Search Results

This chapter explores the context of the cases, setting out the history of patient involvement initiatives and deliberative experiments in the UK. It highlights the antipathy to interest groups and the ‘research orientation’ of those experiments, and the effects that orientation has had on limiting the scope and agenda of deliberation. It argues that whether deliberation occurs at the local level or at the centre matters a great deal, but that deliberative experiments tend to be at least as much about resource battles between the centre and the periphery as responding to citizens’ needs.

Discusses the transition from bureaucratic public administration to public or new public management. Classic bureaucratic administration, based on the Prussian army’s administrative principles, resulted from a series of civil service reforms implemented in the second half of nineteenth century. It revealed a surprising historical persistence. Public management reform is the capitalist state organization’s second major reform. It emerged when globalization and the crisis of the state challenged the legitimacy of state bureaucracies and bureaucratic public administration. Margaret Thatcher launched public management reform in Great Britain, but in the end it was adopted by governments formed by political parties from across the political spectrum, including parties on the traditional left, most notably Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand.

This chapter has five purposes. First, to provide a general theoretical orientation and framework to analyse changes in UK higher education at the institutional, organizational, and individual academic and manager-academic levels. Second, to provide an analytical narrative about the emergence and subsequent development of ‘New Managerialism’ (NM). Third, to review the discursive strategies and control technologies embodied in different formulations of NM and New Public Management (NPM). Fourth, to identify and assess the endemic contradictions, tensions, and conflicts within and between these discursive strategies and control technologies, as well as their broader implications for longer-term institutional change and organizational innovation. Fifth, to provide an initial interpretation of the process of ‘hybridization’ in public services domains and organizationals, and its wider significance for the development of universities as ‘knowledge-intensive organizations’.

Examines the relationship between new public management (NPM) reforms and regulation inside government. It charts the changes in regulatory style over a 20‐year period. The relaxation of controls associated with NPM has often been accompanied by the tightening of other forms of control.

Deliberate and successful attempts to build distinctive collective research strategies, or ‘profiles’, that involve reallocating resources to particular areas constitute a new phenomenon in the German university system. Rectors and presidents have come to consider such profile-building as an important task, which their increased authority makes it possible for them to push forward. This chapter discusses how this significant shift in organizational leadership and identity came about, focusing on the key elements of the ‘new public management’ (NPM) that were decisive for this development, and on the factors explaining variations in profile-building activities and their success at German universities.

A summary of the stages through which the modern state has passed historically. It began as authoritarian and patrimonial in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it was the absolutist state. In the nineteenth century, it turned liberal and bureaucratic: the liberal state imposed the rule of law and assured civil rights. In the first part of the twentieth century, the transition to democracy was completed: it was the time of the liberal state, of elitist or liberal democracy, and, still, of bureaucratic administration. In the second part of that century, the state becomes social-democratic, and assumes a developmental character; democracy now is social or plural rather than just liberal. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the state is aiming to become social-liberal and republican; democracy is aiming to become participatory or republican; and administration is aiming to become managerial, or inspired by the principles of new public management.

State structures have been radically reformulated in recent decades. In both developed and developing countries a neo-liberal informed model or narrative of ‘good governance’ has seen many functions and responsibilities hived-off or delegated beyond the direct control of politicians and public officials. However, the state has not been ‘withered away’ or ‘rolled back’ — it has been transformed. This chapter examines how this transformation has been based upon the notion of delegation and why this matters, in both administrative and democratic terms.

Chapter 4 explores the processes through which institutions struggle for a place in the democratic order and how they achieve and lose primacy and autonomy. It attends to why it is difficult to find a form of political organization that is perceived as normatively best and also sustainable, securing a stable equilibrium between central government and partly autonomous institutions. The analytical value of ‘autonomy’ as detachment from politics and the apolitical dynamics of change assumed by many New Public Management reforms are questioned, and the interplay between central authority and institutional autonomy is interpreted as an artefact of partly decoupled inter-institutional processes involving the struggle for power among interdependent and co-evolving institutions that are carriers of competing yet legitimate values, interests, behavioural logics, and resources. The issues are illustrated by the cases of public administration and the public university.

This chapter discusses whether process-based organization and the notion of New Public Management (NPM) complement or contradict each other. We re-visit the earlier analysis of the UK NPM and consider its implications for the emerging Labour government for the organization and management of UK public services. With this, we analyse how the process-based model of organization complies with the features of current public service organizations. The chapter describes how the UK NPM movement evolved in the late 1990s and draws attention to the issues that came out during this period by presenting the four subtypes of the NPM. This chapter concludes that there is a tension between the process and functional principles in organizing. Thus, we see how reengineers were not able to establish a set of core processes to facilitate corporate change. This particular case of BPR brought about change but not organizational transformation.

For a number of reasons the reframing of social citizenship has been pursued more rapidly in the UK than in most other countries, so that national experience offers a useful object lesson in the strengths and weaknesses of rational actor reforms in the European context. This chapter analyses the reframing process in detail under successive governments, paying attention to the institutional structure of government departments, the part played by the Treasury, and the understanding of the challenges by the chief policy actors. It discusses the logic of policy reform in official documents and shows how rational actor assumptions predominate. The problems identified in relation to the new policies are chiefly to do with the difficulties of structuring incentives appropriately and of establishing a level playing field for equal opportunity policies. The issues that provider incentives may focus on the competitive advantage of their particular agency rather than public benefit, social inclusion may receive little support, and the value basis of social trust may be damaged receive insufficient recognition.

This chapter analyses responses to the pressures on social and public provision among European countries and at the level of the EU. It argues that attempts to develop common EU-wide social provision have been largely unsuccessful, while EU monetary and open market policies have transformed the economic context. Social policy reforms have developed mainly at the national level, in the shadow of European economic policies. While major differences remain between groupings of countries, two common directions can be identified. Social security benefit, employment, and labour market reforms strengthen work incentives and increasingly put the responsibility on individuals to pursue opportunities actively. New Managerialist policies in health, social care, and other services impose strict targets on providers and introduce competitive quasi-markets. Taken together these new policy directions imply a shift in the assumptions about social citizenship. Those involved as providers and users are expected to act as deliberative and pro-active rational actors, with individual opportunities and incentives playing a major role. Governments become increasingly concerned with equality of opportunity rather than outcome.

This concluding chapter draws out the major lessons both for government and for the IT industry. For the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, United States, and Canada, it argues that new public management (NPM) is intellectually dead, an orthodoxy now played out and plagued by evidence of adverse by-product effects. NPM focused on disaggregation, competition, and incentivization changes. It also fragmented administrative institutions, dramatically increasing policy system institutional complexity, and somewhat reducing citizens' autonomous capacities to solve their own problems. NPM impaired government IT modernization by hollowing out public sector staffs and capabilities and bringing new contractually based risks and barriers into cross-government policy-making. An emerging post-NPM agenda has ‘digital era governance’ changes at its core, focusing on the reintegration of services, holistic and ‘joined-up’ approaches to policy-making, and the extensive digitalization of administrative operations.

Chapters 8 and 9 seek to anchor the analysis of the previous three chapters in a concrete policy context by considering the impact of recent reforms in the field of UK health care. The NHS is the flagship of the British welfare state and at the heart of public sector reform. A New Public Management system (quasi-markets, strict targets and strong incentives for managers, regulation of quality from the centre, and better information for users) has transformed the service. Comparisons of changes in provision over time and between regions of the UK indicate considerable improvement at a time of increasing pressure on health care. However, these gains rest on substantially increased resources and there has been little improvement in cost-efficiency and productivity. Improvements for disadvantaged minorities are much less impressive. Public attitudes and responses display considerable disquiet with the reform programme, particularly in relation to confidence and trust.

This chapter looks at how far differences in public management and public administration factors seem to shape countries' divergent experiences with government IT development. It examines four key, qualitatively set dimensions: checks and balances in fundamental governance arrangements (we expect the absence of checks to worsen government IT performance); the openness of bureaucratic culture to technical expertise (again, a closed, non-technical bureaucracy should inhibit IT performance); the openness of each country to new public management (NPM) reforms (we expect NPM to inhibit government IT performance because of its direct effects in fragmenting government and its indirect effects in boosting the power of the IT industry); the presence of a strong, central, political-administrative push for e-government (we expect the absence of such an effort to impair government IT's development). The institutional explanatory variables do indeed show some influence on the expected lines, but they also show considerable country variance and highlight multiple ‘exceptions’ and explanatory problems.

New public management is the name given to the reforms within the public sector that are aimed at reducing the size and cost of the public service, encouraging interchange of personnel between the public and private sectors, introducing more private sector practices, and diminishing insignificant government activities or assets. In Hong Kong, reforms of the public sector were the results of the reaction to the political and economical difficulties encountered by the government rather than an attempt to converge the advocacies of the new public management. In Hong Kong, new public management was related mainly to the conditions of employment of civil servants, to attempts to improve their efficiency and productivity, and to several ways of using the private sector to perform public functions. This chapter discusses how the key principles shaping the status and behaviour of civil servants have been affected by the attempts to implement public sector reforms. This chapter examines the consequences of the reforms in four major areas of human management. These are recruitment, selection and terms of service, pay and fringe benefits, disciplinary procedures and performance management and training. The chapter also discusses the effects of the shift from the policy of corruption to promotion of integrity in the civil service of Hong Kong.

This chapter examines the diverse pressures and demands which have contributed to the growth of auditing practices in other areas. It also considers the programmes which demand auditing. In particular, three overlapping programmes for enhanced governance and control are considered. These three programmatic developments, the rise of New Public Management (NPM), a shift in regulatory style and the rise of quality assurance, establish a demand for a particular style of control in many different fields. The three overlapping programmes presuppose and demand that auditing in its different forms can deliver assurance, add to compliance and stimulate best practice. Furthermore, the three programmes pass costs down to regulatees who develop a self-monitoring capacity.