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Discusses three conventional assumptions that are made about public management: that it is in the throes of a millennial transformation to a new style; that today's ‘new’ public management ideas differ sharply from those of earlier eras; and that the favoured doctrines of contemporary public management tend to be dubbed as economic rationalism. Goes on to point out that the book looks at public management from a different perspective, and reduces its arguments to seven related propositions, discussed in the remainder of the chapter that: grid/cultural theory captures most of the variety in both current and historical debates about how to organize public services; application of a cultural‐theory framework can illuminate many of the central analytic questions of public management; if we look across time and space, we can identify ideas about how to organize government and public services that correspond to each of the four polar categories contained in cultural theory; no one of those recipes for good organization has a clear claim to be considered more modern than any of the others and each has in‐built weaknesses; variation in ideas about how to organize in government is not likely to disappear; the dimensions identified by cultural theory enable analysis of organizational variety to be pursued at a range of levels; and the understanding of cultural and organizational variety, within a historical perspective, merits a central place in the study of public management. These seven propositions overlap, and some of them are given more space than others in the book; this chapter concentrates mainly on the first proposition, and aims to introduce grid/group cultural theory in the context of public management, but the other six propositions are also discussed more briefly, as a way of setting the scene for the remainder of the book.

This chapter explores the extent to which the structure of ‘give’ clauses may be motivated by cultural and cognitive factors. It identifies three categories of the ‘give’ phenomena which are discussed in turn: (a) aspects of ‘give’ clause structure which are determined by a broad cognitive principle and have substantial cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variety; (b) aspects of ‘give’ clause structure which reflect an orientation or perspective but with significance in a larger culture and are culture- and language-specific; (c) and aspects of ‘give’ clause structure which have a special significance within a particular language system, but do not reflect larger cultural, non-linguistic values.