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The Middle Aging of New Public Management: Into the Age of Paradox?
Christopher Hood
Oxford University
Guy Peters
University of Pittsburgh
ABSTRACT
As ‘‘New Public Management’’ enters middleage, scholarly attention has moved to some degree from descriptive mapping and a priori critiques to the analysis of surprises and paradoxes associated with recent and contemporary public servicereforms. Some standard analytic lenses for examining such paradoxes, explored here, are the Mertonian tradition of analyzing unintended effects of social interventions, cultural theories of surprise, andthe analysis of discontinuities and unexpected couplings in the operation of complex systems, though the New Public Management literature to date has employed the first lens more intensively thanthe other two. We conclude by exploring features of New Public Man- agement reforms that may have contributed to paradoxical effects and argue that the analysis of such paradoxes can help advanceadministrative science and the understanding of public sector reform.
THE MIDDLE AGING OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
A bureaucratic Rip van Winkle who awoke in the new century after twenty years of slumbermight be surprised by the scale of the international ‘‘New Public Management’’ (NPM) industry that had grown up to chronicle, interpret, and assess the wave of efforts to reform executive governmentacross the world over the past two decades. Scanning the groaning bookshelves and burgeoning Web sites containing the products of the NPM industry, the awoken slumberer might at first be dazed by thevariety of themes, approaches, and terminology produced by an eclectic mix of consultants, conventional scholars, staff of international agencies, senior public servants, politicians, and spindoctors.
However, once the many neologisms had been investigated and explained, a more familiar picture might start to appear. And, helped by the bibliographies and textbooks on NPM that have emerged in...