Reinventing the Proverbs of Government

The field of public administration has a long history of popular reform movements. Many of these reforms have failed to deliver the improvements promised. The current “reinventing government” reforms, which follow largely from the writings of David Osborne and his coauthors, claim to establish a new governmental paradigm based on liberating employees and citizens to do their best and using new management methods to get the most out of what government does. However, a careful analysis of Osborne's chief works, Reinventing Government and Banishing Bureaucracy, reveals that their advice cannot be applied because it is inconsistent. No new paradigm is established, and, more importantly, because of the ahistorical nature of these texts, Osborne proposes discredited ideas for administrative reform and misleads the reader concerning the significance of his observations.