ABSTRACT
More than a decade has passed since the publication of Christopher Hood’s influential piece that codified the nature of the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm (Hood 1991). At that time it seemed likely, certainly within the Anglo-American research community, that this paradigm would sweep all before it in its triumphal re-casting of the nature of our discipline – in theory and in practice. One hundred-odd years of the hegemony of public administration in the public sphere seemingly counted for nothing in this momentous shift. Since then, though, the debate on the impact of NPM upon the discipline, and indeed about whether it is a paradigm at all (Gow and Dufour 2000), has become more contested.
