Best Practice Research and Postbureaucratic Reform1

Best practice research (BPR) is the method of choice for contemporary postbureaucratic reform theorists. Public management researchers increasingly examine “best practices” to advocate postbureaucratic principles of customer-driven, value-focused, entrepreneurial, market-oriented government. BPR and postbureaucratic theory may be a positive, practical, prescriptive, and innovative new paradigm in public management research and theory, but numerous practical and scientific challenges remain. BPR is theoretically self-validating, noncumulative, limited in scope, and politically skewed. BPR demonstrates the unique problems that arise when research and reform in public management become too closely linked. BPR successfully brought postbureaucratic theory to market, but it cannot now be responsible for evaluating the administrative reforms it has generated. The methodology of “reforms as experiments” is more suited for this task.