Beginning in the 1970s and quickening in the 1980s, the ideology of managerialism began to infuse European public administration. In America, where management and managers had been respected for generations, an invigorated emphasis on public management was pervading public affairs education and practice. There ensued an era of public management reforms so international in scope that the term New Public Management (NPM), coined for that subset of neo-liberal policies initiated by Westminster governments, came to describe public management reforms of almost every kind, everywhere, including civil service, budget, and territorial reforms that had long histories under other names.  Almost any deliberate effort at organizational change and development began to be counted as NPM.

Discussion of these public management reforms has been riveted by claims that a new paradigm, the business-like New Public Management, is replacing traditional, hierarchical government on a global scale. By examining the evolution of managerial structures, practices, and values in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Public Management: Old and New reveals how public management institutions and practices in these, and by implication, most other countries, is inevitably shaped by the country¿s history as much as or more than by transcendent global forces.  Constitutions and constitutional institutions, legislatures, and courts of competent jurisdiction control and regulate the evolution of national public management.  Moreover, the spread of national democratic movements, not internationalized capitalism, is the most influential of recent global developments shaping public management reform.

Public Management: Old and New reflects several convictions: that public management is a nexus where politics, law, and administration necessarily engage each other; that the comparative study of public management is essential to understanding its importance as an institution of governance; that the study of public management must be both historical and analytical, both descriptive and theoretical; and that public management as a subject of teaching, research and practice must be recognized as having multiple, interrelated dimensions, including structures of delegation and control, managerial techniques and practices, and the values that come to be institutionalized in administrative organizations.

This argument is broadly institutional in that it traces the evolution of those durable governmental structures, conventions, practices, and beliefs that enable and constrain public management policy and practice in these four institutionally different countries. The central argument is that public management without its institutional context is ¿mere¿ managerialism, that is, an ideology or conceit which views management principia probant, non probantur as a technocratic means to achieve the end of effective governmental performance without acknowledging the powerful influences of specific institutional contexts and circumstances on its structures, practices and values. On the contrary, public management cannot be understood as other than endogenous ¿ intrinsic ¿ to each country¿s political economy.  Each country¿s political economy must, in turn, be understood as a resultant of path-dependent, historic processes subject, but in no predictable way, to occasional ¿punctuations¿ or discontinuous changes that affect particular but not fundamental characteristics of change processes.

To argue for convergence across countries on ¿government as a business,¿ or, for that matter, on any other dominant pattern of outcomes, one must argue that a fundamental transformation in the historic role of the nation state and of democratic institutions, that is, in the generative forces of public administration, is under way, transformation of a nature that ¿predicts¿ the new paradigm or pattern. If the bureaucratic paradigm is rational/legal in the Weberian sense in order to reconcile democracy with the administrative state, then a post-bureaucratic paradigm featuring, for example, quasi-markets or, alternatively, participatory democracy must be founded on new sources of legitimacy and new bases for the performance of collective tasks: perhaps different forms of rationality, different jurisprudential principles, a different allocation of property rights, a different ideal concerning the role of the state in protecting individual rights and creating collective goods; new habits of thought and action not only among elites but more widely throughout the polity.

As Elke Löffler and others have noted, however, the requisite political decision-making to sustain an altogether new managerial paradigm has not been happening. Though there have been structural and operational reforms in various countries, little significant change has occurred in the organization and practices of legitimizing institutions: in parliaments and legislative councils, in judicial systems and administrative law forums, in political conventions and traditional notions of oversight and accountability. In the face of inertia in the political and judicial branches of government, it is likely that managerialism can do little more than supplement the repertoire of managerial structures and practices that is the cumulative legacy of the centuries of effort that built contemporary administrative states. In the long run, legislatures and courts may not be willing to tolerate the loss of traditional accountability implied by New Public Management.  That the status quo ante may no longer be a preferred option, as Guy Peters has suggested, overlooks evidence of path dependency in national institutions and in the political dynamics that account for it.

In summary, when it comes to managerial reform and change, countries are unlikely to wander very far from their historic paths, even when, as they have in the past, they confront revolutionary changes in their circumstances.  Thus it is important to know what paths they are on, because the present is influenced in systematic ways by prior choices and conventions.  American public management reflects the Founders¿ choices concerning, among other things, the formal separation of powers; British public management reflects the evolution of parliamentary sovereignty and the unity of its uncodified constitution. French and German public management reflect the transformation of absolutist bureaucracies into democratic Rechtsstaaten, albeit in different ways. Without understanding these path dynamics, we cannot understand why, when it comes to public management reform, America is incoherent and incremental, Great Britain can be zealous, Germany is reluctant, and France is inconsistent.

The most stable institutions in the era of managerialism have been those that guarantee the legitimacy of delegated authority: legislatures and courts. In America and in other countries as well, to the extent that their electoral politics involves the direct engagement of interest groups, elected officials will continue to be under pressure, when the legitimacy of the uses of delegated authority and resources is called into question, to enforce traditional modes and concepts of accountability. The same result is likely where the rule of law takes the form of a Rechtsstaat.

Against managerial institutions, and in a sense transcending them, then, stand the law and the courts that define and enforce it.

This article is based on the author¿s Public Management: Old and New, forthcoming from Routledge.