ABSTRACT
To many Americans and Europeans associated with the field of public management, there is no “old” public management. Much as poet Philip Larkin once quipped that sex was invented in 1963, many have argued that public management and public sector managerialism were invented in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher’s government in Great Britain, or, more generally, in the last twenty to thirty years as management eclipsed administration as an ideology of public service delivery. Even when there is acknowledged to be an “old” public management, as is the case in the United States, its influence is being obliterated, so a popular argument goes, by global, regional, and national forces for change. Why, those who hold this view wonder, remain besotted with the past?
