ABSTRACT
Reform protagonists or actor constellations can vary between countries and over time, and resulting reform patterns are further influenced by structural possibilities and constraints imbedded in a national polity. Contrary to the German case, public sector reforms in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth states since the 1980s have been pushed by politicians and appear to be secular and comprehensive and based on a coherent reform philosophy. The chapter discusses the change in the reform climate in Germany and point out specifics of the competing bearer strata of the new ideas. It explores the similarities, for there are such and differences of administrative reforms in the UK and Germany during the last decades. The chapter provides some inherent problems of key modernisation concepts that not only make them partly incompatible with traditional German public sector thinking but have also led to disputes in the Anglo-Saxon reform discussion.
