ABSTRACT
With the emergence of New Public Management in the 1990s, one has started to talk about public management policy. This may at first sound awkward, as if one could combine public policy and public management. They are simply two different concepts for analysing the public sector. Yet the recognition of the place of management in public organisations calls for a discussion about the ends and means of public management, i.e. about how public organisations are to be operated. Public policy consists of the decisions of government in relation to its organisations, focusing on the ends and means of the teams it sets up. Public management, on the other hand, is basically running the public organisations. By ‘public management policy’ one refers to the recent reforms in OECD countries of how public organisations are to be run as well as the outcomes of these efforts.
