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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2006
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 2007 17(1):1-17; doi:10.1093/jopart/muj019
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Bureaucracy Redux: Management Reformism and the Welfare State

Evelyn Z. Brodkin

University of Chicago

Address correspondence to the author at e-brodkin{at}uchicago.edu.

Bureaucratic discretion is a fundamental feature of social provision, one that presents enduring difficulties for management. In general, management reform has taken two, divergent paths. One, utilizing the familiar public bureaucratic model, seeks to control discretion through hierarchical command structures and standardization. The other, utilizing decentralization and privatization, regulates and relocates discretion, using incentive structures associated with market or quasi-market institutions. However, it may be that discretion will prove to be as problematic for the new public management (NPM) as it was for the old. This article offers a critical political history of management reformism, reviewing efforts to reorganize the public welfare provision by applying new public management models to old public bureaucracy problems. It considers the dynamics of bureaucratic discretion and reform not only as a problem of public management but as part of the contested politics of social policymaking.


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