ABSTRACT
In recent decades, there has been considerable questioning of the state's ability to manage a monopoly of public services. In the West, some people have been arguing that the welfare state is in crisis (Habermas, 1976; Le Grand and Robinson, 1985). Realising the importance of productivity, performance and control, governments have begun to engage themselves in transforming the way that services are managed (Flynn, 1997). The traditional 'public administration' is now giving way to the 'new public management', the paradigm shift of which marks a move towards a more transparent and accountable public sector. There is a fundamental change in the philosophy of governance, shifting from the traditional paradigm of 'public administration' emphasizing the monopolistic role of the state in social provisions to the 'management-oriented' approach which centres around the notion of 'economic rationalism', which embodies a universal model of rationality in re-fashioning social policy, is the belief that economic factors are the most important ones that shape social and public policies and drive individual actions.
