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Departing from the post-war Weberian-oriented bureaucratic model, the Greek administrative system has been subjected to several reform programmes with a view to its modernization. This article aims to explore the main shifts in the course of administrative change and relate this process with the broader theoretical developments in the field of public administration. It is argued that the Greek administration has been unable to follow and take advantage of a vigorously expanded constellation of ideal-types and hybrid models of state (re)organization. Transformations have diachronically produced weak results and failed to build a consistent conceptual and operational administrative paradigm. Even under the current economic contraction and the external conditionality pressure, there is no strong evidence of a paradigm shift in the administrative pattern but rather fragmented changes of limited ambit.Points for practitioners:Despite the fact that the Greek public administration has undergone a series of transformations, interestingly almost none of these reform efforts seem to have incorporated a particular administrative pattern. This article summarizes old and more recent theoretical developments on models of administrative reorganization, with a view to broadening practitioners’ choices in the process of state reform.