ABSTRACT
The term ‘new public management’ (NPM) denotes an administrative philosophy which came into the ascendancy in the 1980s. NPM dominated the public administration agenda in Australia, New Zealand and the UK (cf. Aucoin 1990; Hood 1990, 1991; Hood and Jackson 1991, 177–97), with variants in Canada and the USA (see Pollitt 1990). NPM's doctrines included the following:
A renewed emphasis on the separation of management or ‘delivery’ responsibility from policy or target-setting responsibilities. Within that, there was a renewed emphasis on ‘management mathematics’ (technical methods of investment appraisal and efficiency criteria) rather than on qualitative or ‘people’ issues.
A disaggregated approach to public sector management, involving break-up of administrative units into separately managed and self-sufficient entities, corporatised and privatised and dealing with one another at arms length, on a user-pays basis.
A strong emphasis on cost-cutting rather than overall bureaucratic expansion. Much of NPM's popular rhetoric was taken from what private sector management practice is supposed or portrayed to be. But the emphasis in practice was far more on discipline than on investment, even though the latter is often more characteristic of ‘advanced’ private corporate personnel management practices (cf. Nethercote 1989, 14; Baker 1989, 129).
A management style reflecting traditional private sector corporate practice, in the sense of a preference: for output targets over traditional ‘process’ controls in public bureaucracies; for short-term contract hiring and performance-linked pay over traditional career tenure and uniform fixed salaries; for top-down managerial ‘freedom to manage’ over a pluralist, cross-checking approach to public sector management which limits the power of line managers.
A style of policy-making increasingly based on the ‘new machine polities’, in the sense of a preference for policy driven by opinion polling targeted on marginal constituencies or key electoral groups rather than by paying attention to policy arguments coming from within the public bureaucracy on the basis of long-standing experience (Mills 1986; Hood 1990, 206).
A preference for deregulation, at least in the sense of the replacement of ‘classical’ regulation (Breyer 1982) by ‘light’ regulation, often involving fewer regulators, more ‘self-regulation’ and a conscious attempt to achieve closer cooperation of government and business (corporatism as distinct from corporatisation).
