New Public Management: The Transformation of Ideas and Practice

Citation

Keen, J. (2003), "New Public Management: The Transformation of Ideas and Practice", Journal of Health Organization and Management, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 388-389. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhom.2003.17.5.388.2

Why are so many political scientists still so interested in the new public management (NPM)? In some countries, including England, we seem to be moving beyond it into relatively uncharted territory, involving joining up whole systems and other suspiciously hippy‐sounding ideas. In others, including a number of European countries, it seems to have stalled on take‐off. If there is a positive answer, then at least part of it can be found in this excellent collection of papers.

The contributors make it clear early on that NPM is really a conceptual lens through which the real topic – civil service reform – can be viewed. The book reports on developments in four countries, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia. This is interesting, properly reflecting the spirit in which Christopher Hood made his original observations in 1991. It avoids the positivist trap of assuming that NPM is an entity that can be picked up and studied, which rather too many academics seem to have fallen into.

In turn, sections of the book are devoted to exploring the nature of NPM ideas, to assessing the extent to which those ideas have taken hold and influenced reform programmes, and the impact of those programmes. Each of these is interesting, with particularly thoughtful contributions on top level civil service reform and on the implications for political processes.

There is a useful comparison to be made with Pollitt and Bouckaert's (2000) helpful survey of NPM in ten countries. They provided analysis by both analytical theme – decentralisation, use of contracts and so on – and by tracking structural changes, keeping them largely separate in the text. This volume stresses themes in each chapter, illustrating them with evidence from one or more of the four countries. Several of the chapters are in effect essays, based on case studies that explore a particular theme – political control, and the impact on political processes, for example.

This reviewer felt that the book really came into its own when it stood back from NPM and compared and contrasted it with longer‐running themes in political science, in the course of exploring what is going on in the reform programmes in the four countries. Perhaps inevitably, given the countries involved, there is much reference to the work of Nils Brunsson and colleagues and of the “New Institutionalists”. In a “sceptical view of NPM”, Robert Gregory sets out a baleful account of changes in New Zealand, concluding that NPM may turn out to undermine the achievement of the very objectives its supporters are aiming for – such as greater efficiency and “restoring” trust in public institutions. Citizens there have, if anything, lost faith – both in the reform processes and in the institutions affected – which seems to be almost everything that ever counted as a public service in New Zealand.

In contrast to this empirically‐driven critique, Anders Forssell reflects on the extent to which public sector reforms are best explained by NPM or by the reform theories developed by Brunsson and others. It is, roughly, a draw. One of the most interesting results was that a small number of powerful concepts – particularly loose coupling and path dependence – seem to do just as well in explaining recent reforms, as do the ideas contained in NPM.

How useful a lens is NPM, at least on the evidence of this volume? As the last comment suggested, the answer seems to be a bit of a mixed bag. NPM has, in this book, been used to highlight particular aspects of public service reform, and produced some useful observations and insights. Equally, there are telltale signs throughout the book – several references to systems concepts, for example – that there is more going on than can be captured in the NPM universe. This collection has probably gone as far as anyone can to explore the analytical potential of NPM.