Municipal Reinvention: Managerial Values and Diffusion among Municipalities

During the last decade, government reinvention along with the new public management (NPM) has driven a managerial reform wave toward market efficiency, entrepreneurship, and performance-based/benchmarking management in the public sector. Using an 1CMA mailed survey of more than twelve hundred municipal governments in the United States, this study embarks on an exploratory study of municipal reinvention. The results suggest that reinvention values are widely held by chief city administrators, and various reinvention programs are diffused into many municipal governments. But many chief administrators are cautious about the outcome of reinvention efforts. Preliminary empirical evidence also suggests that the reinvention values of chief administrators as well as socioeconomic (size, economic condition) and institutional factors (labor union, government type) are closely associated with the adoption of reinvention programs at the municipal level.