deliver their central promise namely, economic growth," and that the "developing" countries grew better under the "bad" policies of 1960-1980. (2002: 128) Fashion and Rhetoric Why, then, the overwhelming dominance of NPM until a few years ago? Naturally, NPM is more than a fashion; as already stated, it is a genuine ideology, or based on one, the neo-liberal creed, in the sense that ideologies are reduced perspectives of reality, reified by their believers because they cannot handle the complexity of the latter. But the power of fashion in itself should never be underestimated, and as has been rightly said, Public sector reform is in fashion and no self-respecting government can afford to ignore it. How a fashion is established is one of the most intriguing questions of public policy. Part of the answer lies in policy diffusion brought
" Onlookers say, "Oh, they're just talking past each other." (That happens a lot in philosophy.) In stating the foregoing meaning facts, I have at least half-heartedly tried to avoid "reification" of things called meanings; that is, talking about "mean- ings" as if they were individual things like shoes or socks. I have talked of sentences having such features as being meaningful, being synonymous, being ambiguous, though I did eventually slip into alluding to "meanings." I could have reified throughout, and said "has a meaning" instead of "is meaningful," "have the same meaning" instead of "are synonymous," and so on, or perhaps even used explicit quantifier expressions, as in "There is a meaning that the sentence has" and "There exists a meaning that is common to each of these sentences." Philosophers have made an issue of this. Let us use the term "entity theory" to mean a theory that officially takes meanings to be individual things
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