Abstract
This article discusses: the doctrinal content of the group of ideas known as ‘new public management’(NPM); the intellectual provenance of those ideas; explanations for their apparent persuasiveness in the 1980 s; and criticisms which have been made of the new doctrines. Particular attention is paid to the claim that NPM offers an all‐purpose key to better provision of public services. This article argues that NFM has been most commonly criticized in terms of a claimed contradiction between ‘equity’ and ‘efficiency’ values, but that any critique which is to survive NPM's claim to ‘infinite reprogrammability’ must be couched in terms of possible conflicts between administrative values. The conclusion is that the ESRC'S Management in Government’ research initiative has been more valuable in helping to identify rather than to definitively answer, the key conceptual questions raised by NPM.
THE RISE OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT (NPM)
The rise of 'new public management' (hereafter NPM) over the past 15 years is one of the most striking intemational trends in public administration. Though the research reported in the other papers in this issue refers mainly to UK experience, NPM is emphatically not a uniquely British development. NPM's rise seems to be linked with four other administrative 'megatrends', namely: (i) attempts to slow down or reverse govemment growth in terms of overt public spending and staffing (Dunsire and Hood 1989);
IMPLICATIONS FOR NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
The work of the ESRC's Management in Government Initiative has helped us to identify the specific forms that NPM took in the UK and to trace its history. But, like many research initiatives, it has perhaps been more successful in prompting the critical questions rather than in answering them definitively. Two key questions in particular seem to deserve more examination, in order to 'put NPM in its place' intellectually.
First, NPM can be imderstood as primarily an expression of sigma-type values. Its claims have lain mainly in the direction of cutting costs and doing more for less as a result of better-quality management and different structural design. Accordingly, one of the key tests of NPM's 'success' is whether and how it has delivered on that claim, in addition to succeeding in terms of rhetorical acceptance. We still have remarkably little independent evidence on this point, and work by Dimsire et al. (1988) has some path-breaking qualities in that it is a serious attempt to develop indicators of organizational structure and control systems in a way that helps us to understand how privatization and corporatization works.
