The new public management: how to transform a theme into a legacy

If its academic admirers can avoid the trap of becoming a cult of programmed believers, the New Public Management (NPM) can have three constructive legacies for the field of public administration: (1) a stronger emphasis on performance-motivated administration and inclusion in the administrative canon of performance-oriented institutional arrangements, structural forms, and managerial doctrines fitted to particular contexts, in other words, advances in the state of the public management art; (2) an international dialogue on and a stronger comparative dimension to the study of state design and administrative reform; and (3) the integrated use of economic, sociological, social-psychological, and other advanced conceptual models and heuristics in the study of public institutions and management, with the potential to strengthen the field's scholarship and the possibilities for theory-grounded practice. While discussing each of these legacies, this article concentrates on the third and most controversial. The kinds of conceptual thinking that can strengthen the intellectual foundations of the field are illustrated by comparing the logic of management within the framework of competitive markets, a logic which has inspired many of New Public Management's reforms, with the logic of management within the framework of constitutional governance. While substantively different, these two styles of inquiry are surprisingly similar in their interdisciplinary use of theory to create subtle and sophisticated models of structure and strategy, with important implications for the study of bureaucracy and public management.
Two Parables A traveler returns from a three-day stopover in India and entertains his friends with stories he heard there. 'Aha!' cries one of them, a publisher. 'Your stories will [...]