Second, this new image of the government and the public sector helped give the state a partially new and more contemporary image at the same time as it provided some degree of support and legitimacy to further cut-backs in public expenditures; as Stoker (1998:39) puts it, ‘governance is the acceptable face of spending cuts’. In a fashion not too different from the ‘lean and mean’ ideal of the competitive firm in the 1990s, this new perspective on government presents the public sector essentially as the functional equivalent of a mean and lean business in the private sector. By the same token, new forms of citizen engagement which could be seen as a reaction to widespread frustration with traditional models of governance have quickly gained massive attention on both sides of the Atlantic (Pierre, 1998b).