ABSTRACT
178Writing over a quarter century ago, Frederick Mosher (1982, 221) observed, “One thing seems clear ... the principles of merit and the practices whereby they were given substance are changing and must change a good deal more to remain viable in our society.” He argued in his classic Democracy and the Public Service that human resource management (HRM) systems “should be decentralized and delegated to bring them into more immediate relationship with the middle and lower managers they served” (86). More recently, however, administrative reformers have gone significantly further. So-called radical civil service reform (RCSR) couched in the neomanagerialist tenets of the new public management (NPM) has grown popular among government reinventors and has resonated as a populist political theme (Barzelay with Armajani 1992; Durant and Legge 2006; Pollitt 1990; Terry 1993). Consonant with NPM advocates who espouse freeing managers from the bonds of bureaucratic constraints to allow them to manage their organizations effectively, proponents of RCSR advocate eliminating job security in favor of at-will employment, eroding merit protections, linking pay to performance, and decentralizing personnel functions to program line managers, largely without checks on managerial excesses.
