To understand the structure and workings of the newer paradigm well enough to improve public management requires attention and thoughtfulness but not the honed skills of an analytic philosopher of social linguist. The new paradigm, we suggest, can readily be understood by working with the metaphor of an extended family of ideas. The image of an extended family is helpful because it indicates that each idea is somehow related to every other, and it implies that some concentration is required to identify just how, The same metaphor can be pushed much further. Think of the new paradigm, as well as the bureaucratic one, as a generation within an extended family. Although the members of each generation may not enjoy equal standing, their relationships-like those between concepts in either paradigm-are not hierarchical. All the cousins may be compatible in many situations, but their personalities-much like the entailment of the concepts of incentive and empowerment-are likely to differ markedly. Furthermore, just as siblings and cousins seek to prove that they are individually and collectively different from their parents' generation, self-definitions of the new paradigm emphasize divergences from the bureaucratic paradigm. Generational differences in extended families and paradigms also reflect changes in the social, economic, and political environments in which they have lived. To pursue the metaphor one more step, just as the siblings and cousins are influenced more by the preceding generation that they care to see or admit, concepts in the new paradigm are deeply conditioned by their lineal relationships to concepts in the bureaucratic predecessor.