Abstract
Public administrators always seem to be looking for a fix to the field’s “big” problem of ineffective government. One popular solution was (and perhaps still is) New Public Management reforms based on market values. Collaborative Public Management and related suggestions emerged thereafter to return the field to its democratic roots. The problem is, though, that both these constructs are pegged as “new” when nothing particularly innovative exists. This article uses Baudrillard’s phases of the image to trace developments within two popular governance constructs, showing, chiefly, how phases can loop back when appropriate historical roots of the object (nostalgia) are revealed.
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