ABSTRACT
The book Reinventing Government challenged practitioners and scholars to re-examine how local governments are designed and managed. David Morgan’s Urban Management text from 1989 provides a rough indicator of the state of the field at the time the research for Reinventing Government was underway. What Reinventing Government did was to offer a new orientation and logic for using new approaches and techniques in ways that reinforced each other. Reinventing Government received a negative response from academic researchers. Many of the changes described in Reinventing Government reflect the impact of new technologies that reduced the costs of acquiring and accessing information. Redesigning government principle reflects the shift in management systems to a focus on performance and assessment of results. Redesigning government represents a way to assess which strategy or strategies to choose and how to carry them out in initiatives that range from simple projects to change in complex systems.
