ABSTRACT
In recent years, a wave of change has passed through government organizations in the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and elsewhere. Vigorously criticizing the bureaucratic model, its orthodoxy holds that public organizations need increased flexibility and manoeuvrability in order to respond creatively to changed and still changing conditions, to invent and experiment in order to devise new ways of 'doing more with less'. But although administrative reform holds out the promise of better service to citizens, more efficient use of public monies, and a zeal for continuous improvement, its major prescriptions - such as greater authority for public managers, empowerment of front-line workers, and market-like competition to create incentives - all pose a challenge to traditional theories of accountability. Several observers have characterized the problem as involving, inevitably and unfortunately, a trade-off between accountability and the increased flexibility and entrepreneurial energy of 'reinvented' government: to get more of one, we m ust take less of the other (Bellone and Goerl 1992; Hughes 1994; Lynn 1992; Moe 1994).
