2000 Taylor and Francis. Charles Goodsell (1983) characterizes American bureaucracy as similar to a good used car: it is reliable, relatively inexpensive to operate, and generally gives good service. Bureaucracy, in Goodsells estimation, is the equivalent of Ralphs Pretty Good Grocery in Lake Woebegone. Goodsells assessment is meant to be an average for American bureaucracy; he recognized, and others have presented information, that American bureaucracies vary a great deal about that mean (Meier 1993; Wolf 1997). With the current public philosophy of neoconservative economics (Lan and Rosenbloom 1992; Osborne and Gaebler 1992), being pretty good is unlikely to be good enough to meet the expectations of policy makers and the public. Public administrators can no longer be content to simply distinguish 84the good from the bad and the ugly. What is needed is a way to look at the pretty good agencies and distinguish among that group those that are exceptional, the stars that other organizations can emulate to provide more effective performance.
