Best Practice Research and Postbureaucratic Reform<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1"><sup>1</sup></xref>

Abstract

Best practice research (BPR) is the method of choice for contemporary postbureaucratic reform theorists. Public management researchers increasingly examine to advocate postbureaucratic principles of customer-driven, valuefocused, 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 it has generated. The methodology of reforms as experiments is more suited for this task. Theory development in the field of management raditionally has relied on practice and experience as the basis for its inductive claims. Research methods that observe the day-to-day workings of organizations and managers in order to develop new principles for reform have a rich history of successes. Frederick Taylor studied iron workers to discover and promote the tools of scientific management; Hawthorne researchers experimented with factory laborers to reveal a behavioral side to management; Herbert Simon studied municipal employees to understand the administrative behavior of decision making; Henry Mintzberg chronicled the activities of managers to develop theories of managerial work; Peters and Waterman examined top-company characteristics in order to advocate organizational excellence; and more recently, Osborne and Gaebler (1992) studied best management practices to prescribe market-oriented government. 'A revision of the paper presented at the Berkeley Symposium on Public Management Research, University of California at Berkeley, July 1993. J-PART, 4(1994):1:67-83 67/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Tue, 2 Apr 2013 15:16:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Berkeley Symposium: Selected Papers Each of these scholars derived new theories and principles from their research. Subsequently, that research has been used successfully, whether by the scholars or by others, to prescribe various in managerial and organizational work. Unlike its social science parents or policy analysis sibling, the link between research and reform in public management is good-perhaps frighteningly good, particularly the new relationship between best practice research and postbureaucratic reform. Best practices research (BPR) is the newest version of the method of inductive practice-to-principles research. BPR is different from most of its predecessors insofar as the observations seem more selective and less direct and the principles more prescriptive and less constrained. The contents of the theories that are derived from BPR are different too, increasingly presenting what may be labeled a postbureaucratic reform thesis, that is, a customer-driven, results-oriented, value-focused, entrepreneurial, flexible, and anticipatory style and form of government.2 BPR is the method of choice for postbureaucratic theorists. In this article we examine BPR as a method of research and assess its theoretical contribution to the continued development of public