ABSTRACT
One of the features of public management reform at the end of the twentieth century was a strong push to introduce market mechanisms1 and private sector fi rms into the provision of public services (Hood 1991, Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). There have been numerous critiques of the effectiveness of this aspect of ‘New Public Management’ (Dunsire et al. 1994, Peters and Savoie 1998, Kay 2002, Propper et al. 2004), as well as various attempts at explaining why theory didn’t work in practice. These explanations included the effect of institutional context (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004), the ideological as opposed to practical nature of reform efforts (Brunsson and Olsen 1993), the confl ict between different value systems (Moe 1994, Lynn et al. 2001), a failure to implement fully the proposed reform (Moynihan 2006) and the unanticipated costs of engaging with the private sector (Prager 1994).
