speaking and the specific language game in use. This article borrows an interpretive device, originally developed by Roland Barthes and further articulated by Jean Baudrillard, which lays waste to the assertion that a word has a single denotative meaning. Such an interpretation (that words represent, or correspond to, reality) is but the first step of a progressively unreal simulacrum that moves to skepticism, through masking (where a word connotes the radical absence of the object it points toward) to hyperreality. Hyperreality is the domain of self-referential imagery, where words and symbols refer only to themselves but provide titillation and visceral gratification in the process. The authors conclude that the very term privatization lacks foundational stability. (1889-1951), a philosopher whose works included one of the great philosophical treatises on scientific knowledge (namely the Tractatus [Wittgenstein, 1961], written in the 1920s), later changed his mind about the possibility of clear language, and he repudiated his own momentous book. In the 1920s, he believed that the purpose of philosophy, in its relation to knowledge, was the logical clarification of thoughts; but as he got older, he came to believe that too much meaningambiguity exists for there to be the necessary correspondence between words and objects that rigorous protocols of science would require (Wittgenstein, 1958). Ludwig WittgensteinIf one examines how language is used-as Wittgenstein did in Philosophical Investigations-it becomes apparent that word usage is not exacting in a denotative, rock-means-rock, horse-means-horse sense. The same word can serve in different capacities. Friends can "horse around";

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A surprising number of modern American cities are experiencing efforts to drastically alter or even abandon their forms of local government. We discuss the major perspectives on municipal structural choice and then use both survey and census data in an attempt to explain this contemporary urban conflict over governance structure. Our findings demonstrate that no single institutional, political, social, or contextual theory satisfactorily explains this evolving struggle over governing arrangements in U.S. cities. Rather, a complex array of factors such as race, ethnicity, education, economic change, governmental composition, and specific municipal design features seem to be driving these movements for institutional change.

This article examines the forms of municipal governments in Wisconsin and their relationship to variables in the areas of socioeconomic, partisanship, election process, decision-making in the governance process, and internal municipal operations. Wisconsin has more mayor-council and mayoral forms with an appointed administrator rather than council-manager forms common in other states. We find that reform in Wisconsin has occurred in all government forms and that most municipalities desiring the managerial results of a professional administration have chosen an adaptation of the mayor-council form. Furthermore, we find that there are few clearly identifiable differences between cities with differing governmental forms.

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