Managing Reforms: The Politics of Organizing Reform Work

Literature in the field of New Public Administration has focused mainly on individual countries especially the successes and failures of public sector reform efforts. This article introduces a more comparative perspective by looking at the different ways governments are managing public sector reforms without judging the successes and failures. The authors take an inductive approach by first introducing descriptions of reform works in six countries: Thailand, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Malaysia, the United States, and Japan. Then all the cases are synthesized into a framework for comparison. Findings from the study show that there are no distinct patterns. Thus, there is no one golden rule for organizing reform work. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005