ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the story of administrative reform in Britain, covering evidence-based policy making, managerialism, and service delivery and choice. It also outlines an interpretive approach to studying administrative reform, especially the use of ethnography to give voice to groups that are all too often ignored, to understanding 'the black box' of government and, distinctively, to recovering the beliefs and practices of actors. The chapter discusses five axioms under the following headings: coping, institutional memory, storytelling, traditions, and implementation. It explores the pros and cons of an interpretive, ethnographic approach, concluding that in place of 'the civil service reform syndrome', with its overlapping, short-lived initiatives, need to reform the constitutional and political role of public administration in the polity. The chapter suggests that the reforms of the civil service proposed by both think tanks and the government over the past decade are pervaded by beliefs in the instrumental rationality of evidence-based policymaking, managerialism, and economic choice.
