The Analysis of Administrative Traditions

Abstract

Much of the contemporary discussion of administrative systems tends to treat all public bureaucracies as virtually identical. The ideas of the New Public Management (NPM) and other reforms of the public sector have assumed that the same reform agenda can be used to improve public management almost anywhere (Christensen and Lægreid 2001a). Further, some processes of change, such as Europeanization and globalization, are assumed to lead to convergence among administrative systems (Kettl 2000; Knill 2001). International bodies and consulting organizations (Saint- Martin 2000) have spread what amounts to a common ideology of change in public organizations. As Tony Verheijen discusses in Chapter 16, the European Union and OECD have identified what they see as a common ‘European legacy’ and have presented this in terms of benchmarks against which new EU members should measure themselves.