ABSTRACT
The search for better governmental organizations is a never-ending quest (Light 1998). Scholars, legislators, the media, public officials, and bureaucrats alike are not asking whether government bureaucracies should be reformed. The questions and the debates in recent years have centered on the relative advantages and limitations of two quite different basic approaches to public-sector reform. The first approach asks whether it is possible to reform existing bureaucratic structures and practices enough that we can indeed govern well through them (Ott and Goodman 1998; Peters 1996). The second approach assumes that existing structures and practices cannot be improved enough; instead, we should develop alternatives to bureaucratic organizational structures (Behn 1995; Kearney and Hays 1998). The question for proponents of the second approach is: Which of the many alternative reform models would serve as the best replacements for traditional bureaucracies, and under what circumstances? The first of these reform approachesimproving bureaucratic structures and practices-largely fell out of favor as the second approach moved to center stage during the decade of the 1990s (Peters 1996).
