New Public Management: The Transformation of Ideas and Practice

This title was first published in 2002: These papers examine the dynamics of comprehensive civil service reform in Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia. The book challenges the globalization thesis, which maintains that New Public Management is spreading fast around the world and generating convergence between civil service systems. The authors argue that administrative reforms are transformed by a complex mixture of environmental pressure, polity features and historical and institutional contexts and that this transformation implies substantial divergence and organizational variety and heterogeneity. There is therefore a need to look behind the new NPM orthodoxy and to develop a more differentiated view of the problems of governing the public sector. Three forms of NPM are studied in the text. First, the transformation of the reforms themselves, which is examined by focusing on NPM reform processes, ideas and content. Second, the transformation of administrative systems - the effects of NPM reforms on political-administrative control, organized interests, policy capacity and governmental culture. Third, the transformation of theory and the implications of NPM for reform theory and democratic ideas.