After NPM?

Abstract

When Christopher Hood coined the (critical) term New Public Management (NPM) in 1991, he was trying to summarize and describe what was taking place in the public sector of western countries during the 1980s.Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK started a new era in the development if the welfare state in the 1980s.Private corporations became the model of governance and management, to be emulated by public administrations all over the (western) world.State governments in the 1980s and 1990s declared that continued growth in public expenditure is incompatible with national competitiveness in an era of globalized economic relations and integrated financial markets (see e.g.Pollitt and Dan, 2011).The size and scope of the public sector had to be reduced, and this change can be achieved by the introduction of the business-like management discourses, strategies and practices into public administration.The hierarchical bureaucracy, which was felt to be inefficient, was to be replaced with market logic, which was assumed to contribute towards efficiency (Power, 1997); responsibility and control were to be decentralised.It is this assemblage of reforms that Hood named New Public Management.The NPM reforms have focused on methods of organising, governing, controlling, and reporting activities rather than on products and production process of the public sector.In the early 1990s, the reforms consisted of attempts to create more delimited and governable organisations, for instance through the introduction of profit centres and performance evaluation (Power, 1997).Thus NPM introduced several new concepts to characterize public administration, such as performance management, competition, and offering quality and choice to citizens.The idea was to combine accountability and efficiency in public administration.The "business" aspects of activity became more prominent and it was assumed that the application of NPM would result in a public administration becoming "cheaper, more efficient, and more responsive to its 'customers'" (Pollitt and Dan, 2011: 7).New Public Management has now been around for several decades and may be described as a "global reform movement … inspired by a broad neo-liberal ideology" (Christensen and Laegreid, 2007: 4-8).It is one of the most frequent used terms among researchers of public administration organizations but also among politicians, civil servants and various professional groups.The usefulness *Kajsa Lindberg is an Associate Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law

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