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Ideals of public administration and good government in the United States are examined from the late-19th to mid-20th centuries in order to understand the processes by which such ideals emerge and evolve. In brief, calls for moral, incorruptible administrators in the late 1800s, developed into calls for measurably effective and efficient administration during the early decades of the 1900s, and eventually gave way to an elaborated regime of comparisons, alternatives and tradeoffs (typified in practices such as performance budgeting and cost-benefit analysis) in the wake of World War II. To explain this evolution, I draw on concepts from organizational sociology, considering the transposition and repurposing of materials across fields and time. Specifically, I argue that ideals take shape through encounters between adjacent social realms, becoming codified in organizations, persons, practices, and ideas. As ideals are rendered incarnate, they also give rise to new grievances, challengers, and alternative orders. But these new orders are not invented whole cloth. Rather they are constituted by the materials available within, and shifting relations between, adjacent arenas. By developing a sociological account of the evolution of ideals, this article contributes to ongoing theoretical discussions of institutional emergence and change.