266 10: Conclusion: A Bright Future for Th eory?
governance given such a broad target, though the attempt is usefully driving public
administration scholars to adopt new concepts and apply them in creative ways.
Th e second approach equates governance with the NPM movement (Peters and
Pierre 1998). Th is approach provides an intellectual handle on governance that is
easier to grasp, but its ability to carry all that is implied by governance is question-
able. All the variants of NPM are, at their core, attempts to persuade the public sec-
tor to adopt corporate values and practices. Diff erentiating the public sector and
private sector only by the type of goods or services they produce requires adopting
a distinct ideological conception of government, one where government is largely
reduced to being a contractual agent for various groups of citizens. Th is concep-
tion challenges the cultural and philosophical role of democracy (McCabe and
Vinzant 1999; Box, Marshall, Reed, and Reed 2001). As B. Guy Peters and John
Pierre (1998) argue, NPM and governance may share common ground, but this
does not make them conceptual equivalents. NPM carries too much ideological
baggage, is too much an attempt to realize a particular political vision of what the
world should look like to function as a general scholarly theory of governance.
Although these normative components are not formally captured in Table 10.1,
the bottom line is that equating NPM with governance theory mischaracterizes
both frameworks. For example, despite the claims of the NPM movement, there is
substantial evidence showing that the Weberian structure of bureaucracies justifi -
ably remains prevalent in public institutions (Hill and Lynn 2005), because such
structural arrangements can actually increase, rather than decrease, organizational
effi ciency (Leland and Smirnova 2009). Governance theories can quite comfort-
ably absorb such empirical fi ndings; for NPM, they come dangerously close to
falsifying central theoretical (or at least ideological) assumptions.
Th e third approach, and the one we believe most promising, is to treat gov-
ernance as the attempt to understand the lateral and institutional relations in
administrative agencies in the context of the disarticulated state (Frederickson
1999b). Th is approach is bounded by and anchored to the recognition that juris-
dictional boundaries are less meaningful to the practical necessities of eff ective
policy implementation. Although not a comprehensive theory of governance, the
theory of administrative conjunction demonstrates the promise of intellectual
frameworks built from this particular starting point. In administrative conjunc-
tion, appointed public offi cials and civil service professionals make eff ective pol-
icy possible through voluntary, multijurisdictional cooperation (Frederickson
2007). As the state becomes increasingly fragmented and the importance of po-
litical boundaries erodes, conjunctions connect the various units of government
and make coherent patterns of policy implementation possible in the absence of
a central authority. Frederickson builds upon this notion by off ering a theory of
governance as the “management of the extended state” (2005, 300). As a frame-
work for theory-building, Frederickson’s extended state advises scholars to look
to international relations, specifi cally regime theory. Th e regime theory of gover-
nance embraces the notion of the disarticulated or extended state, but attempts