Chapter 12 Deconstructing Administrative Culture: Exploring the Relationship Between Cultural Patterns and Public Sector Change in the UK and Germany

This chapter tries to shed some light on the relationship between cultural patterns and country-specific public sector reform profiles. For a comparison, the British and German cases seem to be particularly appealing as they arguably represent two distinct approaches in public sector reform (see also Schröter & Wollmann, 1997; Schröter & Wollmann, 2000). It has become part and parcel of the conventional public management wisdom that the UK stands out for its vigorously pursued market-orientation and the emphasis on the explicitly “managerial” side of the new public management (“freedom to manage”) (see also Schröter, 2006), while few commentators seem to dispute that recent public sector reform programs in Germany have been of only modest range – more concerned with “maintaining” (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004) established features of the administrative system and fine-tuning the internal bureaucratic machinery of the state apparatus. At this point, our discussion does not take issue with that stereotypical depiction of national reform styles (see Schröter, 2001); rather it tackles a potentially powerful approach of interpreting the conspicuous policy variance: the linkage between traditional political and administrative cultures and national reform strategies.