The market narrative: the wrong story for "managing" the public sector

"Reinventing Government" (1992) by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, has been embraced by some governments as a panacea. These authors advocate a healthy (sic) injection of competition into government services, with government not producing but administering competitively-based, market-driven service delivery. The wisdom of reinventing government in this way is subjected to critique in this paper. The underlying market narrative, upon which it relies, is also approached with some scepticism and subjected to some deconstruction. The paper shows the market narrative is fundamentally flawed as is the wisdom of reinventing government in the manner suggested by Osborne and Gaebler