The Political Economy of Results-Oriented Management in the “Neoadministrative State”

Abstract

To comply with the precepts of today’s neoadministrative state, public managers are routinely pressed by elected officials to become results-oriented, customer-focused, and partnership-seeking service deliverers. The magnitude of the cultural change involved has frequently proved daunting at all levels of government in the United States. Although much remains unclear about the prudence and prospects of such cultural-reform efforts, researchers are gradually discerning the political economy of the efforts and challenges they pose to effectiveness and to public accountability. In the process, they are finding how critical the approaches taken in the early stages of cultural reform are to their ultimate success or failure. To advance practice and research on this topic, this article chronicles and analyzes the first 3 years of a critical case study of results-driven, customer-focused, and partnership-oriented cultural change in the Department of Health and Human Services in Montgomery County, Maryland. Identified are nine critical choices made during those years that sorely complicated progress, the flaws in underlying causal theories that spawned these problems, and the challenges to, and opportunities for advancing, accountability that reformers can expect and that researchers can profitably pursue.