Bureaucratic discretion is a fundamental feature of social provision, one that presents enduring difficulties for management. In general, management reform has taken two, divergent paths. One, utilizing the familiar public bureaucratic model, seeks to control discretion through hierarchical command structures and standardization. The other, utilizing decentralization and privatization, regulates and relocates discretion, using incentive structures associated with market or quasi-market institutions. However, it may be that discretion will prove to be as problematic for the new public management (NPM) as it was for the old. This article offers a critical political history of management reformism, reviewing efforts to reorganize the public welfare provision by applying new public management models to old public bureaucracy problems. It considers the dynamics of bureaucratic discretion and reform not only as a problem of public management but as part of the contested politics of social policymaking.
