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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 discusses whether process-based organization and the notion of New Public Management (NPM) complement or contradict each other. We re-visit the earlier analysis of the UK NPM and consider its implications for the emerging Labour government for the organization and management of UK public services. With this, we analyse how the process-based model of organization complies with the features of current public service organizations. The chapter describes how the UK NPM movement evolved in the late 1990s and draws attention to the issues that came out during this period by presenting the four subtypes of the NPM. This chapter concludes that there is a tension between the process and functional principles in organizing. Thus, we see how reengineers were not able to establish a set of core processes to facilitate corporate change. This particular case of BPR brought about change but not organizational transformation.