GLOBALIZATION AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM: - What is happening in theory?

Governments everywhere are engaged in self-conscious projects of administrative and managerial improvement. Scholars of public management thus confront a fascinating array of talk, conjectures, and facts on administrative and managerial change that can be assembled from myriad sources. There are as well stylized facts, stories, conjectures, and ideological glosses – these might be termed ‘theory substitutes’ – that may or may not be consistent with actual developments worldwide and which are provocative in their implications. Our goal as scholars of governance and management must be to penetrate appearances to ascertain whatever lessons and meanings might lie beneath. A variety of theoretical frameworks ranging from conceptual classifications to synoptic speculations to causal accounts of state building are available for this intellectual work.