es are also seen in public organizations based on employment practices, civil service controls, unions, and political patronage. These and other problems have been noted in the effort to "reinvent" government in the Clinton Administration. Such reform movements have developed before, and generally they have strengthened rather than weakened the bureaucratic system which defines our public institutions. Administrative reform has been seen as a matter of strengthening the hand of public officials (Steinman & Miewald, 1984, p. 6). The current round is based on the desire to empower the citizenry and to make the administrator more effective, not more powerful.
Osborne and Gaebler (1992) discuss the reinvention of government and note that for many people, the idea of doing so calls forth the image of running government like a business. The appeal of this notion is found in the related idea that business optimizes effort to achieve an end at as little cost as possible while government operates more for the process of doing something than to accomplish it and more to keep the engine running than to worry about how much it costs to run it. Osborne and Gaebler, however, state that government and business are fundamentally different institutions in a variety of ways:
Business leaders are driven by the profit motive; government leaders are driven by the desire to get reelected. Businesses get most of their money from their customers; governments get most of their money from taxpayers. Businesses are usually driven by competition; governments usually use monopolies. (p. 20)
Osborne and Gaebler point out that such disparities create fundamentally different incentives in the private sector. For the manager in the public sector, the ultimate test is not whether he or she produces a product or a profit but whether they please elected politicians. Politicians in turn tend to be driven by interest groups, and therefore public manage...