, let alone as an organizing concept for the pursuit of administrative reform. By the end of the decade, it was the stuff of New York Times headlines (Steinberg 1997) and a concept that permeated discussions of how to improve the design and delivery of public programs. Reinvention's reach extended well beyond the borders of the United States. By the end of the 1990s, Reinventing Government (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), the best-selling book that did so much to galvanize the movement bearing its name, had been translated into at least 15 different languages (Thompson and Riccucci 1998). One astute observer affirmed that "a global revolution in public management" was clearly under way, much of it along the lines recommended by reinvention proponents (Kettl 1997). Within the United States, reinvention has sparked much debate within the public administration community, a substantial portion of which has appeared on the pages of Public Administration Review. Does the reinvention movement provide appropriate language, principles, and prescriptions to guide officials in their approach to public administration and management? More specifically, does reinvention's commitment to letting mangers manage and to entrepreneurship erode the rule of law and political accountability? Does its emphasis on defining and surveying customers and its effort to infuse public programs with market mechanisms threaten the fabric of citizenship in democracy? These and countless other questions have fueled sharp exchanges among students of governance. In all the debate about reinvention, however, systematic efforts to trace the degree to which the 87,000 units of government in the United States have actually adopted reinvention reforms and the consequences of such adoption have been much less evident. To be sure, some useful case analyses of reform efforts exist (Barzelay and Armajani 1992; Thompson 2000), and others have employed a broad survey methodology to probe reinvention's penetration of city-manager governments (Kearney, Feldman, and Scavo 2000). But valuable as these and related studies are, a full mapping of the diffusion of reinvention practices to jurisdictions and public agencies has yet to occur. In this regard, the article by Brudney, Hebert, and Wright on "Reinventing Government in the American States," which draws on a survey of more than 1,200 top administrators in all 50 states, is an important step forward. The authors' focus on state governments is particularly welcome, in part, because the debate about reinvention has arguably devoted disproportionate attention to the federal level and the National Performance Review. State governments employ close to five million workers, over two million more than the national government and close to a quarter of all civilian public employees. States not only enact and implement their own policies, they also stand at the crossroads of intergovernmental management in the American system of federalism. The fortunes of many important national policies, such as Medicaid, depend heavily on state implementation. States also do much to shape policy and administrative parameters for local governments (where well over 60 percent of civilian government employees work). Reinvention proponents have, for instance, stressed the need to reform human resource (merit) systems. State governments frequently structure rules and policies that determine how easy or difficult it will be for local officials to modify these systems. In their assessment of reinvention in the states, Brudney, Hebert, and Wright reach an important conclusion, namely, that reinvention principles have made only modest headway in penetrating the practices of state governments. They assert, "Reinventing government has received wide publicity and prestigious political endorsements, but it appears to be more of a ripple than a reform wave at the state level" (28-29). …