Of alternating waves and shifting shores: The configuration of reform values in the US federal bureaucracy

Abstract

Scholars have noted that United States federal government reforms come in waves (Barley and Kunda, 1992; Kettl, 2002; Light, 1998), often accompanied by values that alternate between rational and normative conceptions of public administration and service. The idea of alternation also suggests the importance of time in gauging the effect of new reforms when previous reforms have accumulated from the past (see Pollitt, 2008). Time is a necessary variable in implementing reforms; time is crucial to know if reform values have taken hold. Extending Paul Light's (1998) reform waves metaphor, we investigate here whether two predominant management philosophies have influenced and reconfigured the shoreline of values found among federal agencies over a particular period of time. Using empirical methods, we examine how the values of New Public Management and its humanist (post-NPM) counterpart have settled and taken hold among US federal agencies. We followed three lines of inquiry: determining the existence of reform values in the bureaucracy, examining the prevalence of different sets of values, and investigating whether 'crowding out' of values occurred, that is, whether there was a detectable shift in the distribution of values as a new wave came on top of others. Our analysis yields evidence for the predominance of certain NPM and post-NPM values and indicates that bureaucracy concurrently holds what may be regarded as competing values side-by-side. Implications for research and future reforms are suggested in the final section of the article. © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.